The Chinese Mirror

Tang Wei: "I Still Haven't Learned to be a Star"

     [Since Chinese film authorities lifted the two-year ban on Tang Wei (汤唯) from filmmaking, which actually resulted in her disappearing from movie screens for three years, the promising young actress is back.  With one movie released very recently (to good reviews) and a second now in post-production, she has naturally been the subject of numerous interviews in the Chinese entertainment media.  The following is a translation of one of the longer (and I think best) of these, an interview Tang Wei gave to the Shanghai magazine Bund Pictorial in March, and published in Bund's print edition of April, 2010. The article is online at the magazine's site, as well as reprinted in other Chinese online news sources. Comments in brackets, like this one, are the translator's, added where it was thought more detail or clarification was desirable. Tang Wei's character in "Crossing Hennessey" is named Oi-lin, but some Chinese sources say the character has the Western name Eleonora; that is the one used here, and if that turns out not to be true, it will be corrected.  Tang Wei's preliminary remarks upon meeting the interviewer refer to an earlier Bund interview which was also translated in The Chinese Mirror.]

Text:  Li Jun (李俊).  Photography:  Xiao Wu (小武).  Ms. Tang's apparel by  Ling Yun (凌云). Interview venue provided by the Kangxi Star Photographic Studio in Beijing.

    What's the most popular word in the 2010 movie world?  "Comeback."  With their sex tape scandal faded from the news, Edison Chan and Gillian Chung have surfaced again, with non-stop commercials and filming.  But the Chinese movie comeback that will undoubtedly shine the brightest is that of Tang Wei. Her high-profile appearance on the red carpet at the premier of her new film "Crossing Hennessy" was also a declaration of her own comeback, signifying that the star of Ang Lee's "Lust, Caution" was back on the big screen after two years of exile. Her new movie will be released in [mainland] theaters nationwide on April 2, and comments after advance screenings generally said that Tang Wei lights up the box office.  

    In just four short years, 31-year-old Tang Wei has gone through a roller coaster of life's ups and downs.  Since early 2006 she has gone from being just one of more than 10,000 aspiring young Chinese actresses, most of them acting in various small theaters throughout the country.  Her life changed completely when director Ang Lee selected her as Wang Jiazhi [her character in "Lust, Caution"].  Overnight she became famous and her family moved north. But fame is a two-edged sword, and at the same time she was wounded by its sharper edge, resulting in her sudden disappearance from public view.  Now, Tang Wei is back. 

     A dark blue commercial vehicle pulls up in front of the studio, and Tang Wei is the first to jump out. It is early March in Beijing.  Tang Wei is wearing a black jacket, a white shirt and jeans, her hair pulled back in a pony tail.  

    "I just returned to Beijing late yesterday, and I didn't sleep well.  I didn't get jet lag going over [to the US] but I did coming back, that's why my eyes are swollen," she explains, rubbing her eyes.

    Tang Wei had just concluded the filming of her next movie "Late Autumn" in the United States.  The day filming wrapped, she stayed up all night packing, and the next morning was on the first flight back to Beijing from Seattle.  

    "We finally meet, but actually have to continue speaking into space, because I can't open my eyes to see you!"  (Laughs)  Tang Wei, sitting before a mirror, closes her eyes as mascara is applied.
    "The last time I talked with you was by phone, in January 2008," says the reporter.
    "When we were on the phone back in 2008, can you tell me what question you asked me at that time?  What the situation was then?" Tang Wei turns things around and starts the questioning.
    "It was like, what time is it there?  Where are you?  It seemed you were very mysterious, and didn't answer, and you sounded very far away."
    "I remember that.  I was in a foreign country then, sitting at a table in an office, and watching the rain fall outside the window."
    "You said back then that your ideal life was to live in your own house with your family and a big dog."
    "Well, I haven't realized that ideal so far," Tang Wei said.

    Tang Wei is back.  On March 21, the Tang Wei-Jacky Cheung film "Crossing Hennessy" was shown at the Hong Kong International Film Festival, and Tang Wei set foot on the red carpet, dressed in a simple flowered short dress.  Tang Wei was out of movies for fully three years, and disappeared completely from various commercial involvements.  Her last production was also her first, Ang Lee's "Lust, Caution."

The Future of Hong Kong Cinema: a round table discussion (V)

Becoming a niche genre

Lie Fu:  Personally, I think Hong Kong films in the future will become a niche genre.

Mao Jian:  Local movies will be standard.  Many people online have quoted you (Lie Fu) as saying "Hong Kong cinema is dead."  Did you say that?

Lie Fu:  I wrote that in 1995.  But by "death" I didn't mean completely over and done with; rather, I meant the cessation of creativity, that no one would be carrying it onwards.

Mao Jian:  Did you feel this was the case in 1995, or were you making a prediction?

Lie Fu:  It was already the case.  I was still with "Ming Pao Monthly"《明报月刊》then, and I wrote a piece on how Hong Kong cinema was already in a bad way.  The editor decided to make it a cover feature, and we went with this sentence as a gimmick.

Moderator:  "Ip Man" just got the [Hong Kong Film] award for Best Picture; what do Hong Kong people feel about this movie?

Lie Fu:  That "Ip Man" is a Hong Kong film.  From Wong Fei Hong through Fong Sai Yuk to Ip Man, there have been a series of folk heroes who are a special part of Hong Kong movie culture.  There have been heroes who were not from Guangdong Province, such as Huo Yuanjia and Chen Zhen, who were created out of Hong Kong films.  And in the broader view, Hong Kong movies can still preserve and spread the Lingnan culture.  [Lingnan:  literally, "south of the Five Ridges," meaning the area covering Guangdong and Guangxi provinces]  Watching "Ip Man" is very comfortable:  director Wilson Yip didn't get fancy with his characters.  Of course, the Ip family descendants had certain demands, much like those of Mei Lanfang ["Forever Enthralled"], that their ancestor couldn't be turned into this or that.

Luo Gang:  There was also an easy way out there.  "Ip Man" took the national mood as the film's structure.  Of course, Hong Kong filmmakers have been more likely to use nationalistic sentiment, for example the Wong Fei Hong series, right up through the complexity of Dongfang Bubai. 

