Chinese director Zhang Yuan first became famous as one
of the leaders of the Chinese underground film movement,
the so-called Sixth Generation who, following international
stars Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, started to make films
after 1989. Born in 1963, Zhang Yuan graduated in 1985
from the Beijing Film Academy (Faculty of
Cinematography). He started making films in 1990 in partnership
with documentary director Wu Wenguang (who
made My Time in the Red Guards). Zhang’s career met with
immediate positive public and international critical acclaim.
His film Mama (1992) won the jury prize and the main
award at the Film Festival of Nantes (France), and the critics’
award at the Edinburgh and Berlin Film Festivals.
This was followed by Beijing Bastards (1993), Sons
(1996), and East Palace West Palace (1996), which confirmed
him as the enfant terrible of contemporary Chinese
cinema. At that time, he chose to make films outside of the
mainstream Chinese film system, avoiding the Film
Bureau’s censorship regime. But along with this freedom
came a price: he was prevented from showing his films to
Chinese audiences. Unwilling to continue restricting his
potential audience to foreign film festival goers and critics,
Zhang Yuan undertook a radical change in direction with
Seventeen Years (1999).
His success was twofold: the film won the Venice Film
Festival’s Golden Lion award for Best Director, and afterwards
it was finally approved by the Film Bureau’s censors.
Since then, he has chosen to produce and release all his
films - Crazy English (1999), I Love You (2002), Green Tea
(2003), and Jiang Jie (2004) - inside the system. And he’s
been rewarded both with the local audience he always wanted,
and with another leadership role, this time at the head
of the recent proliferation of relatively small, independently
produced high quality films with commercial potential.
How would you introduce yourself to people who come to
watch your films?
My position reflects the state of Chinese cinema today. On
the one hand, it is experiencing a new form of open-mindedness,
while on the other it is experiencing a great deal
of pressure from censorship. Not to mention the increasing
competition from Hollywood. None of my films prior to
Seventeen Years were shown in China. Eight months after
its recognition at Venice, that film finally managed to get
approval from the censors. Jiang Jie has had no problems
with the censors. As for commercially successful films like
Green Tea and I Love You, although they weren’t cut by the
censors, I still had to solve the problem of how to shoot the
love scenes, and the scenes with psychologically unstable characters. The relationship between filmmakers and censors
in China means we are always “dancing with chains
around your legs”, as Milan Kundera said in The
Unbearable Lightness of Being.
FEFF’s interest in showing these three very different kinds
of films stems from the spirit of the festival. We try to introduce
audiences to a variety of films from East Asian that
reflect local trends. How would you connect these three
films for an audience?
Jiang Jie represents the China of the Seventies, I Love You
the Eighties and Green Tea the Nineties to now. I can’t see
anything that the three films have in common. In this way, I
can cite the example of a master of modern-day cinema
such as Fassbinder. I have seen at least twenty of his films,
and I have never been able to find any themes in common.
Can we say that your career can be separated into two
distinct parts - before and after Seventeen Years?
I admit to suffering from a kind of schizophrenia, in the
sense that I realise that I show different sides of myself. As
a film director I maintain that there aren’t any noticeable
breaks in my career: it is a continuous line of work. Even
though I’ve spent a lot of time abroad, taken part in many
international film festivals and developed a wealth of cultural
interests, my life is still based in China. Despite all this,
before making Seventeen Years I suffered from the frustration
of not being able to communicate with Chinese people.
I wasn’t able to establish a meaningful dialogue with the
general public. I felt the need and determination to distance
myself from expressions and terms such as “the underground
cinema” or “underground culture”.
Intellectuals and some of my friends called this a compromise
on my part. But if this move allowed me to get access
to a wider public, then I was ready and willing to do it. I
remember my anxiety and uneasiness in the days leading
up to the first screening of Seventeen Years at the Beijing
Youth Palace. I was used to meeting the public at international
Film Festivals, but I was not ready to meet a Chinese
audience - it turned out to be a completely different experience.
What was the Chinese audience’s reaction to your film I
Love You?
Young people enjoyed the film. The story is inspired by a
famous novel Get a Kick and Die (Guo ba yin jiu si) by Wang
Shuo. This was already very popular as a television serial
called Have Some Fun? What really interested me was the
female character and her determination to find love and
happiness.
Was it difficult to put your own stamp on such a popular
story?
