POSTHUMOUS 
THE FAREWELL 
Lulu Wang didn’t know she wanted to be a filmmaker until she was a senior at Boston College and watching “Secretary.”“I don’t know if I talk about this very much, but it’s the film that made me want to make films,” Wang says on the latest episode of “The Big Ticket,” Variety and iHeart’s movie podcast.“Maggie [Gyllenhaal] is so spectacular in that,” she said. “Even though she's in the position of being dominated, I would say it's still very much...
Lulu
Wang
Film Director
Wang earned raves when “The Farewell” debuted at Sundance 2019, and upon its July release it bested “Avengers: Endgame” with the year’s biggest per-theater average gross. It was an unlikely achievement for an intimate, semi-autobiographical film about a young woman (Awkwafina) returning to her Chinese homeland to say goodbye to a grandmother in the dark about the cancer that is killing her. But it validated the resolve of the Beijing-born, Miami-reared writer-director, who fought pressure to change the film’s primary language to English (from Mandarin) and make some characters Caucasian. It was a big shift from her 2014 debut, the romantic comedy “Posthumous,” and she plans to deliver yet another change-up with her next project, the sci-fi feature “Children of the New World.”