Lie Fu:  This began with Bruce Lee's "Fist of Fury."

Luo Gang:  This nationalistic sentiment is also more suitable for the mainland market, less likely to go wrong.

Moderator:  [Producer] Raymond Wong has attempted a lot of movies on the mainland in recent years, but it wasn't until "Ip Man" that he won some awards and praise.  But were you as surprised as many people were when "Ip Man" beat out "The Way We Are" for Best Picture at the Hong Kong Film Awards?

Mao Jian:  Not at all.  I felt quite comfortable with that, and welcomed it.  "Ip Man" most embodied the characteristics of Hong Kong cinema, and thought that in Donnie Yen's fight scenes they had really grasped the spirit of Hong Kong films. 

Lie Fu:  Since "City Entertainment" 《电影双周刊》ceased publishing, the Hong Kong Film Awards have been an industry award, and that has definitely encouraged commercial films.  

Mao Jian:  Otherwise, Hong Kong movies would have too small an audience, and we would be advocating the protection of Hong Kong commercial films.

Moderator:  But one can't just make artistic films, that's a dead end.

Luo Gang:  Hong Kong cinema is a rich genre in and of itself.  But the problem now is that commercial films are becoming overly reliant on the mainland market, without the success that came in the golden age.  There will all kinds of possibilities in the next decade, and the next generation of Hong Kong filmmakers will be growing up in this environment.

Moderator:  So are you saying that even without a censorship system, Hong Kong cinema could not be as dynamic as it was in the past?

Luo Gang: Yes. 

Moderator:  Was that due to Hong Kong directors misreading the mainland market?  Otherwise, why have most of the co-productions done so badly?

Mao Jian:  Possibly.  They couldn't find the feeling of mainland audiences.

Sun Ganlu:  There's another problem here.   Those small art films haven't taken the psychology of mainland audiences, their expectations, into account at the outset.  They've just centered on the director himself, so the main determinant of these films' rise or fall has largely been a measure of Hong Kong local creativity.  As for a movie finding a market, its integration into both the mainland and the Hong Kong markets certainly has an impact.  Before the mainland market opened up, Hong Kong movies were more aimed at the Southeast Asian and the Japan-Korea markets, but after so big a market as the mainland opened up, it couldn't help but have an impact of Hong Kong filmmakers' creative work.  But even without censorship Hong Kong filmmakers will still encounter problems. 

Mao Jian:  Much like John Woo making movies in the United States, that's all over with. 

Sun Ganlu:  It's a kind of customization, a customized structure, a customized market, even customizing oneself.  But Hong Kong filmmakers' image and understanding of the mainland market is definitely problematic.

Mao Jian:  So like Ang Lee, it's not easy.

Moderator:  So we've now discovered that John Woo's original understanding of the mainland market was that it was more difficulty to understand than the U.S. market.

Luo Gang:  He completely used "Troy" in filming "Red Cliff."

Sun Ganlu:  As a creative person matures, his reactions to his environment become increasingly complex, and there are more factors influencing him.  But we must not forget that he is still a creator, still growing, and are there problems in this growth?  "Red Cliff" was really bad, but if you say the environment was a factor in that, what does that have to do with him personally? 

A steadily narrowing road 

Sun Ganlu:  I think there's been a subtle change with Hong Kong filmsy.  I once saw a small film called "Love Story,"《恋爱物语》and Hong Kong films like that do not stress Hong Kong's identity, but just relate a story of everyday life, a relaxed state of mind.  But now in movies like "The Sparrow" we are seeing the first signs of a stress on Hong Kong characteristics in a genre that used to rely heavily of the use of force to tell their story.   

Lie Fu:  This is related to Johnnie To's own state of mind, with so many of his peers gone.

Moderator:  And Johnnie To has stayed in Hong Kong.

Sun Ganlu:  It's very difficult now to just look at Hong Kong films in isolation.  There is a latent power behind them. Hong Kong filmmakers are already considered to be "insiders" on the mainland.  Their standpoint and vision have changed.  

Lie Fu:  It's just as Joe Ma (马伟豪) said in an interview, I worry that we will all run to Beijing, and the only Chinese movies left will be northern ones.

Moderator:  China's most popular directors have basically all come from north China.  Since Xie Jin (谢晋) there really haven't been any good directors from Shanghai or south China.  Will Hong Kong directors going north form a distinctly southern counterbalance to that?

Lie Fu:  What worries me is whether Hong Kong will take the same road Shanghai did.

Sun Ganlu:  It could be that a small part of Hong Kong cinema will continue to exist, and  one movie may stand out from time to time, but the overall pattern might not go that way.  In addition, as far as film production is concerned, "going north" may well be the trend.  It's like Hollywood movies, with the investment pressures so great, that may be the only choice.  Otherwise, it will be like movies from Denmark or Norway:  there are some, but by having to fend for themselves they don't have a global impact, and not even much regional impact.

Luo Gang:  The road will get steadily narrower.  Making movies today requires so much financial support, there are so many things to do.  With funding, a director can assemble the very best team.  Directors realize that if they can't assemble that team, it's useless.

Moderator:  Funding now comes primarily from the mainland, since there is very little Hong Kong money for investment in motion pictures.  And since the investors are from the mainland, it naturally follows that the mainland side will control production of the film.

Lie Fu:   There aren't many Hong Kong studios left, and it seems as if Johnnie To is about the only one who can still get funding from abroad.

Sun Ganlu:  If you look at the current situation for actors in the three cross-straits locations, it's clear that if you don't come to the mainland to act, sing or appear on TV, you have no hope.  

[End of Part V and discussion]  Part I  Part II  Part III  Part IV  

The Future of Hong Kong Cinema: a round table discussion (IV)

 Either go north or wait for death

 

Moderator:  There are very few purely Hong Kong films right now, but there are quite a few Hong Kong-directed co-productions with the "north," but they're also not acclimatized. 

 

Luo Gang:  Many Hong Kong directors are making movies of inferior quality in order to accomodate the current mainland market.  Take Wang Jing for example.  He's really a very interesting director, but if he wanted to make money on the mainland he would have to make what they wanted there, and his original style would be lost completely.  His work has a delightful and comic sort of ribaldry, but how do you play this sort of comedy on the mainland?  You can't. 

