Lulu Wang wanted the mystery at the end of Prime Video’s Expats

In the end, we know about as much as we did when we started. Expatswhose first episode kicked off with a series of open-ended reunions — first a more charged episode between Margaret (Nicole Kidman) and Mercy (Ji-young Yoo), and later a quieter, sadder meeting between Hilary (Sarayu Blue) and Margaret — is ceased with the coming together of those same characters, and the same indeterminate feeling that pervades their encounters.

(Ed. remark: This post will now begin discussing spoilers for the end of Expats.)

What we still don’t know is what happened to Gus, or what Mercy will do next with her own baby, or even, technically, how these women all feel about each other in the end. But that’s exactly how showrunner Lulu Wang wanted the film adaptation of Janice YK Lee’s 2016 novel to be The expats to feel. As she narrates Polygon, she sees the ending as its own kind of beginning, and the mystery that drives so much of the pain in her life. Expats was never the point she wanted to leave us with.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Polygon: So, how did you first think about and approach the tone of each of the characters’ endings?

Lulu Wang: I guess I wanted it to feel both macro and micro. Both large in size in the world, and global, but also so deeply personal. It is a mother looking for her child. But we are also all looking for a way to move on, to grieve, to find closure, to be happy, to find forgiveness, to be gentler with ourselves.

So I think it was always really important to me visually that I have that very long shot of Margaret walking through the city with her backpack on. And in many ways she becomes part of the city; she can no longer separate herself from the street, from the people and from the elements, because her son is there somewhere. And for Mercy, it was about realizing that all she wants is to be loved. We hate her so much, she does all these things and she makes all these choices. But that moment when we really realize that she’s just a kid, and her mother brings her soup – I think that’s one of the most heartbreaking parts of, like: Oh, wow, she’s really young. She’s just a kid and she’s dealing with these really adult situations. And for Hilary, who just broke free, we always imagine her ending would have a lot of color, and I wanted her to almost say, yeah, she’s lost everything, but in a way she comes back to life. And she’s this butterfly and she, you know, goes from being very monochromatic to embracing a lot of color.

I’m curious how you thought about directing the tone of the series. How were you drawn early on in terms of finding the right mood for what you were looking for with this adaptation?

I didn’t want it to be a plot-driven series where we watched to solve the crime. I really wanted it to be an exploration of grief; I wanted it to feel like the book, because that’s what the book felt like. It was this tapestry of characters, with all these different backgrounds, and against this very complex setting. And there are all these different ways that people try to cope with it in different ways.

And so I think I actually look at the book, and I pick out sentences, and then I talk to my DP, and we watch movies together – we watched this great French series called Les Revenants, ‘the return’, a zombie series about the return of the dead. But it’s not what you might think. It’s really about sadness and the passing of time. We watched foreign films, like this Icelandic film called a White, white day. We looked Nashville, one of my favorites. We also looked at a lot of photos.

So by putting those images together, I think we wanted to have a sense of dread and emptiness.

That haunting feeling really shines through, and I’d love to know what was forming in your mind’s eye when you were thinking about how to show an absence or how to illustrate that lack, if not a total void?

I think we talked a lot in the writers’ room about ambiguous loss, and about not having closure, and about all the different ways that we carry trauma that isn’t visible. It’s not always as simple as, Okay, this person has died. And now I’m sad. Sometimes you never get closure, you never get to say goodbye. Sometimes you mourn the loss of time. Sometimes you mourn the loss of memory (…) where the person is still there, but he or she is not there in the way you know them. So how do you compare to them? And how do you grieve?

I think that’s why – and I did this with The goodbye also – (I focused on) really looking at the space and having the ability to get wide shots, where people are really isolated in the frame.

Margaret, for example, in her grief, looks for a place where she can be alone. And the emptiness of that room somehow comforts her, because she can be someone else. She is not constantly reminded of the tragedy. And so that was a very crucial image for us: Nicole in a practical location in Hong Kong. She had to climb the seven flights of stairs. It was her first day of shooting. I was like, Oh my god, she’s going to hate me. This is Nicole Kidman. I let her go up the stairs, there is no elevator. We’re in a little room and there’s windows everywhere so we can actually see Hong Kong and all the windows and all the lives that are in all those windows, you know? And she’s here in a little box of a room, and there’s a weird purple bathtub. Something almost Murakami-esque, right, about the strange places we find ourselves and the strange feelings we get while doing so.

Certainly. And to your point about almost avoiding the mystery of it, I’m curious how you build the final sort of confrontation between all these women. There’s a feeling in the finale of it like a staccato conversation, these bits and pieces chopped up.

In a way it’s a visual voiceover, I guess. I wanted it to feel like they were addressing the audience; I wanted to play with this (idea that) whatever they were saying, the other woman could be saying almost the same things too. It’s a specific conversation, but it’s also a universal conversation; it is an end and a beginning. It’s excuses, and not being able to find the words to apologize. They’ve all been the other woman in different situations. And the series is a lot about perpetrators and victims. And we always sympathize with the victims, it is easy to identify with them. But it is much more difficult to actually have compassion for the people who commit the actions and make the mistakes. And it was very important to us that all these women were perpetrators and victims at the same time, but in different stories. In someone else’s story, they are the perpetrator; in their own story they are the victims. And to be able to grasp all those truths at once, it just felt like the symmetry of their faces connected them.

Expats is now streaming on Prime Video.