“I’m never going to make something where it’s like, ‘Here’s a good person, here’s a bad person, and this is how you’re supposed to feel about them,’†says Lulu Wang, the writer, director, and creator of the gorgeous and quietly searing Amazon miniseries Expats.
These words are at the heart of The Farewell writer-director’s Hong Kong–set show, based on a novel by Janice Y.K. Lee and adapted by Lee, Wang, Alice Bell, Vera Miao, and Gursimran Sandhu with care and intrigue. Starring Nicole Kidman, Sarayu Blue, and Ji-young Yoo as, respectively, the grief-stricken Margaret, the successful yet frustrated Hilary, and the guilt-ridden Mercy — three complicated expatriates living in different social realities in Hong Kong — Expats follows their individual tales as the trio’s fates collide through an unspeakable tragedy, gradually widening its lens across the city’s diverse corners.
“When Nicole Kidman brought me the book, I saw this rich tapestry of a world of women of all different backgrounds,†Wang recalls. “I saw it as an opportunity to expand. I am an expat when I travel to Hong Kong and Asia. But I’m also an immigrant from Asia. And I really wanted to look at the intersection of all these different identities of people who are searching for home, which is not just a physical place.â€
Within that expansion, two things remain constant throughout Expats: Wang’s uncompromising commitment to maintaining her characters’ thorny qualities, and a deeply cinematic demeanor that’s achieved through long takes, thoughtful reflections, gleaming nighttime shots, and an assured handle on the passage of time. That cinematic vein is so palpable that New York’s Film at Lincoln Center screened a series of movies that inspired Wang in her Expats journey, all handpicked by Wang. She broke down her selections and discussed how each of these movies informed Expats’ themes around privilege, grief, motherhood, guilt, and more.
Play (Ruben Östlund, 2011)
One of Triangle of Sadness filmmaker Ruben Östlund’s lesser-known works, the controversial Play — about a group of Black teens intimidating white and Asian kids via role-playing — asks the audience to abandon absolutes. “It’s about perspective,†says Wang. “About holding multiple truths at once. It requires a lot of critical thinking.â€
Östlund’s static, watchful framing in Play was an inspiration for Wang, who is similarly observant and nonjudgmental about her own complex characters. “People often think portraying something is equivalent to judgment. But the film is about the prejudices that you are bringing [to it]. I love that it’s complicated and messy. With Expats, that’s what I wanted to do — it’s about people being people. Can we accept others and ourselves in all the degrees of being human?â€
Wang’s play on perspective is especially on display in the show’s upcoming sixth and final episode, “Home,†with long conversations among Margaret, Hilary, and Mercy edited to purposely obscure who’s talking to whom. “I wanted to show that all three women have a shared experience,†Wang explains. “They’ve all been hurt, and they’ve all hurt others. And they’re talking to the audience as well. I love when cinema forces the audience to engage. What I wanted to do, which Play does so brilliantly, is make the audience complicit and hold the mirror up to themselves.â€
The Helper (Joanna Bowers, 2017)
While Expats is mostly from the point of view of Margaret, Mercy, and Hilary, the show’s feature-length fifth episode, “Central,†confidently shifts gears by following the perspectives of Puri (Amelyn Pardenilla) and Essie (Ruby Ruiz), the Filipina helpers of Hilary and Margaret. In crafting the duo’s respective journeys, Joanna Bowers’s documentary — about Hong Kong’s live-in housekeepers employed by the city’s richest families — was instrumental for the writers’ detailed understanding of these domestic-worker communities, with their Sunday picnics, diverse artistic talents, and daily hardships.
“The book doesn’t go that deep into these two women. So watching this documentary, we were able to get a little bit more insight on how the system works,†Wang says. “The documentary follows a singing group and influenced [our portrayal of] the amount of joy in the community. All the singing, dancing, and talent that isn’t shown to the world … It’s the way that they survive being away from their families and living these lives that are full of sacrifice. On their days off, they can actually do something for themselves.â€
The writers room also made sure that Puri and Essie were pronouncedly different characters in well-defined ways. “We didn’t want to make them this one type, and The Helper influenced that a lot.â€
A White, White Day (Hlynur Pálmason, 2019)
Icelandic filmmaker Hlynur Pálmason (Godland) starts A White, White Day, his enigmatic portrait of immense grief, with a long shot of a car driving through an icy landscape. “That inspired one of the shots in episode two,†explains Wang, referring to a hypnotic one-take sequence of Margaret driving down from her elite neighborhood called the Peak.
It was Wang’s cinematographer, Anna Franquesa-Solano, who recommended the film as a reference point in its unsentimental but still emotional handling of the passage of time. Wang was taken by Pálmason’s study of grief as a journey that makes people behave in irrational, even unlikeable ways. “When you go into sentimentality, it has the opposite effect and the audience doesn’t feel as much,†Wang says. “When you have the space to feel more, it lingers for a long time. That’s what A White, White Day does so brilliantly.â€
Don’t Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973)
“It’s just a classic movie about grief, very difficult to watch,†says Wang of Nicolas Roeg’s influential genre outing that lent DNA to many a psychological thriller that followed. “Its use of visual metaphors and imagery, and the set piece with the girl in the red coat … Tonally, it was an inspiration.â€
Don’t Look Now’s impact particularly shows in episode three, when we witness Margaret’s psychological spiraling: One minute, her social niceties as a wealthy American in Hong Kong fall away, and the next, she irrationally searches a deceased neighbor’s apartment for clues about her son’s disappearance.