Lie Fu:  With compromise, there is no creativity.

 

Moderator:  I was at a film forum in Hong Kong not long ago, where everyone was saying "it's either go north or wait for death."  But looking back on these past two years, as far as the work of Hong Kong directors goes, it doesn't look like the two are that far apart.

 

Mao Jian:  Go north, or you're road kill.

 

Moderator:  Peter Chan's two co-productions, "Perhaps Love" and "The Warlords," were fairly successful.

 

Lie Fu:  Chan was very clever:  "Perhaps Love" was unrealistic, and "The Warlords" a costumer.

 

Sun Ganlu:  This is very important.  Some stories must be placed in the context of a specific time, in order to have sufficient dramatic tension. Those earlier films which were adaptations of martial arts classics needed the pretext of a dynasty; if you placed the story in an empty environment, that kind of conflict would certainly not stimulate a strong reaction in the hearts of the audience, it just wouldn't be dramatic enough.

Luo Gang:  When Tsui Hark was first making "A Chinese Ghost Story," that turbulence was the most important factor in the movie, and when it was integrated into that fantasy movie with various other factors it maximized its effect.  There was also "The East is Red," in which a woman played something other than the customary female role, creating a new identity problem.  These films all had great projections behind them, for without these projections stirring ideas in people's heads, how can you make a good movie?  So all we're seeing is a bunch of lousy movies like "All About Women."  Tsui Hark has become a synonym for lousy movies.  

 

Sun Ganlu:  For a film to have impact, there has to be some sort of projection. The creators themselves may not even be aware of it, but in a specific time context, some things will certainly be taken from it.  But if you say these channels have not been established, then no one will have a reaction to it. 

 

Lie Fu:  Speaking of joint productions, there was a film in the 90s called "A Moment of Romance 3," which co-starred Andy Lau and Wu Chien-lien.  I've seen it occasionally on TV,  and it is totally different from "A Moment of Romance I."  That was also a Hong Kong co-production, with the Changchun Film Studio, and it had absolutely no Hong Kong identity, just a China of the imagination.  In those years no one had any criticisms or comments about these "joint productions," nor that they "lacked any Hong Kong flavor."  I feel this should be looked into further.

 

Mao Jian:  The stars had a particularly prominent Hong Kong identity, so the picture didn't have a co-production image. 

 

Moderator:  This issue wasn't very sensitive at that time because there were few co-productions.  And their directors might not have taken mainland tastes into account, just followed their own concerns.  Now, while Hong Kong directors may have their own concerns, they always take mainland tastes into consideration. In fact, when they were filming "Ip Man," mainland audiences' tastes were taken into account.  Outside of 2009 Hong Kong movies made as joint productions, were there any self-invested movies?

Lie Fu:  Yes, Wong Jing made two Category III films.  After the CEPA [Closer Economic Partnership Agreement] was signed in 2003, permitting co-productions to be treated as domestically-produced Chinese films, many Hong Kong directors went north.  but there were also Hong Kong directors who opposed CEPA, such as Herman Yau, Johnnie To and Pang Ho-cheung.  Herman Yau may be the most home-grown Hong Kong director.

 

Moderator:  His work has never been released on the mainland.

 

Sun Ganlu:  The impact of joint production movies was just mentioned, and in that light I think we should review the issues around Peter Chan's co-operation with the mainland,  which can actually be packaged as one identifical issue.  He chose a costume theme last time [The Warlords], but his new drama "Bodyguards and Assassins" is a story about Sun Yat-sen, set in Hong Kong.  Actually, the characters could be completely changed, to Chiang Kai-shek or Zhang Xue-liang, but they're both off limits.  So the choices he made here were not accidental, but were choices fitting to this day and age.  Of course, by making these choices, he contributes to the development of commercial films, technically proficient, a star-studded cast, and ever higher quality films.  But for those native Hong Kong directors who are relatively creative, who aim their films at smaller, artistically-oriented audiences, could this sort of filmmaking environment be destructive, or even deadly?

[In Part 5:  Finances will determine the future]  Part I   Part II   Part III

The Future of Hong Kong Cinema: a round table discussion (III)

The mainland's "acceptance of history"

Moderator:  Left-wing films were the first to enter the mainland, which gradually opened it up for more Hong Kong productions.

Luo Gang:  Li Han-hsiang's "The Burning of Yuan Ming Yuan"《火烧圆明园》and Hsu Hsiao-ming's "Mirage"《海市蜃楼》were the first mainland-Hong Kong co-productions.  Of course, we are talking here about the mainland angle, and while they might have been unimportant in Hong Kong, they had a very great impact on the mainland. 

Sun Ganlu:  Hong Kong movies really spread on the mainland after the ban on them was lifted in the 80s. Li Han-hsiang's co-production was very important for re-establishing mainland-Hong Kong filmmaking co-operation.

Mao Jian:  The Hong Kong industry itself was developing very well at that time:  the 80s were their golden age, the peak era for the Hong Kong movie genre.

Sun Ganlu:  But for mainland audiences, Hong Kong movies in that era were on video, not in theaters.

Luo Gang:  Yes, for instance, we never saw films like those of John Woo and Tsui Hark on the big screen, everyone just saw them on video tape.  Actually, they weren't from official channels, just pirated. Sometimes, exhibiting Hong Kong movies and TV series entering the mainland at that time wasn't that open, and were viewed in videotape halls.  

Mao Jian:  In fact, Hong Kong videos were inverted in time.  Hong Kong films shown here on the mainland back then were reordered, and weren't brought in according to the time the films were made.

Moderator:  We could say that the mainland acceptance of Hong Kong films, and Hong Kong films themselves, were not entirely the same thing.

Luo Gang:  Yes, and movies like Stephen Chow's "A Chinese Odyssey"《大话西游》were phenomenal on the mainland, but not so popular in Hong Kong.

Lie Fu:  When you all saw "A Chinese Odyssey" for the first time was it on videotape or VCD?

Moderator:  It was released in theaters, but did poor box office.  Most mainland viewers can still see it on DVD.

