Adele Lim has a significant amount of experience working as a producer and writer, including scoring an Annie Award nomination for her work on Raya and the Last Dragon, but Joy Ride marks a pretty big first for her; it’s her directorial debut, and a phenomenal one at that.
Of all of your past writing and producing experience, which particular production do you think set you up for the most success directing your first film? LIM: First of all, having complete confidence in your vision and in your sense of story. The most important practical piece of advice was to be in the moment. That, as a writer, you exist in the past and what the movie was, what you're doing now, what you're gonna be doing tomorrow. As the director, you want to just be in the moment, be with your actors, are we laughing and crying the way we need to in this scene so that our audience can feel it? That was tremendously helpful.
I have so many follow-up questions to that. First, I love hearing about studios and producers who support their director's voice, and I know you had that here with Lionsgate and Point Grey. What is something about the studio-director relationship that they struck with you that you really appreciated and hope that more directors working with studios on comedies like this can have in the future?
LIM: I come from working in television, which is a very collaborative medium, and I think the best writers and creators are people who understand that to be surrounded by a room full of smarter people is exactly the position you want to be in, and being able to listen to all those notes, finding a way to have those notes plus your project and not diminish it, but ultimately, you are the filter for that. You're the inflection point for your own movie.