Andrew Ahn Talks Tradition, Community, and His New Take on The Wedding Banquet
Nearly a decade after his patient, empathetic debut, Spa Night, bowed at Sundance 2016, Andrew Ahn still wields sensitivity as his sharpest tool. It brightens the gentle boy‑and‑Korean‑War‑veteran bond in Driveways and, in Fire Island, turns the tender friendship between Joel Kim Booster and Bowen Yang into the scaffolding for a riotous house of queer warmth and trust amid the bacchanal..
In his update of Ang Lee’s 1993 screwball The Wedding Banquet, Andrew Ahn pairs Kelly Marie Tran and Lily Gladstone’s earnest parents with Bowen Yang and Han Gi‑chan’s messy, green‑card‑fraught romance, charmingly measuring what has—and hasn’t—shifted in the 30 years since the original.
Queer visibility and rights have grown, yet, through the screwball lens, Ahn shows how desire and the power to fulfill it can still collide. Guided by his trademark compassion, he untangles the emotionally loaded choices queer adults face as they move into new life stages amid the people they love.
Grindr spoke with Andrew about tradition, celebration, and how much has changed for the queer community since the original film, a few days before the film made its debut in US theaters.
Q: Huge congrats on the film! How are you doing?
"I’m very tired, but I'm doing all right. I'm very ready to get this movie out there."
Q: You’ve said films like Spa Night are deeply personal; as your career grows, is it becoming easier or harder to maintain the balance between your personal bond with a film and letting it go to live its own life with audiences?
"I'll say it's harder to make personal films that are also more accessible and meant for a wider audience. I knew that the people going to see Spa Night would really understand my connection to the material. But with The Wedding Banquet, because it is a wider release, there are more people watching it, and I think you're more vulnerable. I also think that I get to Trojan Horse the personal aspects of the film into this rom-com genre. I think there will be some people who don't understand that connection at all, and that also makes me nervous, but I think I've grown a lot as a filmmaker, and have more strength to deal with audience reaction. And I'm very glad that many people have embraced this film so beautifully. And so I feel very ready. But, yeah, it's a weird thing to try and to make a quote, unquote, commercial film that you know is a lot about the phase of adulthood that I find myself in."
Q: Does that phase of adulthood also include some of the things that you've explored in your past work, as far as the compatibility between tradition, traditional Korean culture, and modern life?
"I think the older I get, the more I realize how interconnected everything is, and how my cultural identity and my desires for building queer family, my relationship to my boyfriend, my relationship to my parents. It's all so connected, and I hate it, right? I wish I could compartmentalize them in a way, but I've chosen to embrace them all and try to let them all coexist together, because I think that leads to a healthier life, even though it might be more complicated.
And so, I think about how I love my boyfriend and hope to get married someday. I hope to celebrate with some of these Korean traditions and rituals, which would bring me closer to my parents, because these are rituals that they participated in, and that would also bring them closer to my partner, you know? Like, there's just something about how all of those things influence each other that I don't want to deny. And so there wa a wealth of feeling that I channeled into reimagining this movie."
Q: The film’s emotional ecosystem is clear: it celebrates the strides LGBTQ people have made since Ang Lee’s version, yet it keeps a sharp eye on how fragile those gains remain. Kelly says, “If it happens, it happens,” and Lily fires back, “Not for gay people”—a perfect snapshot of that precarity. How did you thread that needle?
"There's something so interesting about how it's hard enough as it is to be gay, without homophobia. That particular moment that you mentioned is lifted from my personal experience. My boyfriend said to me when we're talking about kids, like, “If it happens, it happens.” And there was something about him saying that that made me realize that as queer people, because we can't Whoopsie daisy a baby, we have to be extremely intentional about having children, and so any sort of hesitation could become a giant obstacle. And that's not homophobia. It's already complicated.
We're already dealing with our own issues, whether that's self-loathing or bad parenting. I think that there are just so many obstacles, and so all I want is to have as much of a level playing field as possible in these rights to love who you want to love, have a family, care for the people, and protect the people in your life that you're close to. I think there's just a strange constant state of anxiety that we live in. And so, what's the way that we can combat that? And for me, it's chosen family. How can we trust in the love that we have for each other?"
Q: I think that's also evident in a line that Lily Gladstone says, where she's talking about how she is critical of institutions, but she is pro-celebration. Could you talk about writing that scene?
"I think especially after we cast Lily, and my conversations with her about making the character Indigenous, and talking about the Duwamish people and how they're not federally recognized, just this desire to protect a legacy. And I think a part of that is tradition. And I think that there's a weird conflict, right? Because so many traditions can feel very heteronormative, and so, how do you balance those things? I wanted Lee to really just understand that there are beautiful things that can come out of tradition. And we just have to be very clear, in a way, about what's important to us, and what isn't?
I remember going to a friend's wedding a couple of years ago, and her father gave a toast, and he said, I love you. And she was crying, and I went over to her and said, “Your father's toast was so beautiful.” And she said that he had never said, “I love you” before in their life, and that it took the wedding for that to get articulated. And as much as you can hate marriage and weddings, I was so happy for her. And so that's just what was part of what I was trying to get at. And it's kind of weird to say that, at least within my queer bubble, that me wanting to get married and wanting to have kids somehow feels radical, it feels so annoying to say that. Still, it does feel that way, because so few of my friends want those things, and there are very good reasons for that. I totally get it."
Q: I think it absolutely makes sense and is contrasted very nicely against the way that you frame the performance of heterosexuality and heteronormativity in the film. I love the photo shoot sequence. Could you talk about some of the setups and themes and ideas that you had devised for that sequence?
"I think that there's something about the performance of love. I think there's a lot of performance in the film, right? Even Joan Chen's character may be a performative ally. Like, from the get-go, being on stage with a drag queen and a lion dance troupe—I wanted to give May another moment to perform later in the film. But I think, in that photo studio scene, I wanted it to be a moment for Min’s grandmother, played by the incomparable Youn Yuh-jung, to see the ridiculousness of what's happening and to have that open her up to something more real. I love that conversation that she has with her grandson, against this artifice of, like, a ski mother-daughter photo shoot, just to really articulate how we try to identify authenticity."
Q: We've talked a little bit about your love of bathrooms and having scenes in bathrooms. Could you talk about writing the scene with Joan Chen and Kelly Marie Tran in the bathroom?
"I think you have to be honest in a bathroom, people poo, people pee, in a bathroom, it's very clear. Even when you're getting ready, there's something about, like, " Well, okay, I have to acknowledge the human underneath the makeup or whatever. But it felt really important for that particular scene to happen in an unglamorous place, and for these characters to finally see each other. Regarding this question of parenting and allyship, sometimes people think that, once you figure it out, there you have it. Like May Chen wins an award, she's the perfect mother, and I think she's acknowledging in that scene that parenting and allyship are constant processes where you learn from each other—and that you shouldn't be afraid of the process, right?
It worked out with the pregnancy test and just sitting on the ground. We rehearsed it, and at first they were gonna sit on the edge of the tub, but there was just something about the idea of, “Let's humble both of ourselves to the situation.” And it was just incredibly inspiring to see these two incredible actors work. It's one of my favorite scenes in the film. I should also mention that all four of my films so far have puke in them."
Q: Yeah, yes, I was gonna bring that up as well.
"You can't, you can't deny puke, right? It's just like such a visceral feeling."
The 2025 remake of The Wedding Banquet, directed by Andrew Ahn, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was released in U.S. theaters on Friday, April 18, 2025. The Wedding Banquet is currently playing in select theaters nationwide.