Lie Fu:  I wrote an article in 2007 in which I discussed how there was probably a misreading of Stephen Chow's film culture.  Why is he so popular on the mainland?  Because none of you [mainlanders] have seen Michael Hui's movies.  You had no awareness, no experience of the filmmakers of his generation, so when you suddenly saw Stephen Chow, it was like discovering a new continent, you felt it was very special, very innovative.  His influence in Hong Kong has not been as strong as it has been on the mainland, but he didn't create this effect, it was because the earlier work of Michael Hui was inconceivable to them.  

Moderator:  He has also been popular in Hong Kong, but he's just one of many, while on the mainland, he's been raised to heaven, completely "deified."

Luo Gang:  On the mainland, Stephen Chow is a symbol of youth culture.  If you had people compile a list of who they thought had the greatest influence on young people since the 1980s, Chow would certainly be in the top 10.

Mao Jian:  It wasn't that we hadn't seen Michael Hui, it was just that by that time we had reached the stage where we needed something "inconceivable."  If we had seen Michael Hui before, it wouldn't necessarily have lit a fire, because our time for that hadn't yet arrived.  When Stephen Chow came out with "Flirting Scholar"《唐伯虎点秋香》in 1993, it wasn't popular, we just thought he was silly.

Moderator:  We originally thought movies like his were a mess, and didn't watch them.  But when the right time arrived, we were suddenly able to accept them, that he was ahead of the game.

Mao Jian:  It was the social atmosphere, or the time had arrived.

Luo Gang:  After we entered a commercial society, our young people had certain psychological needs, and they projected their needs onto Stephen Chow.

Moderator:  I remember when Wang Meng (王蒙) [Chinese author] advocated "avoidance of the sublime," (躲避崇高) it touched off quite a controversy.

Sun Ganlu:  Hong Kong movies were a pleasant surprise.

Luo Gang:  Also, Stephen Chow's fans on the mainland have a relatively high level of culture; Stephen Chow is greatly respected by students at many of the country's colleges and universities, .

Sun Ganlu:  This is very closely related to the cultural ecology of the mainland.  Stephen Chow offered a kind of movie rarely seen on the mainland.  But young people on the mainland had a natural demand for these, so there was a strong response to his movies, he became the voice of young people.  In the first Stephen Chow movie I saw, he had a supporting role, playing a naive young man being used by his older brother.

Luo Gang:  When he came out with "All for the Winner" in1990, people evaluated him as a "poor imitation of Chow Yun Fat."  But by the arrival of "A Chinese Odyssey" he was deified.

A sense of identity

Moderator:  Gambling films are a special class of Hong Kong films, and together with  gangster films and action films have special characteristics.

Luo Gang:  The Hong Kong film genre is very well developed, but that particular thread has had relatively little influence on the mainland.  I personally am fond of the "Milky Way Image" films of Johnnie To and Patrick Yau, but these movies have not basically been screened on the mainland.  Like "The Longest Nite" had a fast-clipped style, which affected later films "The Mission" and "PTU."  Through their use of cops and robbers films as a metaphor for the 1997 return [of Hong Kong], they showed a strong political consciousness.  The Hong Kong movies of that time were an upgrade:  in the 80s, John Woo and Tsui Hark had developed this type of film to a mature stage, but by 1997 or so, a great many Hong Kong filmmakers were inspired by a "Hong Kong consciousness."  

Sun Ganlu:  At the beginning of "Infernal Affairs 2," Eric Tsang opened a door, and in the lens there was a shot of the fireworks during the 1997 return.  This sort of shot turned up in a lot of the films of that period.

Moderator:  This expressed a sense of history, but also a sort of desolate and disturbed mentality.

Luo Gang:  The most typical of this mentality was Stanley Kwan's "Rouge."

Lie Fu:  Wong Kar-wai's "Days of Being Wild" was like that too, with the big clock.  Speaking of Hong Kong movies' "golden decade" (early 80s to early 90s), the great development of movies during this era certainly had a political background to it, and to a considerable extent the return of Hong Kong could be said to have triggered the creation of such a golden age.  At the same time, "New Wave" filmmakers were symbolic of a quest for identity, nostalgia and attitudes about the city of Hong Kong.  This is why Shaw was weeded out of competition:  it had no feeling for the city, making very few modern dress movies, they were mostly ancient costume films.  But the "New Wave" emerged with Hong Kong as the theme:  on the one hand, there was a new generation of filmmakers who grew up there, and had a passion for Hong Kong; on the other hand, when Sino-British negotiations [for the return] began in the 80s, Hong Kong people were excluded, filmmakers grasped this feeling and projected that turbulence into such films as "A Better Tomorrow."  In the early 90s there emerged a large number of fiercely ambitious movies like "Lord of the East China Sea," "Lee Rock" and "To be Number One," in which the filmmakers were searching for a kind of dream, and projected their own emotions into their films.

Mao Jian:  The current decline of Hong Kong movies is also related to this, an indistinct sense of identity.

Luo Gang:  After the return of Hong Kong, society entered a normal condition.  How was this normality expressed?  Johnnie To tried to express it afterwards in "Election," but the sympathetic response wasn't as strong as it had been with earlier Hong Kong films.

Sun Ganlu:  It's very interesting that so much of the content of Hong Kong films has been committed to the cops and robbers genre.  The "PTU" series later on had a lot of confrontations among the internal staff of police stations, and this could also be seen a projection.  Earlier, similar films had talked about the external pressures, but with "PTU" the choice was for internal pressures, and not talking about good guys and bad guys, but the choice of a particular incident could slide into some sort of crime.

Luo Gang:  Part 1 of the "PTU" series was shot completely in darkness, with no distinction between police or bandits, between good or bad, but driven by some fortuitous events, all wrapped into the story line. "Infernal Affairs" was also in such a chaotic state.

Mao Jian:  Which can be seen as suggesting some kind of Hong Kong identity.

Luo Gang:  There was also such an arrangement in "Beast Stalker," for which Nick Cheung won an award, when right at the end we discover that everything that happened was because of a traffic accident, and a crook becomes a most pitiable character. 

