Lulu Wang criticized the announcement of Ron Howard directing a biopic about the Chinese classical pianist Lang Lang. Lulu Wang is the director of 2019’s well-regarded and award-winning A24 film The Farewell, which follows a Chinese-American family who returns to China when they learn their matriarch will die but instead of telling her, they decide to have one last family party. Ron Howard is a decorated director who got his start in 1977 and is known for Solo: A Star Wars Story, The Da Vinci Code trilogy, and Cinderella Man.
Lang Lang is a 38-year-old pianist from northeast China who has performed all over the world and has played with some of the most well-regarded orchestras; he is considered one of the best modern piano and keyboard players. This film adaptation, based on Lang Lang’s autobiography Journey of a Thousand Miles, is currently untitled. The film won't be Howard’s first foray into biopics either, but it will be the first to follow a musician and isn’t a documentary, like his 2019 film Pavarotti.
After the announcement, Wang went to Twitter to share her disagreement with the fact that Howard would be in the director’s chair for a film that should have a Chinese or Chinese-American director. Wang believes that without knowing intimate details about Chinese culture, especially the ones that influenced Lang Lang’s life, and how Western imperialism has affected the country as a whole, it wouldn’t be possible to truthfully and accurately tell this story. Lulu goes on to state that she doesn’t want to direct the film in his place. She does, however, want the film industry to learn from the mistakes of the recent adaptation of Mulan.
While Howard’s filmography is filled with multiple genres, his biopics are all about white men, like John Nash in A Beautiful Mind, James J. Braddock in Cinderella Man, and David Frost and Richard Nixon in Frost/Nixon. This announcement would not have proven to be an issue for Howard ten years ago, but with a renewed effort to have representation in front of and behind the camera, it may prove to disrupt pre-production on the film. White Americans going over to China to film without knowing or caring about local politics and culture has already proven to be an issue this year with Disney's Mulan.
Wang’s The Farewell, on the other hand, is a particular story that utilizes the director’s knowledge of Chinese culture and her personal experience with its customs and traditions. While Wang was raised in the states since she was six, her family was steeped in a Chinese-American way of life. The Farewell also deals with this fact; the film shows that while she understands her family’s decisions, what she learned in America is making her push back against some of their beliefs. The film depicts the internal struggle that only a Chinese-American person could go through, and that’s what is vital to Wang: authenticity and understanding. Howard could quite possibly go in and make a film about Lang Lang and his rise to fame but muddle the finer details that Howard’s upbringing blinds him to.
Source: Lulu Wang