Director Lulu Wang says her next movie will be about a couple who can’t have children and ends up going to a virtual reality world to live out their dream.
Like The Farewell, it will center around love, loss and family. Wang spoke to the Indie Wire about the film tentatively titled Children of the New World.
This month, she also sat around the table with some heavyweights at the Director’s Roundtable in Hollywood. Also joining her were Martin Scorcese (The Irishman), Noah Baumbach (Marriage Story), Greta Gerwig (Little Women), Fernando Meirelles (The Two Popes), and Todd Phillips (Joker).
According to the Hollywood Reporter, she reflected at the Roundtable about her decision to choose the smaller studio A24 over a large streaming service which offered her a much bigger pay check.
“One thing we sometimes don’t talk about with some of these bigger streaming platforms is that it’s a different business model. It’s not necessarily about making money back, it’s about brand. They’re building their brand, and when you’re an established filmmaker, you are a brand that they want to partner with to help build their own brand, but with newer filmmakers, newer voices, you don’t have a brand, you need to build that brand,” Wang continued.
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“For a film that’s 75-80 percent in Mandarin subtitled, 100 percent Asian, Asian American cast, to be seen as an American story and play in theaters for four months, and then for me to be at this table, I know for a fact that if I took that the bigger money, that they wouldn’t have the energy to put behind someone like me, to build my brand.”
Wang is still in the early stages of writing Children of the New World.
“It’s about love and loss over something that quote-unquote doesn’t really exist, so what does that mean? What is love?” she asks.
“It’s sci-fi, it’s set in virtual reality, as well as real reality,” Wang said. “But really, for me, it’s about a relationship. It’s about a couple. And it’s about family. Basically, the premise is that they can’t have children, and so they end up going into the VR world and they have children there, digital children, as a way to experience parenting. So that’s how it’s marketed, as a parenting experience.”
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