[In Part 4: "Going north" is the only alternative]  Part I   Part II  

The Future of Hong Kong Cinema: a round table discussion (II)

"Hong Kong films" enter the mainland 

Moderator:  During the mid-60s Hong Kong movies entered the era of Shaw Brothers dominance, from King Hu's "Come Drink With Me" to Chang Cheh's "One-Armed Swordsman."

Luo Gang:  Shaw at that time was walking on two legs, one was the martial arts genre, the other was movie musicals and romances.

Lie Fu:  Chang Cheh's "One-Armed Swordsman" was made earlier than the romances of the 60s and 70s. Li Han-hsiang (李翰祥) left Shaw in the early 60s for Taiwan's developing industry, and Loke Wan Tho was the force behind that. But when Loke was killed in a plane crash, Li lost that support, and his only recourse was to go back to Shaw Brothers. Run Run Shaw's reply to his request was, OK, but this time you'll be making money for me, so you can't go back to just making whatever you want to make. So romances were the only choice for Li.  It was not until his films became profitable that Shaw gave him the money to make movies Li himself liked, "The Empress Dowager"《倾国倾城》and "The Last Tempest"《瀛台泣血》.

Moderator:  But we had no way of seeing these films from that time.  A great many Shaw films from even later were available to mainland audiences only on videotapes and DVDs.  There was a period of time when the mainland had no access to Hong Kong films, and it was not until the 70s and 80s that we could see them again.

Sun Ganlu:  After the "Cultural Revolution" was over on the mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan movies were again available, and for mainland people they brought a sort of exotic air with them.  Another lure was that these films had been inaccessible for so long. 

Lie Fu:  Another very important factor in the attraction of Hong Kong films was their urbanism, their city sensibility.  Mainland movies had urban themes, but no city feeling. That urban sensibility and feeling of the city in Hong Kong films was a very important factor in their popularity.

Mao Jian:  When we watched Hong Kong films on the mainland in the 80s, we felt they were exotic.

Luo Gang:  The most important thing was they way they incorporated the feeling of the city into the form of movies, such as "Chungking Express"《重庆森林》.  Hong Kong movies could draw you a map of the city.

Lie Fu:  They all had very specific locations, like Wan Chai, Central, Tsim Sha Tsui... They filmed each location's special characteristics in such detail.

Luo Gang:  At the end of the 70s, the early 80s, the first Hong Kong movies shown in mainland theaters were "Qu Yuan"《屈原》and "Three Charming Smiles"《三笑》.  Chen Sisi (陈思思), Xia Meng (夏梦) and Zhu Hong (朱虹) became the most popular Hong Kong actresses on the mainland at that time. 

Mao Jian:  Mainland audiences were less familiar with the previous generation of Hong Kong stars, like Josephine Siao (萧芳芳) and Connie Chan (陈宝珠), because they hadn't seen their movies. 

Lie Fu:  The Hong Kong movies and stars that entered the mainland at that time all came from "Great-Phoenix-New" (长凤新).  Hong Kong movies were divided into left and right factions.  On the left were the Great Wall, Phoenix and New Alliance studios, and they had a very close relationship with the mainland.  We called them "Great-Phoenix-New," and they merged in 1981.  The other Hong Kong studios, including Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest, did not have such a close relationship with the mainland.  They needed the Taiwan market, and the Taiwan authorities demanded that they join the "Hong Kong-Kowloon Film and Drama Free Trade Union" before the authorities would give them the credentials to exhibit their films in Taiwan.  In order to market their films there, they had to agree, so objectively they were more pro-Taiwan.   

Moderator:  What was the local Hong Kong situation regarding these two studio factions?

Lie Fu:  Leftist films were still very popular before the "Cultural Revolution."  The Phoenix studio's "Golden Eagle"《金鹰》was the first Hong Kong film to do more than a million at the box office, it was a story about ethnic minorities in Inner Mongolia and was filmed in a mainland location.  Great Wall's "The Jade Bow"《云海玉弓缘》was the first Hong Kong film to use wire technology.  With films like this, the leftist movies made great contributions to Hong Kong films.  But when the "Cultural Revolution" came along, the situation steadily worsened, and the more the leftist studios busied themselves with backing that campaign, the less influence they had with Hong Kong people.

[In Part 3:  Post-Cultural Revolution developments]  Part I

The Future of Hong Kong Cinema: a round table discussion (I)

[2009 was celebrated as the 100th anniversary of Hong Kong movies, although as the following discussion points out, there was some controversy about that. On the occasion of the centennial, the Shanghai magazine "Xinmin Weekly" (新民周刊) convened a panel of experts for a free-ranging roundtable discussion of Hong Kong's film industry, to assess its glorious past and current state of decline, and speculate on its future.  The following is a translation of the transcript of that discussion.  The original was published in the Xinmin Weekly, June 3, 2009, and the original is online.  Any further use of this translation should cite the original as well as The Chinese Mirror.  For readers who want further data on specific films or filmmakers discussed, I have provided links to their Internet Movie Database entries, if contained there.  Parenthetical comments were added to the transcript by the original Chinese editor, while bracketed comments like this paragraph have been added by the translator when he thought further explanation was desirable.  Because of the length of the transcript, it will be posted here in five parts.]

At the centennial of Hong Kong films, is creativity dead? 

Moderator's Introduction:  What is up with Hong Kong cinema?  What led its past glory to its present decline?  Will there still be a purely "Hong Kong cinema" 20 years from now?  On the occasion of the centennial of Hong Kong films, "Xinmin Weekly" brought in experts to take the pulse of Hong Kong cinema in a free-ranging round-table discussion of its pluses and minuses.  

Our Guest Panel:

Lie Fu 列孚 (Hong Kong veteran film critic, film journal editor, author)

Sun Ganlu 孙甘露 (famous author)

Mao Jian 毛尖 (columnist, film scholar, East China Normal University Professor of Chinese as a Foreign Language)

Luo Gang 罗岗 (East China Normal University Professor of Chinese literature)

The Moderator:  Qian Yijiao 钱亦蕉 (journalist); final editing by Wang Qian 王倩 (journalist) 

The Origins of the "Hong Kong Film" 

Moderator:  This year, the movie centennial is being marked everywhere in Hong Kong; does Hong Kong film really have so long a history?

Lie Fu:  Whether Hong Kong films do have a 100 year history is still controversial. "Stealing the Roast Duck"《偷烧鸭》(1909), which was funded by American Jew  Benjamin Brodsky (the owner of the Shanghai "Asia Film Company"), and filmed by Hong Kong people, is generally accepted as the original Hong Kong film; but strictly speaking, it was "Rouge" [aka "Love is Dangerous"]《胭脂》(1925). 

Mao Jian:  To our way of thinking, Hong Kong movies didn't really emerge until after the 1950s.  Hong Kong had been making movies, but until then there had not been an explicity "Hong Kong movie" concept.

Lie Fu:  From the mainland perspective, the idea of "Hong Kong film" was indeed a post-1950s idea. Prior to that there had been no talk of Hong Kong film or non-Hong Kong film. The Nationalist government prohibited dialect movies for a time, but after Hong Kong and Guangdong filmmakers resisted this, they laid that policy to rest, especially in the Guangdong region where Hong Kong movies were being released constantly.  Contacts between those two places were still very frequent at that time, with no talk of Hong Kong-Guangdong entry or exit, and contacts were the same as they were between Shanghai and Nanjing.

Mao Jian:  For me, Hong Kong's earliest [movie] era consisted of Cantonese films and Huangmei.  [黄梅戏:  one of China's five major opera schools; also called "tea-picking opera"] And when Kwan Tak Hing (关德兴) began the "Wong Fei Hung" series in 1949, the "Hong Kong film" concept appeared clearly.

Luo Gang:  Most of those early Hong Kong movies had little influence on the mainland because of the restrictions of the Cantonese dialect.  At the end of the 1940s, many mainland filmmakers went to Hong Kong, and by taking their previous professions with them they established a mainland-Hong Kong relationship. 

Lie Fu:  The filmmakers who went to Hong Kong back then fell into two subsets.  One group went there during the Anti-Japanese War, and most of them went back when the war ended. During the Nationalist-Communist civil war, another group went to Hong Kong, that would have been around 1947-1948.  Later, some filmmakers were deported back to mainland China by the British authorities in Hong Kong due to their being "pro-Communist," for example, Cen Fan (岑范), who was sent back after he filmed his Shaoxing opera version of "Hong Lou Meng"《红楼梦》[Dream of Red Mansions]. 

Moderator:  Why were they expelled from Hong Kong?

Lie Fu:  It was during the Korean War, so the British government took this action.

Luo Gang:  They were all left-wingers.

Twin Cities:  Hong Kong-Shanghai exchanges 

Moderator:  Before liberation, Shanghai was China's movie center, and then in the 1950s a lot of Shanghai filmmakers remained in Hong Kong.  

Luo Gang:  During the time of competition between MP&GI and Shaw [mid-1950s to 1960s], Eileen Chang wrote many scripts dealing with the relationships between Shanghai people and Cantonese people.  In “The Greatest Civil War on Earth"《南北和》(1961) and "The Greatest Wedding on Earth"《南北一家亲》(1962), it was like Hollywood movies in which white families have a black son-in-law, only these had a Guangdong girl finding a Shanghai guy.  Actually, a large number of Shanghai people settled in Hong Kong, and while movies mixed together a lot of Cantonese speakers and Shanghai dialect speakers, they also showed how Shanghai people in Hong Kong looked down on the Cantonese.  Why else would Huang Biyun (黄碧云) [Hong Kong woman writer] express so much disgust with Eileen Chang's [novel] "Little Reunion"?  Shanghai people who went to Hong Kong at that time all boasted they were "high-level Chinese," while Cantonese speakers were at the bottom level of society.  This was a clear psychological advantage, and this kind of advantage led directly up to Huang Biyun.  Later, when Wong Kar-wai had characters speaking Shanghai dialect in "Days of Being Wild," it also expressed a kind of identity.  At that time Shanghai was still the center, and Hong Kong may not yet have emerged as so lively.

Lie Fu:  I don't believe in this comparison of the Shanghai and Cantonese dialects, nor do I think Shanghai people looked down on the Cantonese.  There did exist an upper class of Chinese in Hong Kong, such as Ho Tong (何东) (the richest Chinese person at that time, and the largest shareholder in the Xinmin Company, Ltd., the first Hong Kong corporation totally invested by Hong Kong people), and he was a Cantonese speaker.  At the end of the 1940s many Shanghai people came to Hong Kong, bringing with them capital and technology.  And while the industrial development of Hong Kong was indeed related to the Shanghai people who came south, I don't think there was any "looking down on" situation.  It was much like the scene in "The Greatest Wedding on Earth," where a Shanghai boy and Leung Sing-po's [梁醒波] daughter are talking romance, and Leung just has a very provincial attitude:  how can a Cantonese girl marry an outsider?  And the young man still wants in any way possible to get together with the Cantonese girl.

Sun Ganlu:  This was really part of the social background behind the development of Hong Kong cinema. Did social change and mutual exchanges between the mainland and Hong Kong only affect Hong Kong cinema in capital and technology?

Lie Fu:  Talent was very important.  For instance, the directors at Shaw Brothers and at MP&GI at that time all had filming experience in Shanghai, at least as log keepers or assistant directors. Before their arrival Hong Kong films were still pretty crude, their production unrefined.  They brought with them a strict system, and later formed the Shaw Brothers and MP&GI onto a larger scale, and more streamlined. They brought in the industrial concept, the idea that talent is very important to the film industry. Before that, the older generation of Hong Kong filmmakers were more profit-oriented, so they practiced what was called the "seven-day film" (turning out one movie a week).

Moderator:  The arrival of Shanghai filmmakers was really a stimulus for the maturation of Hong Kong movies.

