Lulu Wang’s heartfelt, absurd 2019 film, “The Farewell,” won over critics and kickstarted her career. It also caught the attention of Nicole Kidman, who approached Wang to adapt Janice Y.K. Lee’s novel, “The Expatriates,” to the small screen.
“Expats,” which streams on Prime Video beginning Friday, follows the lives of American expatriates in Hong Kong. Kidman, who is also an executive producer, stars as Margaret, who suffers a family tragedy. Sarayu Blue and Ji-young Yoo play Hilary and Mercy, who are also caught in the tragedy’s repercussions in this six-episode series that evaluates power dynamics in Hong Kong, motherhood, and grief.
Like “The Farewell,” the series touches on cultural conflicts. Wang is creator, director, and writer, and she adjusted the material to be set in 2014, a politically turbulent year for Hong Kong when pro-democracy demonstrators clashed with the government and occupied city streets. The series often shows the friction between expats and locals, but also looks beyond the expats through the depiction of protests and the lives of domestic workers.
Wang, a Boston College graduate, said the “theme of trauma, of ambiguous loss” resonates in the wake of the pandemic. “It’s a show about how we’re all connected and yet we’re all alone on some level or another,” she said.
The Chinese-American filmmaker spoke to the Globe recently about bringing “Expats” to life.
Q. How did you approach exploring race, class, and gender issues in Hong Kong?
A. This is a series that’s really exploring people in diaspora and all different kinds of people. So there’s no way when we’re telling a story, with so many different identities intersecting, that you can have lived all of those experiences. But I think that I saw traces of myself in all of these different stories. So it really just took a lot of research and honestly, just humility.
Many of the experiences that we explore are represented by different writers in the writers’ room. That’s what’s so great about having multiple people and multiple perspectives, writing it with you. But then also working with the cast and crew — there were several people who were researchers for us and who had lived through 2014 Hong Kong, for example.
Q. This expat community is largely made up of Americans who enjoy a lot of privilege because they’re American. What did you find compelling about that expat community?
A. What was compelling about it is just looking at ways in which people are still drawn to the familiar even when they’re in a foreign country, and that’s just human nature. I think that was really relatable about the expats, that they would still move towards a bubble where people were similar to them. But I also wanted to shatter that bubble. There are events that occur that sort of force them outside of their comfort zones.
Q. There’s a specific scene where Nicole Kidman’s character Margaret is in a grocery store trying to find a specific item and forces a worker to help her, then realizes the man is a customer himself.
A. My favorite scene.
Q. Yes, me too. Can you tell me about directing Nicole Kidman in that scene?
A. That scene sort of serves to undermine Margaret, which I think Nicole did such a great job at, like she understood the assignment, and that she wasn’t likable in this moment. And yet she had to really still believe in what Margaret is feeling and why she’s behaving this way and not go easy on her.
Q. “Expats” had an all-female writers’ room. How did you go about assembling a successful writers’ room? When did you know that it would work?
A. I’ve never written anything with anyone else. I’d always written alone. And I was also doing a lot of press at the time for “The Farewell.” So it was sort of an out-of-body experience, the success of that movie, and I knew that it would be really challenging for me to like, go back into a room alone and write. I was grateful to have a community at that moment to really support me … because no amount of success is going to help with that. You still have to face this blank page, and you still have to excavate your own psyche or things that are painful, things that are meaningful.
We just got in the room, and it just felt right. There were days where we didn’t even know what was going to end up on the page. We weren’t even talking about the show necessarily. We were just talking about ourselves. We’d order food, and we’d laugh, we’d cry … and so much of that ended up in the scripts. The souls, the spirits of all of these women are in these scripts and on the screen.
Q. Can you share a little bit about what makes this series personal for you?
A. My parents and I left China in 1989, and so the political landscape of the mainland at the time that we left parallels that of Hong Kong, which is why I set [the series] in Hong Kong in 2014. It was a moment where Hong Kong was on the precipice of tremendous change, and there’s a lot of fear, but also a lot of hope. I really wanted to explore that spirit of resilience in the face of so much change. Seeing that parallel was really emotional for me.
It’s emotional because it’s really a series about so many different women from so many different backgrounds. There’s two mother-daughter relationships in the story. Both Hilary and Mercy’s relationships with their mothers is something that even though culturally, it’s not the same as my culture, it really is the same.
Q. I read that you didn’t discover your love of film until your senior year at Boston College. Do you have any advice on how beginning filmmakers can discover their voice?
A. Just keep making things. I would also say just have varied interests and experiences because you’re not gonna have stories to tell unless you’re living your life. I’m really grateful that I discovered film later, actually, because I got to just take a lot of different types of classes, and they were life-changing — the philosophy classes that I took, and the psychology and sociology. These are all part of an education to understand the world, to understand people, and to understand how to see and how to interpret the world around you.
Interview was edited and condensed.
Abigail Lee can be reached at abigail.lee@globe.com.