“We grew up on hard R-Rated comedies and were often the butt of the joke,” said “Joy Ride” star Stephanie Hsu. “It’s never been us at the forefront, telling our story and making fun of ourselves.”
The latest comedy blockbuster, “Joy Ride,” from director and co-writer Adele Lim, stars Ashley Park as Audrey, a high-powered attorney who travels to China on business and ends up searching for her birth mother. Joining her on the trip are friends Lolo (Sherry Cola), Deadeye (Sabrina Wu) and Kat (Stephanie Hsu).
The raunchy comedy sees the foursome ending up in wild scenarios including drugs, sex and a steamy hotel sequence in Shanghai. But despite the setting, Lim and the production never left Vancouver.
Park joked she would attend red carpets and be consistently asked “How was it shooting in Korea and China?” which left her speechless and politely dodging the question.
“That was our biggest challenge, shooting Vancouver as China and Korea,” explains Lim. “I’m an immigrant, I grew up in Asia. Even if we couldn’t be in the physical location, the soul of it felt authentic and genuine. We had these amazing heads of department, including our production designer Michael Norman Wong.”
Wong says, “Making ‘Joy Ride’ work in Vancouver as China, Seoul and Paris was very challenging because Vancouver doesn’t look like any of those places. It took everybody getting on board, putting our heads together and finding the right locations.”
A key scene takes place after the friends are kicked off a train following a drug raid and left in the middle of nowhere. Cola’s Lolo character helps out when her online bestie NBA star Baron Davis picks them up and takes them to a hotel.
The Coast Hotel & Convention Centre in Langley City was the location for the film and stood in for the Shanghai hotel where Lolo, Deadeye, Audrey and Kat have their own time with members of the men’s basketball team in different areas of the hotel.
Cola says of her unexpected co-star, Baron Davis, “was such a good sport.” Cola continues, “I can’t wait for people to see Baron Davis in this film because he really is a standout for me.”
Cola divulges, “At a point, I licked his forehead. It was all over the place. I was hopping on the couch. I had bruises all over my shins that night. A lot of stuff didn’t make the cut, I’ll tell you that.”
“The Shanghai hotel, we had to be very sensitive, [because] they were still operational.” Wong says, “We made it work by building this golden metallic trifold screen to hide the reception area that still allowed customers to come in and out — and it provided a nice Asian vibe to it.”
While the team was thousands of miles from Asia, Wong worked with the production team to play up the sets that had already captured the essence of Asia. Wong revealed that Vancouver’s Sun Yat-Sen garden “is built to look like a garden in China, so quite often it’s shot as authentic China in other films.”
“I was adamantly opposed to that in our film,” says Wong. “Someone suggested ‘Why don’t we shoot it there in the gardens as a movie set?’ That works, it has a bit of that look to it.”
In terms of interiors, Wong reveals that Nai Nai’s home (Lori Tan Chinn), was his favorite in the film. “We’re used to seeing images of Beijing the city, we’re used to seeing Shanghai the city, but we see very little of rural China.”
“Nai Nai’s house, that is home to me,” adds Cola. The Shanghai-born actress revealed while on set, she couldn’t believe how much “it really looked like China.”
Lim, who had hoped to channel the essence of the various cities, said the location team’s finds and Wong’s production design made the set feel “like the soul was right.” Lim says, “They brought all of that to the screen, all that love.”
As Wong continued to bring forth the love surrounding the Asian countries, Cola remarked on “Joy Ride’s” groundbreaking premise. “What a moment for the culture and for the AAPI folks in the industry, the community and the country to see such an R-rated moment with these faces on the big screen.”
“I have been desperate to do projects before, but for me, it was almost like I’m desperate for this to be made. No matter what. I’d be so thrilled and honored to be part of it,” says Park, an actress accustomed to traveling the world to depict specific countries — most notably seen as “Emily in Paris’” Mindy at the Villefranche-sur-Mer in Nice, France.
Wu concludes, “When I really learned about the premise, I could tell it was like a really really big important moment.”
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