October 20, 2013, Q. and A.: Jia Zhangke on His New Film “A Touch of Sin,” Part 2 By EDWARD WONG In the second part of my interview with the Chinese director Jia Zhangke, he discusses censorship, industry financing and the need for films to reflect everyday life in China. Q. What kinds of changes to the censorship process have taken place in the last 10 or 15 years? A. The censorship process has changed a lot. I think the biggest change happened in 2004. After 2004, from my own perspective, from the perspective of someone who works in the film industry, there was more discussion in the censorship process. In the past, no one came to talk to us. They would just say “yes” or “no.” No one would listen to the director, no one talked to the director about why he or she made the film or why he or she dealt with the subject in this manner. After 2004, directors began to have the opportunity to discuss and express their own views. After 2004, the range of subjects that directors could make films about also expanded. Of course, it’s not at the point we’d like. But I’ve always believed that we must encourage progress of China’s system. If China makes progress, then we must recognize it. The censorship process has slowly become more relaxed. At the same time, we can’t forget the power of China’s cultural conservatism. It’s not official, it doesn’t come from the government. It comes from the people. For example, “Django Unchained” by Quentin Tarantino. “Django Unchained” was initially approved. It played for one night and then it was halted because there’s a scene in the movie with a naked man. Why did this happen? Because there were some conservative people in the audience who wrote letters and made phone calls to report it. So if we’re looking at what’s blocking the progress of Chinese society, we can’t just look at official controls. It also has to do with the Chinese people themselves. Q. Why do you say these changes took place starting in 2004? A. In 2004, there was a change in that China wanted to develop its film industry. It became more commercialized. The change was very big, because they began to look at films as an industry. Before, films were seen as propaganda tools, just like CCTV or People’s Daily. After 2004, in order to build up the Chinese film industry, officials began to see films not as simply propaganda but as an industry. This change in thinking directly led to the relaxation in policies that came about later. Q. Are there political pressures put on you in certain aspects of your work, such as what happened with the Melbourne International Film Festival in 2009? [Mr. Jia withdrew a film of his from the festival because a documentary about Rebiya Kadeer, the ethnic Uighur dissident living in the United States, was also scheduled to be shown at the festival. In July 2009, Uighurs rioted in the capital of the western Chinese region of Xinjiang, resulting in many deaths. Mr. Jia’s friend Zhao Liang also withdrew a film from the festival, and said in an interview with The New York Times in 2011 that Chinese film bureau officials had pressured him and Mr. Jia to do so.] A. I think this is a misunderstanding. In 2009, it was my own personal decision. I made the decision because I felt that the film festival had become a thing where directors were forced to express their opinions on certain political systems. Whether you went or didn’t — either way you were making a political statement. I didn’t like this feeling. I’m a director. I don’t want to go to a film festival and have people think that I’m trying to make a political statement. Furthermore, that year I saw the violence in Xinjiang and I felt very sad about it. It was violence between people, and between ethnic groups, between the Han people and the Uighurs. I was very saddened by it. Q. Were there any officials who said that you shouldn’t show your film at the film festival? A. No. Q. So you’re saying officials didn’t pressure you and political considerations didn’t influence your decision at all? A. No, this sort of thing has never happened. The only time I come into contact with the government is when a film is going through the review process. Q. Has the commercialization of the film industry in China had an impact on the way you make films? A. It hasn’t affected me very much, because I’m pretty clear about what kind of films I like and the kinds of problems I’ll encounter in making such films. For example, with these kinds of films — whenever the film is passed on to the censors, I always feel anxious, whereas commercial films usually don’t have a problem. I understand these circumstances. And these kinds of films are usually not celebrated by the Chinese market. This I know very well and I understand it. So it doesn’t have a big impact on me. Q. If you want to continue to make these kinds of movies, how do you find investment? A. This is actually something I don’t really worry about because all of my films have made money for the investors. Q. I saw that “A Touch of Sin” has different investors. From China, there are Shanghai Film Group and Shanxi Film & Television Group. And there’s Office Kitano from Japan. Is most of the money from domestic groups? A. Starting from 2004, it’s been mostly domestic and foreign money combined. Sometimes there is Japan or France or South Korea. Q. In the United States, growing commercialization has had a big impact on the film industry. Is this the same in China? A. In China, it’s pretty much the same. It’s had a big influence. On one hand, you’re faced with the continuing decline in the average age of filmgoers. This year, in China, the average age of moviegoers was 21, and it continues to drop. So the market is starting to make movies aimed at this younger age group. At the same time, the cinema system in China is not very sophisticated. The biggest impact has been on independent films or art-house films. There’s less and less room for these films in theaters. Q. So if a director in China wants to make an independent film, how does he or she go about finding investment or people to back him? A. The best thing is to find people to support you. Finding people to