Adele Lim is set to make her directorial debut in “Joy Ride,” and will take on a fun, adventurous road trip movie in the vein of “Girls Trip” and “The Hangover.” The film follows Audrey, played by Ashley Park, on a business trip to Asia accompanied by her messy and thirsty friends portrayed by Stephanie Hsu, Sherry Cola, and Sabrina Wu. However, their trip takes an unexpected turn when Audrey’s business deal is jeopardized, and she must locate her birth mother to save the agreement.
During the premiere of her film at SXSW, Lim had a conversation with Variety in which she talked about various aspects of the movie-making process. She discussed writing the script, collaborating with Point Grey Productions owned by Seth Rogen, casting actors for the film, and her experience stepping into the role of director for the first time.
When asked about what made her to debut as a director, Lim replied, “I’ll just start by saying I am the luckiest bitch in town. I’d been a TV writer-producer for many years before I got into features. I don’t think I had any aspirations of directing. But Point Grey who has a history of working with first-time writers/directors asked me if I’d be up for it. The first thing I said was, ‘Yes.’”
“I have this wonderful community out here of friends and directors, Jon M. Chu, Veena Sud, and so many others who came out of the woodwork to help me. My first instinct was that I didn’t know anything about lenses. How do I learn about lenses? The important thing was having a handle on the story. We talk about wanting to put forward female-centered narratives and Point Grey was a tremendous ally,” she added.
Lim talks about casting Stephanie Hsu
The director also shared how she found her perfect cast. “The AAPI community is very tight-knit. I was working on ‘Raya and the Last Dragon’ at Disney and doing a recording session with Daniel Dae Kim. He’s an old friend, and we were talking about this movie, and I said, ‘I’m going to pull you in for this whether you like it or not. Secondly, we have the script which we’re excited about, but who’s going to be our leader?’” she said.
“I’d seen Sherry Cola. She opened for Ronny Chieng. As for Steph Hsu, I’ve been a huge fan of her from ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’ to ‘Nora from Queens.’ Thank God, we nabbed her before she became ‘Oscar-nominated Stephanie Hsu,’” she continued.
“All credit goes to Richard, our casting director for Sabrina. Deadeye was such a specific part to bring that part to life without making it seem like a caricature or cartoonish. They had recently graduated from college and had a couple of YouTube stand-up specials. I had that feeling of ‘Who is this creature who’s been honing their craft under cover of night?’ Their audition happened over Zoom and just Sabrina just blew it out of the water. They were beatboxing and we didn’t have that in the script, so we wrote it in,” she added.