Plans for a marriage of convenience between two friends go hilariously awry when their uninformed families become involved in Director Andrew Ahn’s romantic comedy, The Wedding Banquet.

In his remake of Ang Lee’s 1993 film of the same name, Ahn’s new feature tells the story of Min, a gay man hoping to stay in the country and avoid being dragged into his family business. He proposes a green card marriage to his lesbian friend Angela in exchange for paying for her IVF treatment. However, things soon get complicated when his grandmother surprises them with plans for an extravagant Korean wedding banquet.

On April 26, after the DGA membership screening in Los Angeles, Ahn discussed the making of The Wedding Banquet during a Q&A moderated by Director Daniel Kwan (Everything Everywhere All at Once).

During the conversation, Ahn spoke about a method he uses with his actors to add depth to their characters.

“When you have a very busy cast — actors who are stacking projects — you very rarely have rehearsal time. With Lily Gladstone and Kelly Marie Tran, we had a 15- minute rehearsal before their first scene. I remember one of the things I wanted to do was to have Kelly and Lily create a secret that they would only know and never tell me. It’s an exercise that’s born out of this previous experience I had where someone told me that I had to know everything about my characters. I kind of resisted that because I was like, ‘I don’t even know everything about myself!’ If I did know everything about my characters, they would just feel so two dimensional, like puppets. So, to give these characters a humanity I felt like I should give these characters secrets that are just theirs. It’s a thing where they created a secret together and they created a secret from each other.”

Ahn’s other directorial credits include the feature films Fire Island, Driveways, Lost L.A. and Spa Night; and episodes of Deli Boys, Bridgerton, Generation, Pride, MacGyver, Gentefied and This Close. He has been a DGA member since 2019.