“We’ve all been through the development process,” Lim tells the Post on a Zoom call. “Our thought was not to pitch the idea, but write the entire script first. It’s a hard R-rated comedy with four Asian leads. It’s very culturally specific. We wanted to see our creative ideas through before we approached Seth and Evan.”
That would be Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, who helped produce the script under their production company, Point Grey Pictures.
At the time, Lim was working on the Disney animated feature Raya and the Last Dragon, while Chevapravatdumrong and Hsiao were involved with several TV series including Family Guy and American Dad!.The three got together on Thursday nights to hash out ideas.
“[We were] throwing index cards against this cheap cardboard thing. We’d crack ourselves up talking about our lives, our friends, every inappropriate story from college we could remember,” Lim says.
An opening montage in Joy Ride shows the lifelong friendship built between Audrey (Ashley Park) and Lolo (Sherry Cola), who grow up the only Asians in White Hills, a stereotypical American suburb.
A high-powered lawyer as an adult, Audrey goes to China to close a real estate deal. Lolo, a slacker who dabbles in sculptures of penises, tags along, together with her friend Deadeye (Sabrina Wu).
In China they connect with Audrey’s college friend Kat (Stephanie Hsu), a star of a period soap opera. Disaster strikes when they are mistaken for drug dealers.
Park’s background is in theatre, Cola’s in comedy. Hsu received an Oscar nomination as Michelle Yeoh’s daughter in Everything Everywhere All At Once, and has also appeared in the TV series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Poker Face, and American Born Chinese. Both Cola and Hsu will be in Randall Park’s soon-to-be-released American comedy-drama Shortcomings.“After meeting with and talking to the leads, their voices really began to inform their characters,” Lim says. “Every single one has personality traits and aspects to their personal and professional lives that are reflected in their parts.” Audrey, for example, loves musical theatre, while Lolo is into metal music.
Lim says she was most affected by meeting Sabrina Wu, at the time a staff writer at Disney+. Lim changed the role of Deadeye, who originally presented as female, to accommodate Wu, who is non-binary.
Deadeye’s affection for K-pop leads at one point to a hilarious and surprisingly faithful rendition of the Cardi B / Megan Thee Stallion hit “WAP”, decked out as a full music-video routine.
“It’s an homage,” Lim says with a laugh. “I wrote a letter to Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion about the reasons why we wanted to do the song in our movie, and we somehow got their permission. How we got that song was a total Hail Mary.”
Lim is unexpectedly low-key about directing her first feature film.
“Most of my career has been as a television writer, producer and showrunner,” she says. “TV is a writer’s medium. We control aspects of production. I’m used to being the person the 300 crew members look to for answers.
“The biggest transition for me was just being very present. When you’re a writer on set, you’re thinking in the past, present and future.”
Lim notes that the writing process, especially for comedy, never stops – not even when shooting.
“The way comedies are made, especially at Point Grey, is with a lot of ‘alts’, or alternate jokes. With a three-page scene, you might shoot 10 or 20 jokes. And for each joke, there might be three or four different parts of the scene where they’re throwing even more alts into it.”
It may take repeated viewings to catch all the jokes, which can veer from scandalous digs at two of the Jonas Brothers performing an “Eiffel Tower” sex position with Kat, to gags about the US-based Asian supermarket chain 99 Ranch Market.
Lim admits that navigating between alt jokes and telling the narrative properly might have been the hardest part of her job.
“I’m a dramatic storyteller,” she says. “I wanted to make sure we adhered to the character journeys, that we hit all the emotional tent poles. I had to decide how much time to invest in laughs, and how much to get the things we needed to achieve dramatically during the scenes.”
Lim originally planned to shoot Joy Ride in China, but the Covid-19 pandemic restricted the production entirely to Vancouver, in Canada.
“I worked in Vancouver on television shows and it looks nothing like Asia,” Lim says. “It was important to get the soul of the locations right. Our set designer would bring pictures of his grandmother’s apartment in Hong Kong so we could get the small details right. The spirit was authentic, even if we couldn’t be in the actual locations.”
For a comedy that includes astonishing drug and alcohol intake, as well as a panoply of bizarre sex acts, Joy Ride hits some stark truths about racism – among Asians as well as Caucasians.
“When Cherry and Teresa and I were writing this, we didn’t think our goal was to show the wide spectrum of the Asian experience,” Lim says. “At its heart, this is a story about belonging. It has a lot to do with the diaspora, how so many of us have roots all over the place. What minority and under-represented groups do have in common is this feeling of ‘otherness’.”
Lim grew up in Malaysia, the daughter of Chinese parents. She was drawn to American and British pop culture even before moving to the United States.
“In Malaysia, I lived in a country where I felt equal,” she says. “It wasn’t until I got [to the US] that I realised Asian-Americans didn’t grow up the way I did. Asian women and men are perceived as ‘others’ despite the fact that they’ve been here for hundreds of years.
“I have a little boy and a little girl. It’s important to me that they don’t grow up feeling like they are not a part of the world they’re being raised in. And if that means their mother has to go direct a movie showing the nasty, raunchy, disgusting side of Asians to normalise our existence here, then that’s what it takes.”
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