Remaking a beloved film classic is no easy task. While she may have only been responsible for acting in Andrew Ahn’s recent reimagining of Ang Lee’s 1993 romantic comedy “The Wedding Banquet,” Kelly Marie Tran knows this feeling all-too-well, as the source material was near and dear to her heart. At the red carpet premiere of the film, IndieWire spoke to Tran about the responsibility she held in helping bring this story to a new generation of audience members and how it helped that the story wasn’t a 1:1 copy.
“The original film is such a seminal moment in cinematic history, especially for queer Asian people, but also just in the midst of great filmmaking. It really holds up,” she said. “I am so excited that we are making a re-imagining, and our version is very different, but it also still honors that original film.”
Specifically, Tran referenced a shot Ahn and co-screenwriter James Schamus — who co-wrote the original with Lee — managed to slip into the new version. While the 1993 take ends with the father at the airport holding his arms as he goes through security, Tran was able to offer her own homage to this for Ahn’s vision.
“Our film ends on a shot of Angela, my character yawning,” said Tran, “and so her arms are in the air.”
Both the 1993 and the 2025 version of “The Wedding Banquet” deal with issues surrounding LGBTQ romance, but while the genre was bountiful during the 20th Century, many are worried modern audiences don’t appreciate it. Tran understands the hesitation, but also thinks the challenges of portraying romance should be embraced.
“I hope that it’s harder to tell love stories, because I hope that we are continuing to investigate what the definition of love is and widening that definition and recognizing that love doesn’t have to look like maybe what traditionally people have been told it needs to look like,” Tran said. “So I hope that it’s getting harder because we’re continuing to innovate and that gives me hope.”
Echoing these sentiments, Ahn also told IndieWire, “I think relationships have always been complex, and I think that there were things in the past that were made to try and make it easier, like patriarchy, heteronormativity. And so I think we have to recognize that we just have to embrace everybody’s humanity and who they want to love and how they want to love. And if we can stick to that overarching philosophy, hopefully that gives us the way to find and support all different kinds of love.”
“The Wedding Banquet” is currently in theaters from Bleecker Street.