“When you’re devolving and coming apart, your reality shifts,†Wang reflects. “Because grief can be so disorienting, you’re not sure if what you’re seeing is real. And that was something that we wanted to give to Margaret. So much of the show is about privilege, and even though Margaret has an awareness and doesn’t want to be one of those ugly Americans who treat people a certain way, grief turns her into that.â€
We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsay, 2011)
To Wang, when you have a show about different perspectives, each character thinks they’re in a different story, a different movie of their own. “Mercy thinks she’s in Gilmore Girls,†she says with a chuckle. “She’s coming of age. And maybe Hilary thinks she’s in a romantic drama. But Margaret? She lives in a psychological thriller.â€
And so We Need to Talk About Kevin and its central character — Tilda Swinton’s Eva, a mother navigating the dark truths about her strange son — presented a link in her mind with all its ambiguities. “She is a mother who is seeing something but has a hard time convincing others. And she herself isn’t even sure of what she’s seeing, because society says you’re not supposed to feel that way. I just love the gray area of this movie. Is she a good mother? Is she a bad mother? It’s not one or the other.â€
Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975)
Wang admits she had a hard time choosing between Nashville and Shortcuts — another ensemble-driven Robert Altman classic — with both movies being huge inspirations for all of her work. But in the end, Nashville won. “Because it’s named after a city and about a group of people in a particular place at a particular time, with a political backdrop,†she says, explaining its parallels to Expats. “I wish that we still had films like this — I think about how difficult Nashville would be to get made today unless you’re like one of the six directors in Hollywood.â€
So in a way, Wang made her own Nashville in series form, noting that it’s the kind of filmmaking she strives for. “It’s not a film that’s driven by plot — the pacing of it is like, you get to just live in the world. It requires the audience to exercise patience and be immersed without knowing what the point is. And yet when we get there, you feel totally satisfied. [While] I’m not getting the financing, the resources to tell those stories about an ensemble of people, I definitely hope to make more films like that.â€
Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower (Joe Piscatella, 2017)
In 2014, teenager Joshua Wong played a key, mobilizing part in Hong Kong’s fight to preserve its autonomy from China. With a leadership role in the city’s Umbrella Movement, which sent thousands of kids to the streets in protest, Wong is the key figure of Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower, a powerful documentary that informed the political backdrop of Expats’ fifth episode and one of its principal characters, the politically active teenager Tony (Will Orr).
“It’s a film about young people and their tenacity,†Wang explains. “I wanted to capture that resilience. But seeing it through the lens of 2024, there’s a sadness to it,†she continues. “My family left [Beijing] in 1989. My parents had a lot of friends who were students and participated [in the 1989 student protests]. And it makes you wonder, what is it for? And so I wanted to tell it through the lens of the mother who is like, ‘It’s not worth it.’ And yet in contrast, when you watch Joshua, the determination of these young people is just so inspiring.â€
Mother (Bong Joon Ho, 2009)
In addition to the grief-stricken Margaret, Expats follows several mothers throughout, including Hilary’s overbearing mom, Brinder (Sudha Bhuchar), whom we get introduced to in episode four, and Wen (Maggie Lee), Tony’s concerned mother who is a key figure in episode five. So Bong Joon Ho’s Mother — about a woman on a desperate quest to clear her son’s name from a murder he’s framed for — was top of mind for Wang, especially in considering the extreme scope of motherly love that can lead one to behave in severe ways.
“What would you call that film? A thriller? A drama?,†she ponders. “It exists somewhere in between. And I love when genre tools are used within dramatic storytelling. That’s what I wanted Expats to be: not a whodunit or horror, but filled with elements of dread, tension, and intrigue.â€
In portraying the complex layers of motherhood, particularly in episode four when Hilary is stuck in an elevator with her visiting mom and her neighbor, the writers’ room reached for their own experiences with women they know well. “Brinder was very much Gursimran’s story. And I saw so much of my mom in hers. Because it was such a warm writers’ room, we were all telling our own stories and I’d be like, ‘Okay, that’s gotta go in there.’â€
Twilight’s Kiss (Ray Yeung, 2019)
A gentle and romantic film about two septuagenarian men secretly falling in love for the first time, Twilight’s Kiss (Suk Suk) portrays different shades of Hong Kong in its quieter and less glamorous corners. This was only one of the Hong Kong–set films that Wang and the team of writers watched to understand the city a little better, especially in the early days of scripting when Wang couldn’t go to Hong Kong due to the pandemic.
“It’s just a really tender, beautiful film that feels very local. And we wanted to represent some characters who were local,†Wang says, referring to the likes of Charly (Bonde Sham), whom Mercy befriends and has a romantic connection with, as well as Tony.
My Love, Don’t Cross That River (Jin Mo-young, 2014)
Charming, disarming, and heart-swelling, this documentary — one of South Korea’s most successful films of all time — lovingly portrays an old couple’s 76-year union that’s to come to an end soon.
It was the film’s immense tenderness that spoke to Wang the most. “That’s something that we didn’t want to let go of. Even though Expats has thriller elements and is about psychological spiraling, we wanted to make sure that there was still love between friends, between Margaret and Clarke [her husband played by Brian Tee] … I think both My Love and Suk Suk really represent how life is both long and so short, so fragile. We can get caught up in things, but at the end of the day, we just need to remember to love each other.â€
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