James Schamus on a new The Wedding Banquet: “Over the years, I’ve come to the conclusion that what we call civilisation and culture is more or less queer”

A producer, screenwriter, scholar, former studio head and director, James Schamus has an extensive, storied CV. His career was launched along with that of Taiwanese director Ang Lee, with whom he co-wrote the ‘Father Knows Best’ trilogy of Pushing Hands (1991), The Wedding Banquet (1993) and Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), and produced countless others.

Now, Schamus has set the table for a new The Wedding Banquet, producing and co-writing with Fire Island director Andrew Ahn, whom he’d worked with previously on 2019 indie Driveways. This new 2025 iteration is not a remake per se, more a 2020s explosion of the original film’s ideas, as two queer couples grapple with cultural and parental expectations.

An erudite and eloquent multi-hyphenate, Schamus is as warm in conversation as he is in his screenplays. We look backwards and ahead, as we discuss two wedding banquets, two key collaborators and four decades of screen allyship.

What defines your experience co-writing and producing the original The Wedding Banquet when you look back on it? You’d made Pushing Hands with Ang Lee, then this was the film that put him on the map.

I think, in order to be truthful, you have to answer it in two directions: the direction of walking through that experience and the direction that’s been retroactively established by the reception of the film.

I have little to say with any kind of nostalgic inflection about the original. Both Ang and I have a habit of watching the films that we work on at their world premieres and then kind of forgetting about them. I hadn’t seen The Wedding Banquet since its world premiere at the Zoo Palast in Berlin until a few weeks ago, when the Asia Society did a retrospective of Ang Lee’s films. Usually I’ll only watch a movie that I’ve worked on if somebody is sitting next to me on an airplane watching it.

Do you watch the film in that instance or do you watch the viewer?

I watch the film. It’s a way to relearn some of the tricks that one was using in making it.

All of this is my way of saying that I haven’t given you an answer to your initial question, and I have no answer to it, except to say that in the course of one’s career you have a few moments that genuinely surprise you. One of those was the first screening [of The Wedding Banquet (1993)] at the Berlin Film Festival. Ted Hope and I hadn’t managed to sell to a sales agent. Three days later, we were screening to distributors, and just selling, selling, selling. It launched our career. The Wedding Banquet was a huge success.

You hadn’t watched it in years, yet we’re sitting here with a remake. It feels like you and Andrew Ahn have taken the core ideas of the original film and spun them off into what they might mean for 2020s America.

The process by which Andrew guided us to make this new film was very specific. It required revisiting the old film but, for me, refusing to enter the house when invited back in.

Andrew came to this project with two almost completely independent paradigms. One was his absolute love of the film – he’s spoken often about the experience of seeing it when he was eight years old. The other was his inventive approach to reformatting and reimagining a cast of characters who could inhabit the central narrative conflicts. Andrew was never going to ‘remake’ The Wedding Banquet. Who wants to remake anything? I gave my blessing to Andrew to just go where he wants to go – don’t worry about us.

He came up with incredible ideas, including ‘doubling down’ on the cast. One thinks of that as narrative ‘addition’ – ‘not just one couple, but two!’ – but they’re not additions, they’re exponential algorithmic explosions in terms of narrative complexity. It was really fun to be pulled in to the Andrew Ahn creative vacuum and realise that I had the engineering skills to figure this out with him.

Thinking further on you as an ‘engineer’: how do you perceive yourself within this creative equation? You seem astute as to when the voice should be yours, and when to take a back seat.

I take the role of producer really seriously, and the role of producer is to be the nexus for every productive impulse from every person who works on a film. You need a level of transparency and also vacancy. You need to get out of the way as much as you need to organise. The balance of that is different on every film, especially if you’re helping write it. There are always going to be moments of creative conflict and of figuring things out together.

I have clarity about my mission, and one part of that is really not needing to be photobombing on the red carpet. Many of my producer peers have a chip on their shoulder about everyone else getting all the credit. I genuinely don’t give a shit. My job is to get the others on that red carpet.

You’re an incredible ally to both LGBTQIA+ and East Asian filmmakers, to the point that Outfest named an award after you. Is that foregrounding and championing of diverse voices instinctual? It’s core to your back catalogue.

I wish I could tell you I had – and I’m using the term affectionately – a ‘woke checklist’ that I used every time I threw myself into a project, but I don’t think that’s the case. I’m lucky to have been around creative people who express themselves with an energy and a passion that I can connect to larger concerns – emotional, political and aesthetic.

In my day job, I’m a professor. Over the years, I’ve come to the conclusion that what we call civilisation and culture is more or less queer. I’m sorry – if it’s aesthetic, it’s going to be queer. That’s my version of queer theory, which is a little sad because it’s too general. Obviously, we need clarity, we need specificity – we need to be able to identify those who are raising voices in particular ways that counter dominant structures. 

On the other hand, if you go back and look at the dominant Hollywood cinema of the 1940s, it seems pretty queer. And that’s the paradox, that there is a dominant queerness that is often nefarious in its relationship to its desires and fantasies, and then there are the voices in the margins.

I don’t think either of those spaces exclusively speaks the kind of aesthetic, political and emotional truth that I respond to. The Wedding Banquet’s at least most visible primary actants, Ang Lee and myself – we’re a couple of cishet dudes. That film arrives at a moment when astonishing thinking and making is happening that we associate with New Queer Cinema, which took extraordinary aesthetic as well as thematic risks. But we’re a Hollywood screwball comedy. I always say to people: how did the middle of the brow become the bad part of the brow? It’s an interesting place to be sometimes.

2025 is a very different queer cinema landscape. How do you feel this film is situated within that, and what are your thoughts on its surroundings?

In this moment of crisis, I often get the question “what should we do?” The answer that rings the truest for me is “do something”.

We did not make this film as a balm for the afflicted, or as a prescription for some kind of political reformation, but all of us felt a call to practise and share a certain kind of joy. There’s a narrative since Sundance about the film, that it’s this lovely moment of joyousness amid all this horror. But I think the reason that people responded so strongly to the film is that joy asserts itself as something precious, it’s preserved in the struggle. 

When we’re having that joy, we’re joining with a community that needs to look out for itself and for people to look out for each other. It’s modelling what we’re all fighting for.

The Wedding Banquet is the opening night gala film of this year’s BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival.