Joy Ride director Adele Lim on her radical, filthy new movie and why one film can’t ‘fix racism’

If there’s one thing that sums up Adele Lim, it’s her response when a critic tried to take her to task over her upcoming film, Joy Ride.

“It’s raunchy simply to be raunchy, forgetting there has to be humor attached, and there’s none of that,” they griped, adding this clanger: “objectifies men, targets white people.”

Some people would have been upset – after all, this is Lim’s directorial debut. She was unfazed. “Imma need ‘Objectifies men, targets white people’ on a tshirt,” she replied, alongside a laughing emoji. Naturally, it went viral.

People tuning into watch Joy Ride on August 4 can expect more of the same irreverence, as well as a generous helping of men being objectified. A wild, gloriously crass film that Lim developed with two friends, it stars Ashley Park, Sherry Cola, Sabrina Wu and Everything Everywhere All At Once’s Stephanie Hsu and tells the story of three Asian women and a non-binary person as they take a road trip across China.

For Lim, something like this – a film that draws on her own experience as a member of the Asian diaspora – has been a long time coming. “It’s so freeing to be able to tell stories and not jam your experience and your storytelling sensibility through this mainstream prism,” she says.

It’s quite some story: over the course of its 95-minute runtime, we see a tattooed vagina (inside and out), piles of vomit and some very graphic sex that puts female pleasure first and foremost (including a wince-inducing scene of a man getting his pelvis fractured by a massage gun being used as a vibrator). Perhaps it shouldn’t feel radical, but it definitely does.

“We didn’t write it with the view of, ‘Let’s definitely get something made,’ [or] we would never have started from this place,” Lim says. “We [wanted] to write something that makes us crack up.” As she explains it, they wanted to investigate what women talk about with their friends in private – especially in more conservative spaces “like Asian culture.”

“My mom and my grandma [are] wonderful, wonderful women, you know, church going, but behind closed doors, they have kind of raunchy senses of humour too, and they have a cute, private giggle about things,” she says. “And so we really wanted to put that side of our experience out there: like, we’re going to write what girls and their best friends talk about.”

The result, she says, is an examination of identity, culture and belonging, but couched “in a shit-tonne of dick jokes, the way it is in real life”.

Though Joy Ride marks her debut as a director, the life of the jobbing writer in Hollywood is one that Lim is very familiar with. Originally from Malaysia, she spent her childhood reading a lot of Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton (“I remember spelling hello like ‘hullo,’” she laughs) before moving to America in the pursuit of a career that would allow her to tell stories.

Not that it was easy: starting on Xena: Warrior Princess, Lim spent time on One Tree Hill, Dynasty and even the American adaptation of Life on Mars. “The sad thing is, when I started in the industry, I just felt lucky to be there. It would be me and you know, twelve white guy writers, writing for an all-white cast. And that was my reality for the best part of ten years,” she says.

“The sad part of it is, you’ve internalised that reality so much, you don’t even think it’s odd. Even though the writer’s room and the shows you’re working on don’t reflect reality at all.”

Though things have improved, clearly there’s still room for change. Lim has been participating in the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strikes in Hollywood, something that’s brought together both the writers campaigning for better pay, and a bevy of A-list actors who’ve been supporting them.

“I love writers, they’re my favourite people,” she says wryly. “But we’re a homely bunch out on the picket line, you know, out of shape and not great at exercise and chanting. And actors are just like, just far more attractive and talented and fun to be around. So it’s going to be a party atmosphere on the picket line.”

Jokes aside, Lim is serious about fighting for change. “We’re not asking for anything new and exciting with bells and whistles. We’re literally asking for the same protections and rights that we had before: that if we create a show, or a movie that is enormously, ridiculously, disgustingly successful, and makes everybody oodles of money, that we get our fair share in that, the way we always have.”

She also has form in putting her money where her mouth is. Brought in to help write the script for the ridiculously successful 2018 film adaptation of Crazy Rich Asians, she chose to walk from the sequel due to a pay discrepancy between her and Peter Chiarelli, her more experienced co-writer.

Was it hard to leave? Very, she says, but necessary. “I remember thinking for Crazy Rich, given my contributions to that movie, if I of all people could not get equal pay for equal work on Crazy Rich Asians, then there’s something desperately wrong with the system.”

“It wasn’t an easy thing to do. Nobody wakes up, you know, thinking, ‘you know what, today I would love to be the face of pay equity.’ You just want to be… you want to be able to tell stories. But I knew that if I’d taken the deal, then it just wouldn’t sit right with me. It would, in a way, undo so much of what that movie had done for cultural representation in America.”

Crazy Rich Asians certainly felt like a breath of fresh air when it came out. Featuring an all-Asian cast including Henry Golding, Constance Wu, Awkwafina, Michelle Yeoh and Gemma Chan, the film grossed more than £180m in box office takings and arguably kick-started a new age of diversity on screen.

Or did it? Lim is less optimistic. “No one movie or show is ever going to fix cultural representation,” she says. “I think we all felt really hopeful when Joy Luck Club came out about like, 30-some years ago, and thinking, well, this is a new day for minorities on the big screen. And it didn’t happen.

“The fear is always that a movie like Crazy Rich Asians will come out and everybody goes, ‘Well, that’s it, we fixed racism. And now it’s a whole new day.’ And that’s not the way it works at all. You know, it’ll take years and years of us just chipping at the system, of having this whole new generation of filmmakers and storytellers come up with projects.”

At least there appears to be a groundswell: in addition to A24’s Oscar-winning darling Everything Everywhere All At Once, Squid Game and Marvel superhero show Shang-Chi have been dominating the cultural discourse in recent years. And of course, Joy Ride is now one of their number too.

“We need all of it,” she says. “And frankly, you know, it doesn’t have to all be at that calibre, we should be able to operate the same way white shows operate, which is to have a fair number of meh shows, or failures even. That’s the equal playing field that we’re shooting for.”

Joy Ride is in cinemas from August 4