We Took Viewers' 31 Questions About *Chongqing Hot Pot* to Director Yang Qing

Questions collected from social media.

Yang Qing, director of Chongqing Hot Pot, started out around the same time as Ning Hao, yet he is still a newcomer.

This is not his first film. Ning Hao had shown him that low-budget Chinese films could find a market, and on that hint he spent three years preparing One Night in Supermarket, released on July 24, 2009. It opened against Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Overheard, and finished with barely more than 10 million yuan. That story about robbing a supermarket drew little notice outside the film business.

Seven years later, Yang Qing went bigger: robbing a vault.

This time Chen Kuo-fu came on as producer, and Chen Kun and Bai Baihe took the leads. For a newcomer, nearly 300 million yuan in ten days is a good result — but Chen Kun and Bai Baihe's films took more than 5 billion yuan between them last year, which makes the number merely passable.

Nor is this the kind of film that sells big. Hits come in roughly two varieties, comedies and visual-effects spectacles, and Chongqing Hot Pot is closer to noir crime. The genre has produced plenty of fine work abroad, but in China the conditions put the film in a bind from the start: the hero has to be pulled into a crime and set off a conflict, yet the hero cannot be a criminal. It has to be plausible, it has to make sense, and above all it has to be legal.

That bind has also made the film contentious. The critic Taotao Tao Dianying put it this way: "The good reviews just magnify the strengths until the flaws can be ignored; the bad ones magnify the flaws until no quantity of strengths is acceptable."

The strengths are in the style. The flaws are in the story.

Yang Qing is a cinephile, and not only of Hong Kong movies — you can see Guy Ritchie by way of Ning Hao, Korean crime films, even The Dark Knight. Among the new generation of directors, cinephilia has become a conspicuous trait: borrowing from predecessors, imitating them, folding it all into a style of one's own is one of the main ways a director grows.

Here the style is Chongqing itself. Chongqing Hot Pot takes place in Chongqing from first frame to last, and nearly all of it inside one cave hot-pot joint and the old money house next to it. The city is not just the backdrop; it becomes the lead. Yang Qing is from Chongqing, and he set out deliberately to make it a second city, after Hong Kong, that means something on screen.

The story is careless, though. Plenty of it does not hold up — the hole in the bank wall goes unnoticed for a whole week — and the teenage romance sits even further outside the film's style. The critic Wu Libing was blunt: "A noir comedy that blows it completely. The whole story is out of order; nothing you do assembles even basic plausibility."

Some had guessed the "youth" material was a concession to the market, and perhaps not Yang Qing's idea at all. In our interview he said he put it in himself. In the film he is commemorating not only the place he left but the time that has gone with it.

More of our conversation follows:

QDaily: Did you have trouble with the censors?

Yang Qing: No. They asked for no changes; a few fight shots were cut. (Too bloody?) Yes, and nothing else. The censors were quite supportive, actually. I think it's because of what they call the positive energy in the story. In the end it is poor people against criminals, good defeating evil — the officially approved theme.

QDaily: Did you ever consider letting them actually become bank robbers?

Yang Qing: They wanted to steal at one point, that sort of thing. The idea was there long ago, years ago, but I never wrote it — I didn't need to write it. What is there to write? You turn the idea over, you know it can't be done, you set it aside. By the time I actually wrote the script, in 2012, I had already seen that there was another road into this story.

The way it stands now, they have to patch a hole. Next to walking out with the money, that is a world apart.

QDaily: Could that hole really be patched in such a short time, about an hour? And the bank didn't notice it for a week?

I've wondered about these things myself, and I've had my doubts. But put it in this city, in this environment, and it starts to seem possible.

QDaily: Put it in Chongqing, you mean?

Yang Qing: Spatially, yes, Chongqing. From another angle it is present-day China. You really do read about far more absurd things in the news.

QDaily: This is a problem of plotting.

Yang Qing: The biggest problem is whether a robbery needs to happen at all any more.

How much money fits in one bag? Four men go in — how much can they carry out? Everything is online now. In a lot of financial crimes people move a few digits on a screen and the money is gone. They don't need to charge in with knives and guns, the primitive violence of edged weapons. It looks dated. Measured against where human technology has got to, robbing a place directly will keep getting more obsolete. And moving it online, they can move much more.