support you depends on finding people who want to support this art, not necessarily because they want to make a profit with this film. China’s rapid economic development has in fact given rise to these kinds of investors, these kinds of bosses, who might take this approach to make this kind of movie. Q. So do you think you might make a commercial film in the future? A. I wouldn’t say no to the opportunity. Take this martial arts film that I am preparing for now. For Chinese audiences, martial arts films are commercial films. Maybe if I brought it to America it would be considered an art-house film. But in China it’s a commercial film. I do have an interest in making films that ordinary audiences want to watch, and at the same time trying to communicate my own thinking and philosophy to the 21-year-old film-going audience. This film is currently in pre-production. I hope to begin filming by next year, after the Lunar New Year, because the pre-production is basically finished. It’s just because we decided to film “A Touch of Sin” in the middle that it was halted. Q. Why did you want to make this kind of a martial arts film? A. It has to do with my own study of history. I was born in 1970, and in 1979, when China began opening up, I was 9. So my entire childhood and adolescence coincided with China’s reform and opening. So for a long time, I had this idea that China’s transformation began in 1979. But later, when I started reading a lot about history, I began to realize that China’s biggest transformation actually started in 1895, or toward the end of the Qing Dynasty. That transformation was actually a huge change because before, China didn’t have science. All of a sudden, mathematics, astronomy and geography were introduced. And China used to be a central empire, and then all of a sudden you have America and France. So China’s real efforts to become modern began back then — including how people dressed, what they ate, their education. So my story is about education. You know the civil service examination system. In 1905 or so it was abolished because China wanted to catch up with modern science. But many people had undergone this education [in the Confucian classics in preparation for the examination], and all of a sudden the system was abolished. They had no way to make a living. So I saw what this transformation was for many people — a sort of passive sacrifice. It was very passive. Because of the transformation, the individual was sacrificed. I’m obsessed with this period, because it’s just like ours. But I wanted to use martial arts to talk about this time. Q. Are there other genre forms with which you want to work later? A. I’m preparing to make a spy movie after this martial arts film. It’s set from 1949 to 1966, the start of the Cultural Revolution. It’s a spy story that takes place in Hong Kong. The history and the relationship between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party is something that Chinese people need to think about. Q. Is it important to you to make an epic historical film? It seems to me that all Chinese filmmakers want to make one. A. I think that Chinese directors have a very strong interest in Chinese history. This derives from the fact that so much of the truth about Chinese history has been suppressed. A lot of directors want to film a truthful version of Chinese history. Just as I want to make a 1949 spy movie — because I want to portray what the relationship between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party was really like. It’s an interest in the truth. For example, the history around the War of Resistance [against Japan] — in the War of Resistance, during World War II, the Kuomintang actually played a major role and made many sacrifices. But after 1949 — ever since I was little, I have been taught that the Kuomintang forces didn’t actually resist, that they tried to escape. Once we understand what really happened, then we begin to want to express it. Because I find that the history we were studying was problematic. From a professional perspective, of course, we want to film it. Q. You traveled to two film festivals with “A Touch of Sin”? A. I went to Cannes and Melbourne. Q. What was the reaction to the film among foreigners? A. I think that, for the most part, at both Cannes and Melbourne, foreigners could understand the stories in the film. They also had questions, such as, well, the same here — is it necessary to have such violent scenes? Many people asked this, and I just told them that I think that if you want to understand violence, to understand the destructiveness of violence, then I don’t know how else to do it. I also think that foreigners have a general understanding of China, such as what’s going on there politically or economically. Their sense as a whole is pretty good, so they can understand the stories from afar, from the perspective of China’s development. Normally Chinese viewers will understand the movie through individual perspectives, from the perspectives of the characters. Q. There are some people here who criticize the foreign media for paying too much attention to the darker aspects of China. Have you gotten this kind of criticism? A. From my first film “Xiao Wu” to now, I’ve heard this kind of criticism. In the past, I might have responded to it, but now I don’t really respond because it’s very obvious. From my perspective, what I am most interested in is individual destinies, and within individual destinies what I’m most interested in is individual struggles. I think this is a general interest that has existed among artists since the beginning of art and movies. We will always be concerned with these struggles, we will always look at the weaknesses, we will always feel a great impulse to understand these dark situations. This is something that doesn’t need to be explained. Through our portrayal of dark situations, through our description of unfortunate events, what we get is a sort of life experience and an affirmation of life. I remember there was an artist who said that on reading Lu Xun’s short stories, he realized that Lu Xun’s short stories are all very dark, but