At the end we know about as much as we did at the beginning. Foreignerswhose first episode began with a few open-ended reunions – first a more tense one between Margaret (Nicole Kidman) and Mercy (Ji-young Yoo) and later a quieter, sadder meeting between Hilary (Sarayu Blue) and Margaret – has ended as the same characters came together and the same vague feeling permeated their meetings.
[Ed. note: This post will now start discussing spoilers for the end of Expats.]
What we still don’t know is what happened to Gus, what Mercy will do next with her own baby, or technically how these women all feel about each other at the end of the day. But that’s exactly how showrunner Lulu Wang wanted the adaptation of Janice YK Lee’s 2016 novel The expatriates feel. As she tells Polygon, she sees the end as a kind of beginning and the secret that causes so much pain Foreigners was never the point she wanted to leave us with.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Polygon: So how did you initially think about and approach the tone of each character’s ending?
Lulu Wang: I think I wanted it to feel like both a macro and a micro feeling. Both large and global in terms of the world, but also deeply personal. It is a mother looking for her child. But we are all also looking for a way to move on, to grieve, to find closure, to be happy, to find forgiveness, and to be gentler with ourselves.
I think visually it was always really important for me to have this really long shot of Margaret walking around the city with her backpack. And in many ways it becomes part of the city; She can no longer separate herself from the street, the people and the elements because her son is out there somewhere. And for Mercy, it was about realizing that she just wanted to be loved. We hate her so much, she does all these things and she makes all these decisions. But that moment with her where we really realize that she’s just a child and her mother brings her soup – I think that’s one of the most heartbreaking [bits] from, how, Oh, wow, she’s really young. She’s still a child and has to deal with these really adult situations.
Photo: Jupiter Wong/Prime Video
I’m curious how you thought about setting the tone of the series as a director. What were you drawn to early on to create exactly the right mood for what you were looking for with this adaptation?
I didn’t want it to be an action-oriented series where we watch to solve the crime. I wanted it to really be an exploration of grief – I wanted it to feel like the book, because that’s what the book feels like. It was this web of characters with all these different backgrounds and against this very complex backdrop. And there are all these different ways that people try to deal with it in different ways.
And I think when I actually looked at the book, I pulled out sentences, and then I talked to my DP, and we watched movies together – we watched this great French series called Ghosts, “The Return,” a zombie series about the return of the dead. But it’s not what you would think. It’s really about grief and how time passes. We watched foreign films, like this Icelandic film called A
When we put these images together, I think we wanted to convey a sense of ghost and emptiness.
That poignancy really comes through, and I’d like to know what formed in your mind’s eye as you thought about how to show an absence or illustrate that lack, if not a complete emptiness?
I think we talked a lot in the writers’ room about ambiguous loss, about not having closure, and about all the different ways we carry trauma that isn’t visible. It’s not always that easy OK, this person died. And now I’m grieving. Sometimes you never get closure, you never get to say goodbye. Sometimes you mourn the lost time. Sometimes you grieve the loss of memory […] where the person is still there, but they are not there as you know them. So how do you feel about them? And how do you mourn?
I think that’s why – and I went along with it The good bye Also – [I focused on] I really look at space and have the ability to do wide angle shots where people are really isolated in the frame.
Photo: Atsushi Nishijima/Prime Video
Photo: Jupiter Wong/Prime Video
Photo: Glen Wilson/Prime Video
Margaret, for example, is looking for a place where she can be alone in her grief. And the emptiness of this space somehow gives her comfort because she is able to be someone else. She is not constantly reminded of the tragedy. And so having Nicole in a convenient location in Hong Kong was a really central image for us. She had to climb the seven flights of stairs. It was her first day of filming. I was like, Oh my god, she’s going to hate me. This is Nicole Kidman. I have her go up the stairs, there is no elevator.
Definitely. As for your point about almost avoiding the mystery, I’m curious to see how you set up the final type of confrontation between all of these women. In the finale one has the impression that it is a staccato conversation in which these fragments are chopped up.
In a way it’s like a visual voiceover, I suppose. I wanted it to feel like they were addressing the audience; I wanted to play with it [idea that] Everything they said, the other woman could say almost the same thing. It’s a specific conversation, but it’s also a universal conversation; There are endings and beginnings. It’s about apologizing and not being able to find the words to apologize. They were all the other woman in different situations. And the series deals a lot with perpetrators and victims. And we always have compassion for the victims, it’s easy to identify with them. But it’s much harder to actually have compassion for the people who do the deeds and make the mistakes. And it was really important to us that all of these women were perpetrators and victims at the same time – but with different stories. In someone else’s story, they are the perpetrator; in their own story they are the victim. And being able to grasp all of these truths at once – it just felt like this symmetry of their faces connected them.
Foreigners is now streaming on Prime Video.