QDaily: So this kind of story is full of primitiveness?

Yang Qing: Right. America shot stories like this by the dozen in the 1980s and 90s, and so did Hong Kong. But shooting one in the 2010s, you get a sense of being out of step with the times. I don't call that a logic problem; I call it a small dislocation in time. But I wanted to shoot it, I wanted to do it. Ever since I saw those films in the 90s I had wondered how to move that kind of story to China. Ten, twenty years later I managed the transplant, and a seam like this was bound to show — a seam in time. Really, I don't see it as a simple matter of logic.

QDaily: Would you ever take that dislocation head-on — show the clash between primitive force and modern technology directly?

Yang Qing: I wouldn't go at it deliberately, because I think it is always there in ordinary life. And in my own case: I went from a town to a county seat to a city to a provincial capital and finally to the capital. I passed through every rung of China's more advanced administrative units; that is how I grew up, step by step, and there were countless dislocations along the way. The spread of culture, changes in how people live, advances in technology — they trickle down from those big administrative units, while I was swimming upstream, moving from the small places toward the source. You get used to the dislocation. You come to see it as part of life.

QDaily: When you say the 1990s, do you mean the influence of American films and Hong Kong films?

Yang Qing: Yes, because I was in my teens then. I was born in 1980, and the 90s happened to coincide with an explosion in cinema. When I was 14, 15, 16, the films of 1994 marked me for life — Forrest Gump, The Shawshank Redemption, Pulp Fiction. Then the Hong Kong films, and what the mainland made then, In the Heat of the Sun and To Live, and the Japanese films, the European films. It was like one of those astronomical years when the planets line up; the world's filmmaking talent all went off at once. Live through that, see it as a child, and it stays with you for the rest of your life.

QDaily: Does the film contain a lot of homages to other films?

Yang Qing: No. I wasn't setting out to pay homage. There was only one question in front of me: how do you shoot a Chinese city, and how do you give it more style, more character? Choosing Chongqing, I had of course already picked a city with a certain distinctiveness. But how do you refine it one step further on screen? You can only borrow from pan-Asian cinema. You can't shoot it to look like Paris — impossible — and not like those more distant cities either. But shooting it to look like Hong Kong, like Korea, you can borrow, because the kinship is closer.

QDaily: Why do none of Chongqing's landmarks appear in the film?

Yang Qing: I can't stand the way people travel and insist on being photographed in front of some place name carved in two big characters. Is that the only thing that proves you came? It's lazy, undemanding. People who make films shouldn't take that shortcut.

QDaily: Why did the four robbers have to be so good-looking?

Yang Qing: In a sense they are carrying out my earliest fantasies about this kind of material. They are the ones who simply act. They are the sort of characters who come out of something more storied, more dramatic. In another setting, under other conditions, I might have built the film around them instead.

QDaily: So the four leads grew into those four?

The four of them are another projection of the leads. I never say in the film what the four are to each other — maybe they're classmates. But there is certainly something behind them: classmates, brothers, people who met online? There's a lot of room to imagine, and those four may just as well be a projection of mine onto the other characters. So those four hold a good deal of the imaginative work.

They can even be my view of how the pretty-boy idols dominate everything today. I'm telling people that fresh meat can also be like this, or ought to be like this — fresh meat belongs next to fresh blood.

QDaily: Do the masks they wear match up with the leads?

Yang Qing: The match starts with the number. Both are four, and the number four makes people assume a correspondence. But the deeper match comes from Journey to the West. Journey to the West is such a large theme in our world that the room for reading into it is enormous. So once I found Journey to the West inside that four, the masks went on and the audience did the rest. I didn't have to do a thing; they match each character to its slot on their own. That is the greatness of Journey to the West.

QDaily: Had you planned for that?

Yang Qing: I hadn't thought about it much beforehand. I only knew that using the Journey to the West masks would open up a lot of space by itself, readings well beyond my design.

Use your own traditional culture with real confidence and it pays you back. The charm of it returns to you on its own. When I chose Journey to the West, I was thinking about why Americans use their masks — Point Break, which I'd seen, where they wear the faces of U.S. presidents, or their cartoon characters. That is confidence in their own culture, so why shouldn't we use ours? In the end, Journey to the West gave me a lot I hadn't foreseen.