they are like a match that illuminates us. This is art. Otherwise, what do we film? There is no shortage of these kinds of films. Q. What was the budget on “A Touch of Sin”? A. The budget on the film was about $4 million. It was the most expensive of all the films I’ve made. Two-thirds of the investment was from domestic companies — from the film groups in Shanghai and Shanxi, as well as my own production company, Xstream Pictures. Q. Which Chinese filmmakers do you follow? A. From Taiwan, I follow Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Tsai Ming-liang’s work. From Hong Kong, Johnnie To and Wong Kar-wai. From the mainland, Lou Ye, Wang Xiaoshuai — basically these are the directors who are the same age as I am. Q. What about younger directors on the mainland? A. Han Jie or Hao Jie and Wang Bing. Q. You often edit your own films. Did you do that with “A Touch of Sin”? A. I edited “A Touch of Sin” in Datong. Because work was too chaotic here, I went to Datong and I stayed in a hotel. For seven or eight days I didn’t go downstairs, I just kept to myself. To eat I would go down to the second floor and then I would go back up and continue editing. I edit my films myself. I also write the films myself. I handwrote this one. It’s faster than using a computer. I edited all my films except “24 City.” That one I wrote with Zhai Yongming. This time writing by hand was faster than writing with a computer. This time I really wanted to write it by hand, and I also wrote it really fast. And I have this colleague from school — no matter how messy my handwriting was, he could read it and then would type it out. This handwritten screenplay will be published in China, maybe in one or two years, by a publishing house in Shandong. Q. You’ll be at the New York Film Festival at the end of September. Are you looking forward to it? A. It has a big Chinatown, and I’m looking forward to going there. The first thing is always to find a Chinatown. Then you can have a great Chinese meal. [laughs] —– After the screening of “A Touch of Sin” and before Jia Zhangke did one-on-one interviews, he engaged for about 20 minutes in a free-flowing conversation with the journalists he had invited to his office. Here are a few interesting comments he made during that discussion. Q. What were some of the most interesting reactions to the film at festival showings? A. The most interesting reaction was that the audience would applaud when people got killed. But when the horse was being beaten or being yelled at, people would feel the pain. A lot of people couldn’t stand watching the horse getting beaten or yelled at, but could tolerate the killing of people. Q. At the international film festivals you attended [Cannes and Melbourne, at this point], what were the differences in reactions between overseas Chinese and foreigners? A. Overseas Chinese understand the background of the film better. A lot of people know the stories you’re depicting. Overseas Chinese seem to be really concerned about whether or not this film can be released in China. Everyone has been asking me about it, and I keep telling everyone this film has already been approved. No one believes me. After the film was submitted to the censors, we waited 20 days, and they came back with two pages of orders and suggestions. The screenplay had already been approved before that. There weren’t really any problems with the script. The two pages were for the finished film. I felt like it wasn’t too bad. They are trying to change as well. They waited two to three weeks after the first edit was submitted to the censorship board, and then they came back with the two pages. And then we resubmitted the edited version. We waited for about a week, and it was approved. It was approved before the final list of films selected for the Cannes film festival was released, otherwise it wouldn’t have complied with regulations. Regarding the violence, they asked me if I could take out some of the violent scenes, and I wrote back to them saying this is the point of the movie. If I take them out, then I don’t know what we’re discussing [in the film]. They had suggestions, and then they had things I had to do. Like in the scene where they have the welcome ceremony at the airport, there was a reference to something about harmony and they said I had to take this out. I thought this was no loss to my film, so it wasn’t a problem. Q. You don’t know who these censors are. A. I do know some of the censors, because some of them are professors or movie critics. Most I don’t know. Q. A lot of people criticize [the writer] Yu Hua for being too close to reality and everyday events. If you were criticized in this way, how would you respond? A. When I make a film, I have things I want to say. I think the way films in China reflect current reality is too slow. In writing, artists and not just journalists should record life. Contemporary people should film contemporary stories. Contemporary people should write about contemporary events. I think this is a very fundamental responsibility. Before, as we were preparing to make a Qing Dynasty martial arts film, these other stories moved me so much that I thought we should tell these stories first. I’ve always wanted to be a storyteller whose work parallels reality. That doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be very distant [in time] in order to tell the story. There are several types of films. There are films with stories that are right in front of you, and you film them. And there is a type that is very removed from the subject. For example, if we were to make a movie about 1949, we would be very removed from it. It’s also a good kind of movie. But what China lacks today is films about 1949 made in 1949, films made about the Cultural Revolution made during the Cultural Revolution, and films about June 4 [the suppression of demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989] made during June 4. There needs to be an immediate reflection on the moment. This is what’s missing.
Posted on: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 04:13:37 +0000
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