We Asked Director Wang Xiaoshuai What It Takes to Make a Good Movie in China Now

The rule of this business is simple: the film itself has to be good, so that one generation of viewers after another grows up surrounded by good movies.

At this year's Shanghai International Film Festival, director Wang Xiaoshuai said he felt like an outsider.

Wang made his name early. The Days (《冬春的日子》), which he shot in 1993, won prizes at a string of international festivals, and in 2000 Beijing Bicycle (《十七岁的单车》) took the Silver Bear in Berlin, settling his standing. But in more than two decades of filmmaking he has never made a commercial film, and he has no respect for them. At a Shanghai festival forum in 2009, standing in front of Ning Hao, Wei Te-sheng and Lu Chuan, he said: "All three of them have made films that took more than 100 million yuan at the box office, but as directors, all three have failed."

Had Wang been able to keep hiding behind that stance, it might have become his label. Instead he ended up standing with that group of "failures." During the 2016 festival he held a quiet launch reception to announce a film company, Dongchun Films. It would raise no outside money, he said, so capital could not control it, and it could make the films he wanted to make — commercial films among them.

Nobody knows what lies ahead for the company, Wang himself probably included. His film Red Amnesia (《闯入者》) opened in 2015. There was a fair amount of promotion behind it, and the release date was not a bad one, but it got less than 2% of screenings. Wang went to Weibo to vent: "April 30 is the darkest day since I started making films."

Wang was born in 1966. Calling his attitude toward commercial cinema simple "rejection" seems unfair. In this conversation with QDaily he shows that he understands perfectly well why capital is necessary, and also how wary he is of copycat trends, of entertainment for its own sake, and of a bubble.

We talked with him about the crisis in China's film market, and about what it actually takes to make a "good movie."

QDaily: Will this company still be mainly about art films, or will you start trying commercial things the way director Jia Zhangke has?

Wang Xiaoshuai: I don't think a company needs to be sorted that way — this company does art films, that one does commercial films. I see no need for it. One company can release all kinds of films; that's fine. It doesn't have to be one or the other... I don't know about Jia. Jia has a new company, and presumably there's some capital arrangement behind it.

QDaily: Right.

Wang Xiaoshuai: Our company has no such capital arrangement. It's fairly clean. There's no notion of restructuring in it... We already had one in Beijing, and with this one set up in Shanghai we can make whatever kind of film we like, as long as the film is good.

QDaily: Why Shanghai for the new company? Beijing feels like the thicker film and TV air.

Wang Xiaoshuai: We're still mainly in Beijing. We set one up in Shanghai as well because in recent years Shanghai — a great center of Chinese film, the place where it began — has disappointed even people from Shanghai. Apart from everyone borrowing the city once a year during the festival to throw parties and hold launch events, the original filmmaking energy in Shanghai itself has been weakening. Now the city and the districts have some policies in place, hoping to get more people to do things here.

QDaily: The films you've made all connect to your own upbringing. Will the coming "Homeland trilogy" also start from personal experience?

Wang Xiaoshuai: At any stage of his life, everyone is relative, everyone is narrow. Facing your own life and experience head-on is a good method all the same, an important way in, whether you're making art or making films. But you shouldn't circle the same thing forever; you should think about other things more widely. If you feel you've finished what you personally wanted to do at this stage, then I think you have to look for material on a larger, wider scale.

QDaily: Have you finished what you wanted to do?

Wang Xiaoshuai: No. I think at this stage there are many questions that need attention and action right away. You live in an age of change — society changing, people changing, politics changing — and I think all of that urgently needs attention. Right now there is too much made for entertainment, too much made purely as business, too much copying and following the herd: the moment something foreign succeeds, it's hurried over to China and remade for audiences here. What all of it lacks is anything that belongs to Chinese people. Young people may love Korean dramas and so on, but I think that as Chinese, once these young people grow up and turn back from the Korean and Japanese wave, they'll still feel China ought to have something of its own.

QDaily: Can you give an example of "something of China's own"?

Wang Xiaoshuai: I don't need a specific example. As I just said, Chinese society — the social and political reality, the way people are changed by this kind of development and social momentum — that is the most interesting thing about China. If Chinese cinema were in a more open state, the stories China turns out, the things and the stories that happen on Chinese ground, really would be enough to make it the strongest film country in the world.

QDaily: What is stopping these homegrown Chinese stories from becoming the "strongest," as you put it?

Wang Xiaoshuai: What people used to discuss most was China's system, film censorship — this can't be made, that can't be touched. Now I think people hardly mention censorship, because it has moved over to the market. The capital market is so hot that film has become extremely, extremely entertainment-driven. Down that road, certain parts of Chinese reality don't need censoring, because nobody will pay attention to them anyway. Their attention has already been censored by money, censored by capital.

QDaily: What does capital do to the film market, do you think? You said earlier it's "not entirely a bad thing."

Wang Xiaoshuai: Right, capital also has to mature. If it can help this industry grow in a healthy way, that's obviously good. But when we talk about capital we tend to think money can do anything, that with money anything is possible, and slowly we forget the most basic things in filmmaking. As Ang Lee often says: the heart you put into a film, or the feeling between one person and another, between people and society — these plain things, the things that let one heart reach another. If none of that is there and all that's left is glossy packaging, that's the misunderstanding capital plants in people. Wrap something in money and it has simply been traded for money; it's business, and you no longer see the film. Capital itself isn't bad. If capital matured a little and worked by the rules of filmmaking, then one plus one would make two, and everything would be stronger.

QDaily: There's still a lot of blind speculation.

Wang Xiaoshuai: I don't even need to say it. Everyone is already talking about how fast and how hard things are moving, a Great Leap Forward kind of bubble. And everyone doing it feels swept along, carried forward, and everyone knows the solid, real thing is missing.

QDaily: That forum with Ang Lee was called "Box Office About to Pass America — What Is Chinese Cinema Still Missing?"

Wang Xiaoshuai: An absurd title.

QDaily: Right. Someone summed up the answer in three words: good movies.

Wang Xiaoshuai: The title is absurd, and it's one of our Chinese flaws. We like to boast, we like the Great Leap Forward — back then it was "catch up with Britain, surpass America," and all at once the whole country was making steel; when the iPhone came out, the people queuing hardest were Chinese... Capital coming in is a fine thing, but instead of waiting for a tree to grow, people pull a full-grown tree in from outside and turn it straight into a film. That's what makes a bubble, and it leaves people abroad open-mouthed too. There has to be a crisis hidden in it. If a bridge plainly needs a year to build and we put it up in a month so it can be presented on some anniversary, a crisis is certainly hidden inside.

QDaily: During the Great Leap Forward, some places growing rice would pull the plants from other fields and crowd them into one plot to claim 10,000 jin per mu. Is Chinese film in much the same state now?

Wang Xiaoshuai: When we see good things happening we should encourage them, but under those good things we have to be deeply watchful, watchful of the negative side. As Ang Lee said: "I said it well before this year's Shanghai festival — slow down, it's too fast, slow down." Of course capital won't listen to you. It wants results fast.

QDaily: So what do you think the rules of this industry are?

Wang Xiaoshuai: The rule of this business is simple: the film itself has to be good — the good movies you mentioned. It's about how you make the film good, so that one generation of viewers after another grows up surrounded by good movies, and their taste in film, their views on film, their appreciation, become more varied, more accurate, better in judgment. Good audiences bring good films into being. I think that's the most basic rule.

QDaily: Do "good movies" include good commercial films?

Wang Xiaoshuai: Of course. Art films — so-called art films — plenty of those experiments have failed too, right? And in the commercial field, among market-facing films, there are plenty of failures as well. Whatever our great director Lee says, you all remember it. Why is that?

QDaily: Because Ang Lee is a success.

Wang Xiaoshuai: Exactly. He's the model, everyone is happy to hear his golden lines, and whatever he says we're all discussing. A reporter just asked me, "How much does your company plan to earn each year, what will the books say?" We haven't started, and already we're thinking that far ahead. If there's a need we might build out a business model, but you have to do the work, and films get made one at a time. I can't say I'll make 10 films and promise that 5 will earn, 2 will break even and 1 will lose. There's no such thing, nobody can promise that. A football is round; the match has no result until the whistle blows. There are betting firms, sure, but that's a different thing from actually playing — and film is the same. No amount of calculation beats fate, so however clever you are, what's the point of the arithmetic? You only need to know that this project is aimed at the market and that you're clear about the genre — pick the genre clearly, make it well, then go promote it. That's the market type. If instead you're making auteur films, small films that a mass audience may not follow, then you have to make sure they're genuinely accomplished, genuinely good.

The market we have now is very good. Among market-facing films there are many successful directors, many successful cases, and in a market this big I think directors and cases like that should be flowering in many places rather than swarming into one. Original energy should be scattered more widely — don't put all the eggs in one basket... What else do I care about? The strength of the younger generation. They want to be directors; how do they become directors? That process needs attention. And once they are directors, their work needs attention. We have a lot of good work now that gets buried simply because it made no noise at the box office. That's a waste.

QDaily: How can they be protected?

Wang Xiaoshuai: By caring about them. Every topic we discuss now looks only at results, at ratings. Real or fake doesn't matter as long as they shoot up; nobody asks whether the maker or the film is any good, only whether the box office hit some number, and that counts as success. Success studies are everywhere.

QDaily: Do you think the growth of the internet will help art films over the long run?

Wang Xiaoshuai: I believe it will help in the future, that a direction will be found. China's internet user base piled up extremely fast, but for the sake of that expansion, to win those members, no paying habit was laid down early on. We all got used to watching free and downloading free, because our business model was never built around a single film but around the audience that formed outside the film... Today iQiyi or someone apparently has twenty million paying viewers, which is a very good trend. That base is already large, and if other channels and sites follow, those paying viewers may slowly start feeding back into how films are shown online.