QDaily: Did you design the masks yourselves?

Yang Qing: We designed them. In the end our art department drew on Japanese Noh theater, taking that uncanny quality from Noh and putting it into the masks. We also had to borrow from the aesthetics of the East as a whole. In the end you have to go into your own culture to find the things you put on screen.

QDaily: Why does Yu Xiaohui pull Liu Bo's mask off?

Yang Qing: Very simple: because the audience wants it off. The audience wants to see the character, to see the actor. We know it's him under the mask, but why wouldn't the audience want to see him? Up to then the plot wouldn't let him remove it; he had to keep it on. By that point his identity was already exposed, and his hands weren't free, so the other character takes it off for him. With Yu Xiaohui's character, I wanted to see Liu Bo too. Talking to Liu Bo face to face, I wouldn't want him in a mask either. It's also the moment of her life-and-death promise: I want to witness it. That is a motivation as well.

QDaily: Is she perhaps confirming that Liu Bo really has become her hero?

Yang Qing: Yes, that's her state of mind — I have to see him.

QDaily: Is Yu Xiaohui a Chongqing native?

Yang Qing: No, she's from elsewhere, a northerner who transferred in. Chongqing has a lot of people like that. They speak two languages all their lives, switching between them with no pattern at all.

But her case is more complicated than that. The simple case is one countryman meeting another. Yu Xiaohui's is harder, because she arrived in a strange place in her teens, which takes time, and then years later, meeting those people again, she goes through another adjustment to the language.

QDaily: Why build in the difference in language?

Yang Qing: Because Chongqing has people like that. Chongqing is a city of migrants. During the Third Front construction era a lot of residents were moved there, and northerners arrived in large numbers. Inside their factory compounds, inside that collective atmosphere, they all spoke Mandarin. But dealing with Chongqing locals they also learned the local speech. I have friends like that. So when I wrote Yu Xiaohui I had a rough feel for such a person.

QDaily: Is her frustration at work also the outsider's state of mind?

Yang Qing: No, that isn't it. The frustration at work comes from the whole picture. I wanted to write a group of failures, people in middle age whose lives have not gone well. People like that may treasure feeling more; they can be moved by it, unlike successful people, who have no feelings.

QDaily: Why do they hold their middle-school years so dear — because they're failures?

Yang Qing: The middle-school part I put in myself, in any case. I think that in middle school, in their teens, they assumed they would own a great deal later on. Then they found that what they own amounts to only this. That is how I see the classmates who stayed behind. Not that one is better or worse — nothing like that. But I feel that staying there bound them to the place for good; they can't get clear of it, because they live there and watch things change every day. This street is closed off, that road rerouted, that building torn down, and on it goes. They see it happen. In all that change they learn what used to be there and isn't now; they understand something. They are nothing like those of us who left home to drift.

QDaily: When Yu Xiaohui first appears she buys a bottle of medicine and puts it in the fridge. What's behind that?

Yang Qing: A scene was cut, a scene of her visiting her father in hospital. She has a sick father, which means she carries a certain pressure, a certain burden — a clerk at an ordinary bank, or rather at what we can't call a bank (Note: in the trailer they rob a bank; in the finished film this was changed with effects to a finance company), an ordinary financial outfit. I just wanted her life to carry some weight.

QDaily: Rather like Liu Bo's grandfather?

Yang Qing: Yes. None of them can live freely because each of them has to be carrying something. So why isn't Yu Xiaohui married? Why does she still give off the air of being single? Is there a reason? These are all stories below the waterline. We never spelled them out, but you feel something is there.

QDaily: Is Liu Bo's grandfather based on anyone real?

Yang Qing: He has a model too. For one thing, I was very close to my mother's father, which is why I wrote a maternal grandfather rather than a paternal one. For another, there are my friends, who told me about their relationships with the generation two steps above them. He also reflects something I've noticed about the real world: in our culture the affection always skips a generation. We aren't very good at handling the direct blood ties. Between children and parents, between parents and their own parents, expression doesn't flow easily. So all of it goes into the skip-generation relationship. He is also there to show the loneliness of a family — I put an old man in, and someone like Liu Bo might strike up an interaction with him, with that generation, where with his parents there is none.