Lie Fu:  The Shaw Brothers, who had been making movies in Shanghai for some years, [as the Tianyi studio] left the mainland earlier to operate mainly in Southeast Asia as the Nanyang (南洋) Film Company, then changed their name in 1950 to the Shaw Brothers and Sons Film Company for their Hong Kong operations.  Shaw Brothers and Sons became a theater operating and film distribution company, with Shaw Brothers providing production, distribution, and film studio "one stop" services. MP&GI had gone into Hong Kong a bit earlier than the Shaw Brothers, with their operations there headed by the Lu family of Malaysia's eldest son Loke Wan-tho (陆运涛), and had nothing to do with Shanghai as far as investment was concerned.  Recently the Hong Kong Film Archive held an Evan Yang (易文) film retrospective.  Yang was from the start the commanding general at MP&GI, his chief subject matter being middle class urban life.  Evan Yang had been educated in Shanghai, went to Taiwan after 1949, then went to Hong Kong to make movies. Other directors who came from Shanghai, like Zhu Shilin and Fei Mu, also made a lot of movies in Hong Kong.

Moderator:  In other words, Hong Kong production studios at that time were mainly from Southeast Asia, while the filmmakers were from the mainland.

Mao Jian:  Before liberation a lot of Shanghai studios had branch offices in Hong Kong.

Lie Fu:  There were also plenty of companies that were first in Hong Kong, then went into Shanghai.  For example, the Minxin company was established first in Hong Kong, and Li Minwei opened a Shanghai branch soon after that.  Later, his company merged into the Lianhua Film Company in Shanghai, and the Minxin studio in Hong Kong became a Lianhua subsidiary.  So the relationship between Hong Kong movies and Shanghai movies was a very close one, right up until Hong Kong Mandarin films disappeared. 

[In Part 2:  Hong Kong films enter the mainland market]

Interview with Zhao Wei: whirling like a gyroscope

[Vicki Zhao Wei.  Click on image for full size]

[2009 has been a busy year for Vicki Zhao Wei (赵薇):  as the voice-over narrator for the following interview expressed it, she has been "whirling like a gyroscope."   In addition to working on her master's degree in directing from the Beijing Film Academy, Zhao Wei was recently appointed Vice-Chairperson of the China Film and Performing Arts Association, finished work on a 34-part TV miniseries in which she had the female lead, and her latest theatrical movie, the epic "Mulan," in which she plays the title role, will premiere on December 8.   She recently sat down for an interview with Hunan TV, mainland China's most entertainment-oriented television channel.  The following is a translation of that interview; the original Chinese transcript is at the station's website.  The interviewer was unidentified.  Notes in brackets, like this one, are the translator's comments, added as clarification and additional information for the reader.]  

My graduation project is a regular movie

Reporter:  You're now Mulan, as well as the female lead in "14 Blades."  Including your earlier roles as Sun Shangxiang [in Red Cliff] and Xiao Yanzi [in the 1998-99 TV miniseries, "My Fair Princess"], your characters have all been heroines; is this relevant to your own personality?
Zhao:   It's because I'm not good at playing "flower vase" [eye candy] roles!  In my view, the type of roles I have played are the type I jump at, they mean much to me personally, as they motivate me to create. If a role is that of a very docile, fragile woman, the sort who hides behind a man all day, to me that sort of role is not sufficiently worth doing.

Reporter:  Who do you believe has more [directing] heft, Zhang Yimou or Chen Kaige?
Zhao:  Zhang Yimou, because the Olympic Games opening and closing ceremonies -- should someone like me even be answering that?  That must offend someone? 

Reporter:  Why don't you -- like a lot of other stars -- have your family living with you in Beijing?
Zhao:  My parents both have their own characters, more than I have, and they like living where they came from.  They came to Beijing, stayed for a week, and then left, saying "We're going home, we won't come again."  They just feel more comfortable in their own home.

Admission to graduate school shocked the whole family

Reporter:   What is life like not having your family with you?
Zhao:  I was very independent even in childhood.  When I was in first or second grade, Mom and Dad stopped making breakfast for me.  Many parents would feed their children eggs and milk for breakfast, even take them to school.  I never had that unless there was an exam the next day for advancing in grade; on those times my mother would get up and fix breakfast for me.

Reporter:  What was your family's reaction when you first decided to leave Anhui and go to Beijing for the university entrance exams?
Zhao:  When they knew that, they were very surprised, saying "that's great, we didn't know your ambitions were that high."  Their attitude regarding me has always been that I should do what I loved. Later, when I was admitted, they thought it was wonderful, but it came as a total surprise.  In the end, when I was admitted as a graduate student, my whole family was very shocked that I had suddenly turned them into a most scholarly family. 

Reporter:  If you had to choose between fame and fortune, which would it be?
Zhao:  Fortune!  One gets weary of just being "known," but who ever gets tired of making money?

Naiveté almost ruined me

Reporter:  Before you've seen [one of your] movies or TV series, how do you feel about it?
Zhao:  I feel I've acted my role quite well.  And now that I have greater depth of experience, when I look back on my past performances I also have to say I did very well.  When I look now at the original "Xiao Yanzi," I find it was indeed quite valuable, and I still think it was a good performance.

Reporter:  Other than acting, do you now consider things you have said or done in the past that were due to naiveté?
Zhao:  When I was just getting to be famous, I wasn't exactly a model of maturity, what I most liked to eat and drink, that is what I ate and drank.  I filled out my figure so much, that my lord!  I simply was so naive it almost ruined me.  For instance, if you asked me now what my favorite foods are, I might say tofu, green tea and the like, but if you had unexpectedly asked me back then to list five things, they would all be fattening, like dumplings, chocolate, beef...  Heavens, it's a wonder I'm not fat now. 

"Burning of the Red Lotus Temple": an expert's view

[left, Professor Jia Leilei]

[The following is a translation of an interview with Jia Leilei (贾磊磊)，  Associate Director and Research Fellow at the Chinese Academy of Television Arts, as well as professor and doctoral advisor at the Nanjing Normal University’s College of Liberal Arts and Literature.  He is one of China’s leading film historians, with research specialties that include the history of martial arts movies.  Among his more than 200 published books and articles is The History of Chinese Martial Arts Films (Zhongguo Wuxia Dianying Shi 中国武侠电影史 Beijing:  Culture and Arts Press, 2005).  This interview originally appeared in the Beijing newspaper New Capital Times (Xin Jing Bao 新京报), May 9, 2004.  As of August, 2009, the original was still online.  The interview was conducted for the New Capital Times by journalistic intern Zhang Yue (张悦).] 

