Fang Li Is the Producer Who Always Pays for Art-House Films | 100 People With Ideas

He runs a tech company and Laurel Films, holds guest professorships at seven universities, and still finds time to throw parties with his many friends. But in the end, you know his name because of that stack of art-house films.

In 2011, the director Li Ruijun met the producer Fang Li for the first time, at the Deauville film festival in France, where Fang Li had come with Li Yu's Buddha Mountain. Fang Li thought Li Ruijun was "quite something," with "that stubborn streak," and tossed off a line: "Let's work together sometime."

Before that meeting, the director — born in 1983 — had raised his own money to make two films, Summer Solstice and The Old Donkey. He had traded business cards with producers before, but a passing "let's work together" was not something to take seriously. Li Ruijun had learned it was an industry pleasantry.

People like Fang Li are rare. After that first meeting, Li Ruijun got a text from him every holiday. "When I say I'll work with someone, I mean it. I never say it just to be sociable — that's not how I operate," Fang Li said. His collaborations with Li Yu, Cai Shangjun and Han Han had all started the same way. People noticed something else too: Fang Li had a soft spot for art-house films.

When he saw Li Ruijun again in 2012, Fang Li meant to close the deal. He made a point of watching Li Ruijun's new film, Fly with the Crane, adapted from a Su Tong novel about a country old man who refuses cremation. One line from the film: "They want to turn me into a puff of smoke. I want a white crane to carry me up to the sky."

Fang Li gave it a good review — he hadn't fallen asleep watching it:

It's not boring. It's just a few old men in the countryside sitting around talking, and the pace is a little slow.

Old men hogging the screen, nothing pretty, nothing thrilling — that is one of the traditions of art-house film. Fang Li the producer suggested the opposite: cut the shots of the old men talking shorter. More information per minute, "less boring."

Li Ruijun

But on Li Ruijun's next film, River Road, Fang Li admits he gave "two bad ideas."

This was a story from Li Ruijun's hometown. He is from Gansu; growing up, his own family were Han farmers, and their neighbors were the nomadic Yugur, descendants of the Huihu, who made their long migration to the Hexi Corridor in the mid-9th century. As Li Ruijun grew up, the grassland turned to sand, and the neighbors stopped riding and herding. He wrote their story down: two young brothers go home and find that home is gone.

Fang Li had trained in earth sciences, and the subjects — a wrecked environment, a civilization handed down — got to him. He liked it, and said, "Let's make this film together." Laurel Films signed a sponsorship agreement early in the project. Later, when the other production company, Heaven Pictures, left too little money in, Laurel Films added more than 2 million yuan to the budget.

Fang Li still had suggestions: work in flashbacks to history, shots of armies on the march; or add a fugitive who runs into the two boys while on the run. Good drama, good to look at, with an obvious payoff — you could cast stars and stage big scenes.

In the end, not all of it was taken. Li Ruijun thought it over for two months. Most of the film was deliberately raw, and the actors spoke Yugur throughout. A movie star appearing out of nowhere on the Gobi, on the grassland? That would break the spell. But Li Ruijun did decide to add a special-effects sequence at the start, so the audience would know something of Yugur history.

"Li Ruijun always says a film isn't made by one person. I agree completely," Fang Li said.

A producer also has to find the right distributor for a film. Fang Li said he took his "old bones" on a road show through ten cities. It wasn't enough to calm the big companies down; they explained to him that a weak box office would hurt their share price. In the end Gewara, a movie-ticketing site testing the distribution waters, came in, and they went looking for theaters with a tradition of screening art-house films. River Road opened on October 23. People who saw it praised it, and it scored 7.7 on Douban. But it got less than one percent of screenings, and took under a million yuan on its opening day.

Fang Li had expected more. In the trailer he had called it "a road movie unlike any before" (like The Continent). "Childhood memories, setting out bravely, chasing the future, being on the road. It's the classic road-movie template, very mainstream — it just has no stars."

River Road

This was the tenth film Fang Li produced.

In 2000, Fang Li was working in technology in the United States. Around then he met the director Chen Kaige's sister, and because he loved images and stories, he began working out how to make films. The novelist Wang Chao brought him the script for his first feature, Orphan of Anyang. Fang Li liked it and asked Wang Chao straight out how much money he needed. About 400,000 yuan, Wang Chao said.

Fang Li became a producer. The job meant taking part in a film's overall planning — script, early development, post-production, promotion, distribution. He went on to produce Wang Chao's Day and Night, Lou Ye's Summer Palace, Li Yang's Blind Mountain, Li Yu's Dam Street, Lost in Beijing, Buddha Mountain and Double Xposure, and Han Han's The Continent.

At first he played the producer's part like a character in an underworld movie. On Orphan of Anyang, "the first time I made a film I had no idea China even had a body called the Film Bureau, or that you needed a permit before you could shoot" — and so the film went "underground" almost by accident. In 2004, Summer Palace was banned after its director broke the rules. In 2005, his first film with Li Yu, Dam Street, had no stars and did badly.

