Director Xue Xiaolu on What She Thinks *Finding Mr. Right 2* Is Trying to Say

Why is this a story about two people who never meet?

Finding Mr. Right 2: Book of Love is doing well at the box office. It took more than 100 million yuan on opening day alone, and by the afternoon of April 30 it had passed 170 million. Cinema schedules for the coming days all give it around 40 percent of showtimes — the May Day holiday box-office crown already looks like it is in hand.

The 2013 film Finding Mr. Right was a textbook case of a small budget winning big in the Chinese film market. It finished with 520 million yuan, sixth on that year's box-office chart, and left director Xue Xiaolu with the nickname "the 500-million-yuan woman director."

On the strength of the first film, the financier Edko Films and producer Bill Kong scaled the production up. The first film was shot in 37 days. The sequel took more than seven months and went to eight cities in six countries and regions.

Xue Xiaolu has a knack for social issues. In 2001 she co-wrote Don't Talk to Strangers with Jiang Wei, still the most successful Chinese drama ever made about domestic violence. Finding Mr. Right turned on a different keyword: emigration. Unlike the Chinese scraping out a living abroad in the hit 1990s series A Beijinger in New York, Xue set her sights on the fourth wave — the rich ones. In the first film, Tang Wei's character Wen Jiajia goes to a maternity center in Seattle to wait out her pregnancy. In the second, Wu Xiubo plays Daniel, a Los Angeles real-estate agent who shepherds a "house-buying tour group" around homes in good school districts, while Tang Wei plays Jiao Ye, a public-relations hostess at a Macau casino.

The sequel's plot has nothing to do with the first film's, and word of mouth has been middling. On Douban, three- and four-star ratings dominate, for an overall score of 6.9. Most of the lower scores fault the film for an artiness detached from real life, and for tipping into kitsch (the story carries echoes of 84, Charing Cross Road, but among the many works built on that premise, this one is certainly not a standout) — though others argue the sequel is no step down, since the first film was only adequate as a story and stood out mainly because "giving birth abroad" was a fresh topic facing weak competition at the time.

A Douban user going by "Justice B Sheng" wrote in a review: "Finding Mr. Right 2" isn't trying to hand the audience an ironclad conclusion. It is reaching, on top of a reflection of "reality," for a kind of transcendence — and that transcendence is easy enough to sum up, in five words: there is warmth in this world.

What do you think?

We talked with Xue Xiaolu about making the sequel. What follows is her own account.

Q = QDaily

X = Xue Xiaolu

Q: Three years passed between the first film and the second. What happened in between?

X: After we finished the first film, everyone felt it had done well and that we could make another romance.

But I thought the story of Finding Mr. Right was complete in itself. Personally, I couldn't see any way to keep writing on top of it.

I still wanted to write about the lives of Chinese people overseas. My crudest early idea was this: the first film was about going abroad to give birth, so the second could be about going abroad to buy a house. That's where Daniel's storyline came from. Then I'd build the other characters and relationships on top of that line. But it wasn't good. I spent the better part of six months piecing it together and still felt it wasn't right — it had no soul. I could construct the story, but I couldn't find the soul of how the love should be expressed, so I set it aside.

Then in March 2014, I happened to be talking with a friend and the book 84, Charing Cross Road came up. Something clicked, and I ordered a copy right away. The moment I finished reading it, I knew how to write the script. I kept Daniel's line and rethought the woman's line from scratch, which gave me the casino PR hostess.

Q: When the first film came out, Seattle's maternity centers became a very hot topic. Even now the social-news pages still run pieces visiting maternity centers abroad. How did you come up with that subject?

X: I was talking with a friend who had gone to the US to give birth, and she told me about maternity centers. I found it fascinating. It struck me as a strange thing, or at least a fresh one. I figured that if something felt fresh to me, it might feel fresh to the audience too, so it seemed like a direction worth poking at and testing. So I did some interviews.

I stayed at a maternity center in Los Angeles for more than a week, interviewing the woman who ran it, the managers, the drivers, the cooks, and the pregnant women and their families. The owner and I are good friends now.

Q: This time the subject is buying property abroad. Did you interview real-estate agents in Los Angeles too?