   After the “ancient costume fervor” of the mid-1920s had cooled, the Mingxing studio moved down a different path, and ignited the first spark in the next conflagration – the martial arts/swordsman/gods-and-spirits fantasies:  “Burning of the Red Lotus Temple.”  This initial spark produced a new fervor that dominated the Chinese movie scene for the next four years.  We discussed the film and its impact with Jia Leilei.

Q:  Before the emergence of martial arts “gods and spirits” films as a genre, there had already been Chinese films which had swordsmen as their simple theme; was “Burning of the Red Lotus Temple” a commercial innovation built on that foundation?

Jia:  Swordsman films were not something that just burst suddenly from someone’s imagination, or from some studio’s.  It was the result of a gradual process.  There were two principal factors in the emergence of swordman films:  the first was the influence of American Western movies and the enjoyment Chinese audiences took in watching them, and that inspired Chinese filmmakers; the second was China’s deep store of chivalrous fiction, a mature source of material appropriate for the camera lens, and fully prepared for the screen.  Before “Burning of the Red Lotus Temple” there were martial arts movies like “Railway Robbers” and “Four Heroes Named Wang,” but these didn’t have much impact.  But “Burning” touched off a surge of enthusiasm for the genre.

Q:  After “Burning,” swordsman films had several waves of popularity in China’s first century of cinema.

Jia:  That’s right, “Burning of the Red Lotus Temple” touched off the first surge of popularity for the swordsman genre, with each major Shanghai company picking up on its commercial possibilities.  The second surge came in the 1960s from Hong Kong and Taiwan, although filmmakers at that time were fully aware that [bringing back the genre] was a high risk venture, a speculative commercial product.  But this era gave us a succession of classic movies, violent ones like Chang Che’s, which emphasized male bonding and then gradually transitioned from “swords” to “kicks.”  The third surge came at the start of the 1980s, in movies from the Chinese mainland, beginning with “Mysterious Buddha” 《神秘的大佛》, then such films as “Wudang” 《武当》，and “The Magic Braid”《神鞭》reaching its peak in 1982 with “Shaolin Temple” 《少林寺》.  The fourth surge came at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, with swordsman films that were cooperative China-Hong Kong-Taiwan ventures, for example “New Dragon Gate Inn” 《新龙门客栈》

But while it was very successful, I don’t think “Hero” 《英雄》 should be included in that last surge:  it’s a unique phenomenon, a category in itself.

Zhang Ziyi Interview: From Actress to Producer

[This is a translation of the cover article of the July 14, 2009 issue of the Shanghai magazine "The Bund."  It has been posted at the websites of several Chinese entertainment news services, for example, New China Net.  Throughout the translation, the international English release title "Sophie's Revenge" is used, rather than the Chinese title, "Feichang Wanmei" 非常完美.  A literal English translation of the Chinese title would be "Really Perfect," but an acceptable (and I think better) free translation could be "Absolutely Fabulous,"  although it is easy to understand why this was not used.   Comments in brackets [like this] are those of the Chinese Mirror editor, where further clarification was thought desirable.  The interview was conducted for The Bund by staff writer Liu Lifang 刘莉芳]

    In order to accelerate the completion of filming, Zhang Ziyi put in 50-plus workdays of 12-hours or more, but on the set she was always cheerful, singing happy songs like a child.  As Du Yang expressed it, "her cheerful attitude on the set kept everyone else at ease, and that was especially important."
    Du Yang (杜扬) is "Sophie's" general producer.  Before this collaboration, she thought Zhang Ziyi was too great an international megastar to get close to; but now that she knows Zhang, Du speaks of the actress's "little girl" nature, saying "she is especially straightforward, lovable, and very considerate of others."
    Zhang Ziyi is the nucleus of this film, made with an investment of more than 50 million yuan [US$7.5 million/UK£4.5 million/€5.52 million] and a cast of more than 100.  [Update:  in later interviews, Zhang has denied the budget was this high.]  Her acting role is as the main female character Sophie (苏菲) [Sufei].  Sophie is a cartoonist on a mission, namely to win back her boyfriend, a campaign which triggers a series of comical scenes.  This is the first time Zhang has done comedy, and she bears a heavy share of that comedy.   Art director Chen Siqin (陈思勤) revealed that Zhang's character assumes over 20 different images in the film.  One could say that Zhang Ziyi's success or failure in acting out these various images is a factor in the movie's success or failure.  Another aspect is that this is Zhang Ziyi's first assumption of production responsibility.
    Last year, as one of the several producers of "Sophie's Revenge," Zhang Ziyi approached the cultural communications division of Du Yang's Beijing Perfect World Company with young director Yimeng's script, to discuss the company's possible investment in it.  Du Yang needed only two days to decide to invest, saying that everyone at the company agreed she and Zhang should make this Chinese-style "Amelie of Montmarte."

[right, international English release poster for "Sophie's Revenge."  International release date unscheduled as of this posting.]

Michelle Yeoh Interview: "This is the best phase of my career"

[This is a slightly abridged translation of an interview originally published in the June 11, 2008 issue of the Shanghai magazine Bund Pictorial, with byline by Li Jun 李俊.  A few paragraphs have been omitted because they just reviewed parts of Michelle Yeoh’s career that are generally common knowledge or recorded in her IMDB entry.  The full original interview is online.  Notes in brackets, like this one, are translator’s notes, added for clarification.]

    It was not until she had made "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" at age 38 that Michelle Yeoh, the first truly Chinese Bond girl, began gaining recognition as having completed the transition to being an actress.  When she accepted this publication's request for an interview, Yeoh expressed her deep gratitude to an [unnamed] American director and to Ang Lee.  In discussing her, Lee himself has said, "Michelle Yeoh is not an acrobatic fighting star, she is an actress, a very talented one, and that is more important."  In the past year, she has received the Chevalier award of the French Legion d'Honneur, and with friends has established a film company.  At the same time, four of her movies are currently being shown on Chinese screens, including 'Mummy 3," which opened in July, and also starring Jet Li.  Michelle Yeoh, who turns 46 this year, says "This is the best phase of my performing arts career."