It was certainly difficult. But I was obsessed by the idea of
highly-strung emotional relationships within families. I
discovered that the more intense the love that keeps the
family together, the more complicated and difficult it is to
manage the relationships within the family.
Before her performance in I Love You, popular idol Xu
Jinglei hadn’t had the opportunity to exercise her acting
ability in any substantial way in a film. But in your film, she
shows herself to be a brilliant and courageous actress.
It was a challenge. Xu Jinglei has been a very good friend
of mine for some time. In one of my first films, Beijing Bastards, she had a minor part. I was well aware of the
fact that she had gained a considerable amount of fame
with audiences through appearances in television series,
and I had her in mind for I Love You from the start. We worked
hard at building her character. You need to give an
actress time and space to bring out the best of her talents,
and allow her space to get inside the role.
Did you have problems from the censors because of the
violence in I Love You?
No, there weren’t any censorship issues. Perhaps this is
because this type of violence in families is quite normal
(laughs). Censorship tends to come up over issues like
adultery, and politically sensitive issues.
In I Love You and Green Tea, the theme is the same - the
search for love and the relationship within a couple.
In both films love is central to the story, but there’s also the
suffering which any love story contains. There are many
similarities between these two films, but they set out to talk
about two quite different types of love.
How did the idea for Green Tea come about?
It was a friend who showed me three or four pages from a
story by the writer Jin Renshun, Adilia by the Water
(Shuibian de Adilia). The story’s title is the name of a piano
piece of the kind often played as background music in hotel
lobbies. The interesting feature of this short story was the
mystery which surrounded the female character and her
role as a potential murderer. There was no reason to reveal
the secret. This is all left to the audience’s interpretation.
The original story leaves the solution ambiguous.
Tell us about the way you chose to end Green Tea.
The main point is to make it clear to the audience that the
two women are the same person, and that the male character
is aware of this fact. The fact that I’ve chosen to
leave certain aspects unexplained is an attempt to mirror
everyday life’s ambiguities.
The film Jiang Jie has not yet been released in Chinese cinemas.
What kind of reaction did you get when people heard
that you were filming a “model opera”?
As soon as I started shooting Jiang Jie, negative reactions
started flooding in. The initial comments were about why I
had chosen to deal with a character from the Peking
Opera, and a Communist revolutionary at that. People were
surprised. But it seemed normal to me. I love Peking
Opera, and I particularly admire the Cheng school of performance
style, as exemplified by my main actress Zhang
Huoding. Cheng was a leader of the new generation of
Beijing Opera performance, who describes the style of his
school in single sentence: “Thin clouds conceal the moon
and the fog imprisons the lotus pond”. You must also
remember that I grew up in a period in which everyone was
widely exposed to Peking Opera and that my interest in
making Jiang Jie came from this.
From an analysis of Chinese history, it’s natural to ask oneself:
is the China of today Socialist? Wasn’t the establishment
of an egalitarian society the principle aim of
Socialism? That kind of ideal does not appear to accord
with conditions today. Deep down I still hope that this sort
of society can exist, but China today is not like this. For me,
universal egalitarianism was a concept that was as worthwhile
back then as it is today. The heroism depicted by
Jiang Jie is not too distant from that shown by a Western
hero such as Joan of Arc, when sacrifice and dedication
show themselves to be impossible ideals.
In my opinion, Jiang Jie has always shown the contrast between
black and white, good and the bad, right and the
wrong. It would, however, be difficult to imagine a character
such as Jiang Jie existing today. For me, going back to
that type of revolutionary theatre meant trying to recover
for the present and to relive the profound sensation of a
youth full of values and ideals.
Art from the Cultural Revolution has been dismissed by
many experts in China ever since the Seventies. Is that attitude
changing?
Slowly but surely, people are beginning to re-evaluate
some forms of art from that period. Painting for example.
But cinema will need more time. During the filming of Jiang
Jie, I was completely immersed in the idea of bringing back
a character and a time so rich in ideals. I was aware that
the feelings and reactions to this film were going to be different
from those of the past. The fact that people criticised
the subject matter showed that memories of that time
are very much alive.
How close is your film to the original theatrical work?
Some say that my remake doesn’t bear comparison to the
Seventies original. This is in fact because the feelings and
reactions caused by the film’s content had an effect which
was very much a of a part with that period of history. The
feelings and reactions which the film generates in the
audiences of today can in no way be the same. In any case,
I wanted it to be my film, exactly as I wanted it to be.
Maria Ruggieri e Shelly Kraicer