When Andrew Ahn was 8 years old, his mom went to the video store and came home with a wholesome-sounding, Asian-themed movie called “The Wedding Banquet,” directed by an up-and-comer, Ang Lee.

“She did not know it was a queer film, so we watched it as a family not knowing what to expect,” says Ahn, the son of Korean immigrants, who would go on to get a master’s degree at California Institute of the Arts and direct “Driveways” and “Fire Island.” “As a nascent gay child, it really blew my mind.”

The film remains a personal favorite for Ahn, so when the company that owns the film’s rights offered him the chance to remake it, Ahn was both excited and a bit nervous. He teamed with James Schamus, who had co-written the original (and with Joe Pirro produced “Driveways”), to create a film that goes less for broad or screwball comedy and shrinks down the wedding itself.

The new version features two queer couples, Chris (Bowen Yang) and Min (Han Gi-Chan), and Lee (Lily Gladstone) and Angela (Kelly Marie Tran), who are friends; when the women’s in-vitro fertilization treatments fail and their bank account dries up, Min, who has never come out to his wealthy grandmother (Youn Yuh-Jung) back in South Korea and needs a green card to stay in America, offers to pay for a new round of IVF if Angela marries him. From there, things go a bit sideways.

Ahn, 39, recently discussed the film by video. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Were you nervous about remaking an Ang Lee movie?

A: I was very hesitant to reimagine it, because it holds such a special place in my heart. But I was in a particular place in my life thinking about queer family and whether or not I should get married and whether or not I should have kids, so it felt organic, and I had a very personal reason to build upon the legacy and the story of the original film.

Q. Did you meet with Ang Lee and get his blessing? And what did James Schamus bring as a co-writer on both the original and the remake?

A: Ang has been wonderfully supportive and has sent me really encouraging messages. I’m so honored that he has believed in this project from the get-go. He has not had a chance yet to see the movie, because he was busy on his own films, so we’re very excited to screen it for him.

Writing with James was a real honor. As I mentioned, the film is very personally inspired in many ways so it’s helpful to have someone who’s more objective. And the film has a lot about intergenerational conflict and communication, and James is older (65), so that really helped us flesh out those storylines.

Q: It seems like one change you made was putting the idea of “found family” front and center.

A: It’s part of the original film, but there were priorities and at its heart it was a father and son story. I put a lot of emphasis on found family because it’s a big part of my life. For queer people, it’s definitely something that we think a lot about and is very important to us. So much has changed for the queer community since 1993, and now your found family can become your legal family and I wanted to explore that along with the fear of that extra commitment — now that you can choose to be a husband, do you feel like you deserve it? That resonates with me as a millennial gay man. And then this question about having kids is an option that makes building your queer family more complicated.

Q: Some of the marketing language and early reviews use words like “screwball comedy” and “rom-com,” but this film’s tone is different too, using the characters’ friendships and careers to create a funny but more sweet and poignant film. Was that conscious?

A: I always knew from the conception of the project that I wanted this film to show off the range of the queer experience. I wanted comedy and I wanted drama. There was a lot of fine-tuning in the screenplay, in the production, in the edit, my collaboration with the actors.

I worked with James Schamus on the screenplay to create three-dimensional characters, but they had to be brought to life by our actors, and I really wanted to collaborate with them to incorporate their ideas, their feelings, their experiences. There was a long collaborative process with each actor, very intense.

When we sent the screenplay to Youn Yuh-Jung, the role was initially written as Min’s mother and not grandmother, but she was very humble and said she felt old playing the mother of this character and asked about playing his grandmother. (In the new screenplay Min’s parents are dead.) So we talked about how that would change their relationship, their dynamic and their story.

Lily Gladstone’s role was not originally written as an Indigenous character. The film is set in Seattle, and Lily grew up in Seattle and she wanted to find a way to personalize it. And so she renamed the character from Liz to Lee, which is short for Angeline, who is the daughter of Chief Seattle, the Duwamish chief who the city’s named after, and then we added the conversation about her character’s home, which elevated these themes of stewardship and home in a really beautiful way. I think all that would allow the film to bring that humanity to the film that I was interested in.