X: Of course. I asked agents how they usually work, how they talk to buyers and sellers, how they take people out to see houses and what they say while doing it. What the workflow is, and which are the most important good school districts in the Los Angeles area.

Two of them come up in the film: San Marino and Irvine. They're already hot, and I expect the film will make them hotter — it'll push Irvine's prices up even more, which I think is great, ha.

Q: On films and shows about Chinese people overseas, there was A Beijinger in New York in 1994. Compared with that one, how had the mindset of overseas Chinese changed by the 2013 Finding Mr. Right?

X: This is roughly the fourth wave of Chinese emigration. So many people move back and forth, through so many changes, that I don't think life abroad is as unfamiliar to us as it once was.

A Beijinger in New York was mostly about the struggle to survive abroad — staying alive, working, personal development, a career. By the time of Finding Mr. Right 1 and 2, the reality is that many of the people going out are rich. The Chinese economy has done well, and people go abroad and buy houses. It's like the line in the film says: in 2008, in the subprime crisis, Americans couldn't afford houses — no problem, the Chinese have money. That's a fact. It's pushing Los Angeles real-estate prices up right now; a lot of the buyers are Chinese. A new development comes on the market and, poof, it's gone. Like grabbing cabbage off a shelf. Really.

We were shooting one scene with a banner over a housing development that read "Welcome, Chinese House-Buying Tour Group." We hung it up in the morning, and before noon city hall had a complaint from residents of that development: how can the Chinese do this? They said the house-buying tour groups should not be allowed to come buy in their neighborhood, and that they wanted to protest. Then we had to tell them it was for a film.

That's the reality. So what Chinese people face abroad today isn't a struggle to survive; it's a struggle of the spirit. Where is their spiritual home? How do they find cultural belonging? In the film, whether it's the grandfather and grandmother or Mrs. Wang, their difficulty is not making a living. Their hardship is that they are adrift — no home, no roots, none of that inner sense of belonging and calm.

Q: After Finding Mr. Right became a hit, Chinese romance films of the past few years seem to have picked up the habit of shooting overseas. Tang Wei's film Only You《命中注定》 went to Italy last year, for instance. It's as if romance films are using foreign place names to deliver a sense of romance?

X: As I remember it, Finding Mr. Right really did set the precedent of shooting almost entirely overseas. We shot only four days in China; nearly everything else was shot abroad.

At the time I chose that because it felt fresh and fun, and because that's how the story was written. I told my boss (Bill Kong) that this story had to be shot abroad. We even considered building sets in China, but in the end we decided to shoot everything on location overseas. It really was an experiment. By the second film, everyone seemed to think shooting overseas was no big deal — there were just more demands, and we went to more places. That was it. It came out of what the story needed.

As far as I'm concerned, the overseas setting itself brings no romance. The romance is in the story; scenery can add a few points, but it doesn't help fundamentally. Whether something is romantic depends on the story. Suppose the film were all about Jiao Ye's shabby surroundings, that little room in Macau. Is that romantic? No. Any romance comes from the story.

So I don't think a setting can work miracles. Of course it can add points and raise that feeling of romance, but it isn't the core, and certainly not a principle. You can't just pick a country, make up a love story and expect it to be romantic and good. That's not how it works. What matters is still the story.

Q: Why build the film around 84, Charing Cross Road, around letters between two strangers? The audience's first reaction might be: why not just add each other on WeChat?

X: Letters are fairly old-fashioned today, but I don't think their charm has faded. At the same time, I think WeChat has in a sense taken the place of letters. It travels faster, but much of it still has to be written out by hand. Writing is never the same as speaking. You have to gather your words and rearrange the language, which takes more care and thought than speech does, and that is bound to produce a beauty in the words. In market terms, not many people write letters now, but plenty of people chat on WeChat, so I think it may give a lot of them that same feeling of closeness.

The other side of it is that both characters live pretty wretched lives, each with their own predicament, and there is a great deal of reality they are unwilling to face — so much that they write to each other under false identities. That false identity is also why they are unwilling to talk over WeChat, Skype, the phone and so on. In their letters each of them builds an imagined self, a better self.