QDaily: So that interaction actually shows the loneliness inside the family?

Yang Qing: It shows the distance in the family, the loneliness. He was born into a household where all three generations stand alone — a grandfather, a mother, him. It all points at one kind of person, a loneliness we half recognize: in this family every generation is missing someone.

QDaily: Can we assume Liu Bo watched football with his grandfather as a boy, since the old man wears an Italy jersey?

Yang Qing: Not necessarily together. What I designed was that the jersey is Liu Bo's — some old people wear their grandsons' clothes. Either Liu Bo gave it to him or he found it himself and liked wearing it. It's a kind of connection. What his grandfather did for a living I don't actually know; nothing says he did any particular thing.

I once thought he might have been an old crewman working the Yangtze out of Chongqing. That's why I kept a ship's whistle in their home, laying the sound of a boat under the scene, offscreen. But I think that sort of thing is creative intent; it doesn't have to be pinned down. Let the audience think about it.

QDaily: Liu Bo graduated from No. 18 Middle School, but No. 18 is in Jiangbei. Was that a slip?

Yang Qing: No. 18 was my own high school, but mine was No. 18 in Chengdu, so that's the number I used. I know what a number like that means — every city probably has one. Say any number at all, No. 32, No. 54, No. 7, No. 9, No. 11, and a local will start remembering. I picked 18 because 18 is where I went. I have no idea where Chongqing's No. 18 is.

QDaily: The gun was fake. Why were the robbers afraid of it?

Yang Qing: Because the robbers don't know whose gun it is. All I know is that my own man has been swapped out, and who would dare do that? Special police, regular police, plainclothes — it could be anyone. So whoever holds this gun becomes my man, because if even my man isn't my man, the gun in his hand may not be my gun. That's why the robber, when he finally comes face to face with Sun Wukong, asks him specifically: is the gun in his hand yours? Sun Wukong says yes. And then he starts the game: one, two, three — he shoots me, you stab him. I wanted that detail exactly.

In that situation the robber has countless calls to make, and he has to gamble on this gun, with no information beforehand at all. He can't gamble on the gun against my head being mine, or belonging to someone whose identity I don't know. And at that moment whoever could get inside the bank ought to be police; he would never imagine it's an ordinary man. Where this person came from is far too complicated.

QDaily: In the final battle, when they escape — why have Qi Ge fight the robbers while the leads stand off to the side watching? They end up spectators rather than participants.

Yang Qing: Because that's what the audience wants. When the story walks the leads into a dead end, someone has to arrive like an angel sent from above — a person or a force or something sent to save them. And once he arrives, letting the climax break out between the two sets of villains is, I think, more realistic than having the leads do it. The leads can't beat either side; fight either one and they die. Villain against villain is like Peter Jackson's King Kong remake: when my hero runs into a T. rex, what is he supposed to do? So a King Kong turns up, an ape, and the fight between the ape and the three T. rexes is magnificent. The leads are in danger too — they take no part inside the hot-pot restaurant, but they are in danger, because whichever side wins, they are still the target. It's a dramatic trick, but there's a metaphor about fate behind it.

QDaily: In terms of construction, isn't their sense of danger too weak?

Yang Qing: Mm, that's fair.

QDaily: You used a lot of post-rock. How did you choose it?

Yang Qing: Because my editor and I both love post-rock; I hear that storytelling feeling in it. Back when I was working the story out, in 2009, I couldn't stop listening to post-rock, so by the time we got to this film it happened by itself. I never discussed it with my editor — I knew he liked post-rock, he knew I liked post-rock — and when we cut the film we simply reached for tracks by post-rock bands and laid them in. Post-rock is intensely visual on its own. It suits film scoring very well.

QDaily: Will you make more films about Chongqing? What are your plans after this?

Yang Qing: I don't know. Probably not. I don't want to repeat myself, don't want to be fixed in a shape or a slot. I think making films should mean taking risks. Don't make what you've already tried and can do with your eyes shut. That isn't what filmmaking is for.

Ang Lee has always worked that way. Every time he astonishes you, and every time the result is remarkable. He takes the risk each time. I think his artistic achievement really does come from risk, not from what other directors do — sequel after sequel, the one genre they're good at. I think that ruins your career as an artist.