QDaily: Your films are still mainly art films — not "mainly," in fact, they all are. Do you think about the market, or about making money?

Wang Xiaoshuai: From the beginning to now, what I've wanted in making a film is to present it properly, to win more reasonable support — funding or any other kind — and get it made. As for how the film does afterward, that's something we have to guide and open up slowly... Take America: 100 years of relatively stable market behavior, without too much administrative interference... That's how it can know stable patterns, can draw up projections, with swings of no more than 25% either way.

QDaily: Ang Lee may work slowly, but he has always been willing to try new things and new technology. Will you try 3D or something like it?

Wang Xiaoshuai: Up to now, among Chinese people, among Chinese-speaking directors, there is no second Ang Lee. He's Taiwanese, of Eastern blood, he studied in America for years and then lived in America for years after that, so he carries deep in him the qualities we Chinese are proud of. And once he succeeded, everything he touched was Hollywood. Hollywood as a machine rushes to wherever the talent is; it's also the largest engine of creation, and its sharpest instinct is to run at whoever is succeeding, whoever is formidable. It has enormous capital behind it — that's where capital does its work, huge capital as backing, huge spreadsheets as backing. So Ang Lee has been standing closest to the water. In China they went looking for Zhang Yimou, went looking for Chen Kaige, always the same situation, but it still isn't real Hollywood, only Hollywood from the outside. Ang Lee really is one of a kind.

QDaily: Obstacles aside, what advantage does China's present environment give you?

Wang Xiaoshuai: In making films on the mainland, I think the greatest advantage is keeping a mainland identity, the way a Taiwanese director keeps his Taiwanese character and identity, or a Hong Kong director keeps his Hong Kong character and identity. We all love it when people keep their character and identity — Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang kept their Taiwanese identity and exported the flavor, the taste of Taiwan; Johnnie To and Wong Kar-wai stayed put in Hong Kong. Because if you went to Hong Kong you couldn't do it, you don't understand the place. If you went to Taiwan, where people have lived their whole lives, you wouldn't understand it either, and anything you shot would only skim the surface. For me it's a mainland identity. I live on the mainland, and the temperament, the blood, the flavor that mainland society, politics, economics and human relations have laid down in me — that's my character. As long as I have it, I think the rest is up to heaven.

QDaily: Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang and Wong Kar-wai, the directors you mention, all make wonderful films and all have international reputations, but the film industries of both Taiwan and Hong Kong have declined. Their artistic exploration brought the industry nothing. In China, how can art film and commercial film connect?

Wang Xiaoshuai: Taiwanese cinema's decline is of a piece with capital moving into Hong Kong, and Hong Kong's decline also has to do with capital lining up sequels too fast. What we call a decline isn't an industrial decline, it's a decline in creation, a loss of creativity. Taiwan never built an industry because it stayed with art films the whole time; Hong Kong made too many industrial films, junk films, and in the end wrecked itself, wrecked itself with quick money. Each should be wary of the other's mistake; both need to pay attention.

QDaily: What's the key to keeping creativity alive?

Wang Xiaoshuai: That once capital comes in, you also take so-called creativity seriously. For directors and screenwriters, that means making original work instead of blindly copying foreign things.

QDaily: How should those directors and screenwriters keep their creativity alive?

Wang Xiaoshuai: Be answerable to yourself, hold firm confidence, keep a burning heart. As Ang Lee put it: "You have to bear the loneliness and grow slowly." He didn't make his first film until he was 36, after all. So what he says doesn't really blame young people. Of course it's natural for the young to want to make films, natural for them to be passionate. The ones who really ruin them are the grown-ups — the ones who have got old, who hold the capital and want a miracle at once. They're the ones pulling up the seedlings to help them grow.

QDaily: Besides censorship, what else can the state do for film?

Wang Xiaoshuai: In a free market economy the state shouldn't manage it, shouldn't use administrative power to interfere in the market. But before it interferes, or rather instead of interfering, every country has to set the rules of the game and the laws for the market. Once those are set, the state's hand can let go. Because this market is fairly chaotic right now, it's the administrative departments doing the managing: this month American films can open, next month they can't and Chinese films open — hands pushing things back and forth, rather than a contest decided by how many days a year, what kind of theaters, how many theaters.

That's how a real market economy works everywhere else. They have ratings, R and the rest, all sorted out: bare above the waist is one rating, a bare backside is another, blood spraying is one rating, no blood another. Anyone watching a film, even a fool, can tell them apart — match it up and there's your answer. Set the rules and the state no longer has to manage it; the industry can manage itself. Censorship gives us none of that. A few people shut themselves in a dark room, and when they've finished watching they tell you that you pass or you don't, and you don't even know which part passed. That's arbitrary, and it's human.

Cover image: Visual China Group; still from 11 Flowers