Q: The first film was a love story about a pregnant woman; the second is about two people falling in love who never meet. For a romance, that setup looks very demanding.

X: When you write a romance, you always want to set yourself some difficulty. So with Finding Mr. Right, the interesting part, I think, was writing a pregnant woman carrying another man's child who falls in love with someone else. Making the audience believe it, making the courtship work and look good, making them truly fall in love — that's a test for the screenwriter and the director. So when it was done, there was a small sense of accomplishment. Because a romance film without care, without something that shines, is very hard to make interesting.

The next step up, or the challenge, for the second film was to make the love happen under harder conditions. Two people who never meet — how do you carry on a romance?

But while we were making it, I felt that if the two of them stayed on a single unbroken line and never met at all, the audience would go out of their minds, and would feel no closeness to the characters. And letters read entirely in voiceover are monotonous. So I designed two other imagined characters. Much of the time the two leads are talking to these imagined figures, and that's how I built a sense of closeness between the protagonists.

Q: Let's talk about Jiao Ye, the lead played by Tang Wei. She's a PR hostess at a Macau casino. What does that identity mean?

X: An identity has to have something interesting and distinctive about it, something that can generate drama. That's a basic condition of the work. And of course Chinese people love to gamble and love to buy houses, so perhaps that strikes a chord too.

Q: Before she meets Da Niu, Jiao Ye goes through three "bad men." How did you think those three relationships through?

X: Those three relationships had to accomplish two things: her growth as a person, and the emptiness inside her.

All three characters carry a certain mockery of male roles, which I think also came from what the plot needed.

Q: Your first film, Ocean Heaven, from 2010, was about autism — praised but not a box-office success. Finding Mr. Right was a very successful light romantic comedy. Is that a shift from art films to commercial ones?

X: There was no separate calculation of commercial versus artistic. I try to find a balance between personal expression and what an audience will accept.

All three films were financed by Edko, all made with Mr. Kong, and I think he has given me a great deal of creative room and creative trust.

Ocean Heaven was a film I had always wanted to make, about autism, and one I insisted on directing myself. We gave it some commercial packaging, including big stars. That team really was an unrepeatable, top-flight team: an international movie star in the lead, Christopher Doyle on camera, Joe Hisaishi on the music. Everyone on it was a heavyweight, except me. But in market terms the subject was, after all, fairly marginal. The marketing called it a great tearjerker — who goes to a cinema to watch a tearjerker? One thing and another, and the film didn't make money.

As for Finding Mr. Right, honestly, now that people say it made 500 million yuan, everyone calls it a commercial success. But when the project was greenlit, nobody thought of it as a commercial film. They said it was just one more art film. What came out had some light-comedy in it, but when I turned in the script, nobody saw any comedy there.

Apart from Mr. Kong, nobody was willing to invest in the film at the time. Nobody believed in it; they thought it was an art film. If you're working with a realistic subject, you look for something with a bit of heat to it, or the topics people care about right now, and use those to build a connection with the audience. But I wouldn't say I made this film as a commercial film, or that it's an art film. I find it hard to draw that kind of line.

Q: Besides Edko, did you go to other investors?

X: With Ocean Heaven I spent something like three or four years looking for money, and nobody would invest. Only Mr. Kong did. With Finding Mr. Right it was the same: apart from Mr. Kong, nobody invested. By Finding Mr. Right 2, plenty of people wanted in.

Q: You trained as a screenwriter, and a director has to know far more crafts than a screenwriter does — cinematography, music, acting and so on. How did you learn the skills outside your own field? From Ocean Heaven to this, your third film, how has it felt different?

X: I've been learning as I go, that's the honest answer. On Ocean Heaven you can see my anxiety. Really, on set I was just tense. I got the script part done, and all the camera language was the simplest kind — wide shot, medium shot, close-up, nothing more than that.

By Finding Mr. Right, though, I felt I had improved somewhat. At least my mind was working on set: I could rewrite scenes, write new ones, and work out where to put the camera based on the actual space. I had concepts in my head by then.

On the third film I feel I've picked up a bit more: controlling performances, staging a scene more completely, how to ask an actor for what I want, how to build and control a big set piece, including the range of shots and the number of shots. A little progress in all of it this time.

Images: film stills