In 2007, Fang Li and Li Yu made Lost in Beijing, and this time he set out to do it commercially. He brought in Fan Bingbing, Tony Leung Ka-fai and Tong Dawei, hoping for good reviews and a good box office. But the film landed in the same slot as Lust, Caution, and its so-called "nudity" ran into trouble as well. Even so, by then the combination of Fang Li, Li Yu and Fan Bingbing was starting to show commercial potential. Buddha Mountain, also with Fan Bingbing and also directed by Li Yu, took 80 million yuan; the trio's next film, Double Xposure, finally passed 100 million.

After Han Han's The Continent, Fang Li's name came up much more often.

Fang Li liked Han Han. In 2011 he asked him to write lyrics for Buddha Mountain. As he always did when he met someone he liked, he promised on the spot: "If you ever want to make a film, I'll produce it for you for free." But Han Han had too much else going on — books, car racing, time with his daughter Xiaoye. In May 2013, Han Han's publisher Lu Jinbo called Fang Li and said: "Old Fang, get to Shanghai — Han Han has made up his mind." The three of them talked until 5 a.m. that day. They struck a deal: Han Han would take no fee, and they would put up the money.

The Continent got made. Han Han put his own spin on the story and the lines. It took 650 million yuan at the box office and scored 7.2 on Douban.

Fang Li had called the ending right: "With Buddha Mountain, I didn't guess 80 million — I said 30 million. With The Continent, I was the only one who dared say it would pass 600 million." Lu Jinbo had run a 10,000-yuan pool at the time, everyone guessing the box office. Fang Li won.

After the film came out, Han Han wrote a book, Confession and Farewell (《告白与告别》), which describes Fang Li this way: "Old Fang is a very interesting person. He's always turning problems over — plenty of good ideas and plenty of bad ones — and his energy never runs out."

And the man with all the ideas describes his own director this way: "Han Han is very polite with people. He'll never accept your suggestion easily; he always has eighteen reasons to argue back, and I keep trying, over and over, to talk him around."

Fifteen years in film have taught Fang Li that the relationship between producer and director is a subject in itself. He sorts the directors he has worked with into types: Li Ruijun is not a professional director; Han Han is a one-man operation, a guy who likes to play. And Li Yu, his most frequent collaborator? "She's becoming a professional director. In the future you'll see her make more kinds of films."

He sorts producers into types too. One kind executes, following the director. The other creates — deciding from the start what to shoot and what makes a good film, and offering ideas at every stage of the process.

Fang Li likes offering ideas, but he has no plans to direct. "I'm not a one-track person; my interests scatter too far. I could never settle down and work out every detail and every shot of one film. What I like best is finding one good director after another, and telling as many interesting stories as I can in the life I have," Fang Li said.

Born in 1953, he has another reason: "How many years do I have left? Even if I directed, how many films could I make?"

A still from The Continent

Fang Li and Han Han

Fang Li writes scripts himself, and he enjoys talking a screenplay through. Dam Street and Double Xposure were both written by Fang Li and Li Yu. The two of them share a taste for black humor and for the knotted parts of human nature, and their way of writing is knotted too: four or five scripts left lying around, and the moment one falls even slightly short, it's dropped.

At first they planned an urban story. They wanted to write Life and Death in Sanlitun (《生死三里屯》), using the changes on a bar street to tell the changes of an era. Then it kept growing, and became Life and Death in Beijing (《生死北京》). "On New Year's Eve, December 31, 2005, the two of us were sitting in a UBC Coffee, and it kept feeling not classy enough, not clever enough, too commercial — gunfights and killing, a bar owner, even a rape. Not knotted deep enough in the bone. We dropped it. In seven hours we came up with a new story, and that was Lost in Beijing."

Li Yu has a short fuse. Even their way of communicating was arguing. "I argue with you, I give you my suggestions, I raise everything I disagree with — but once I've made my case, once I've done my part, then you make your own decision as the director. I think that's the right measure for a collaboration. You don't step over that line."

Fang Li and Li Yu

Fang Li talks fast; he jokes that he is a chat machine. At 60, this producer has no one his own age left around him. He has too much to worry about, and someone is always waiting for him, pulling him from one crowd to the next. He runs a tech company and Laurel Films, holds guest professorships at seven universities, and still has to go to parties with his various friends.

He says he likes people, which is why he always wants to set up a stage with them and get something made.

There are still plenty of firsts left to do in the film business, and Fang Li wants to do them. He and Laurel Films are planning two lines of films: emerging cinema and theatrical releases. Alongside the art-house films he has long "supported," there will be commercial films with real originality.

Even so, the next one out, A Postcard to No. 78 Tanhualin (《寄往昙华林78号的明信片》), again comes from a new director, Dong Songyan. It is said to be a film that "mixes Cape No. 7 with Kora." As usual, Fang Li liked the script the moment he read it.

Whether the script still needs work, whether it suits a star, whether audiences will take to it — none of that is known. The only sure thing is that the producer Fang Li will have countless "good ideas and bad ideas" left to tell his directors.