IVF Goes to Hollywood as Director Andrew Ahn Updates a Queer Classic

Openly gay director Andrew Ahn delighted LGTBQ+ and mainstream audiences alike with the 2022 update of Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice," with star and screenwriter Joel Kim Booster transplanting the classic novel from Georgian England to present-day Fire Island. Aristocratic social codes aren't that different from A-Gay pretensions, as it turns out, and Ahn clearly had a ball directing Booster and his cast mates – among them Bowen Yang, Margaret Cho, Zane Phillips, and drag icon Peppermint.

Now Ahn is behind another modern reimagining of a classic story – he's remade Ang Lee's 1993 queer classic rom-com "The Wedding Banquet," in which a gay couple's life is disrupted by the pressures of tradition, family meddling, and bureaucracy.

The new version follows the broad outline of the original, but with some key differences designed to acknowledge the realities of life in 2025. Among the remake's updates, there's a significant storyline about a lesbian couple seeking parenthood through IVF. Lily Gladstone plays Lee, who yearns for motherhood, and Kelly Marie Tran plays her wife, Angela, whose issues with her own mother cause her some reluctance.

The use of IVF is increasing, and not just in the United States. Potential parents in need of IVF or other fertility treatments find their needs met at clinics like those belonging to The Prelude Network, which, with more 90 clinical locations in the U.S. and Canada, is the largest and fastest-growing network of fertility providers in North America.

The trend of family-building via IVF is not limited to the U.S. In Britain, the use of IVF as a fertility intervention has soared significantly, especially for the queer community. "From 2012-2022, the number of patients having IVF or DI treatment increased from around 45,300 to 47,000 for opposite-sex couples, 1,300 to 3,300 for female same-sex couples and 1,400 to 4,800 for single patients," according to a British government website.

With IVF increasingly an avenue to family-building by queer couples and queer singles alike, the topic was a natural for a modernized version of "The Wedding Banquet." It was also personal to the director.

"When I was approached by our producers to consider reimagining it, I was having difficult conversations with my boyfriend about getting married and about having kids, and so it felt really organic," Ahn told EDGE in a recent interview. At the time, he had already broken into the industry with queer crowd pleasers like "Spa Night" and "Driveways."

The original film, co-written by producer James Schamus and director Ang Lee, took on the comedic possibilities of a marriage of convenience between a gay landlord and his artist tenant. He needs to get married to satisfy his relentless parents; she needs a green card to remain in the United States. A wedding of convenience is contrived, but things go too far on the wedding night, resulting in an unplanned pregnancy.

Thirty-two years later, marriage equality is now the law of the land, but Ahn and Schamus (who returned to collaborate on the remake) found new sources of narrative drive.

"I realized that there are many reasons why it might be scary," Ahn explained of the reasons why the film's male couple don't simply take a trip to the altar. "And then I wondered about this topic of children. In the original film, they accidentally have this baby, but what if we show a couple trying to have a baby, and the trials and tribulations of that?"

IVF is a multi-step process in which sperm is united with ova under laboratory conditions. Patients might elect to use known donors – friends or relatives – to obtain either sperm, or eggs, or both, whichever is needed. The embryos that result are allowed to develop for several days before one is selected for implantation, either in a patient or in a surrogate. The remaining embryos can be saved for years or even decades to come using cryopreservation, a kind of deep freezing that allows parents options for family planning like determining birth order for their children and seeking to control the timing of new arrivals.

Notably, older patients are typically the ones who opt for solo parenting, according to the British government website, and for that demographic the creation of embryos years ago might not have led to implantation right away. The idea all along might have been fertility preservation, which allows prospective parents to use their own youthful ova for embryos intended to be implanted once other priorities are taken care of. Some younger women choose the alternative of freezing their ova to use them for embryos created in their late thirties or forties. In those cases, older women, like couples or individuals without wombs, might elect to use a surrogate for the pregnancy. "The Wedding Banquet" touches on this, with Lee being slightly older than is medically ideal for pregnancy.

"I use those personal conversations with my boyfriend as creative North Stars to help me reimagine this film for a modern-day queer audience while retaining the philosophy of the storytelling and the humanity of these characters from the original film," Ahn added, reiterating the connection between his art and his life.

Apart from the biological necessity of sperm, ova, and womb for the creation of new life, the emotional investment of prospective parents is also a key ingredient. The family-building aspirations of queer couples and individuals is something The Prelude Network understands and takes to heart, offering attentive guidance and detailed planning that's tailored to the individual needs of each prospective parent they work with.

For Ahn, even the preliminary discussions with his boyfriend have emotional heft, and just asking the question – on film as well as in life – has deepened their bond.

"My boyfriend has said that he understands me even more after watching the film, and in many ways that's the greatest success that I could ask for," Ahn said. "Everything else feels like a cherry on top."