A New Director Wants to Capture "the Dark Parts of Youth, the Lost Parts, Something Destructive"

He says "an extremely boring aesthetic system" has blotted out much of what youth films could show.

On October 5, director Han Tian's first film, That Roaring Youth (《那一场呼啸而过的青春》), opens.

The film already has a twin. A web series with the same title but a different director and cast aired in June, to lukewarm viewership and lukewarm reviews. Both were adapted from a not-especially-famous novel of the same name by Wu Xiaowu, first serialized online and published in book form by Jiangsu Literature and Art Publishing House in 2009.

That is because the company behind both the series and the film is LeVision Pictures, which bought the rights to the novel. In recent years LeVision has handled the adaptation rights it owns this way again and again. When CEO Zhang Zhao unveils the company's slate, he speaks as a marketer and calls every rights project an "IP".

In 2016, QDaily reported on another LeVision project split into a web series and a film, The Brother Who Slept in the Bunk Above Me (《睡在我上铺的兄弟》), which began not with a novel but with a nostalgic song. In that case, though, one director made both versions.

The film That Roaring Youth ended up a standalone work, quite different from both the novel and the web series.

The story tells a familiar coming-of-age tale: in the shifting late 1990s, in a small town that is a world unto itself, the adults each scrape by their own way, and a few teenagers believe their adolescence will last forever — but it always comes to an end.

The film has three leads: Yang Beibing, a girl who loves to fight; Yu Yi, a quiet boy; and Ziwei, a transfer student from the south. The three actors are Bu Guanjin, who played the principal's daughter in Mr. Donkey; Liu Chang, the male lead of Together With Anthony Through the Long Years (《陪安东尼度过漫长岁月》); and Li Meng, who has drawn attention in recent years for films like Young Babylon and A Touch of Sin.

Among domestic theatrical releases in 2017, this is a youth film worth watching. The plot has flaws — the second half in particular moves too fast and falls into cliché — but the vivid characters set against the atmosphere of their era are the film's biggest strength.

Han Tian signed on in 2016 as a new director under LeVision Pictures' "New Director Program."

Since the 2010s, almost every well-capitalized film and TV company has been striking deals with established directors on one hand (LeVision's list includes Zhang Yimou, Lee Chi-ngai and Tsui Hark, among others) and digging up fresh talent it can put to use on the other. Han Tian knew Liu Jun, LeVision Pictures' production director, and through Liu's introduction he sat down once with CEO Zhang Zhao. The result was that Zhang set up "Han Tian Studio" for him — a willingness to hand him projects already in the pipeline and "give it a try."

Han Tian's first "assignment" last year was to write and direct the web series version of Suddenly Seventeen (《28 岁未成年》), the series counterpart to the film of the same name directed by Zhang Yimou's daughter, Zhang Mo. Under LeVision's plan, the series and the film were made separately but released together at the end of 2016, to draw the most attention. Relatively speaking, the series won some approval from viewers. One Douban review said: "It's a lot better than the film version. At the very least, Jiang Mengjie is lively and buoyant playing a 17-year-old — she's got that quality."

Next, Han Tian was handed the novel That Roaring Youth. Preparation began in the second half of last year, shooting wrapped in the middle of this year, and the film was originally set to open in the August summer season before being pushed to the National Day holiday. LeVision gave it a mid-sized budget: production costs alone came to more than 50 million yuan.

Han Tian had no say over which rights got adapted. But once he started making "his own" film, he made the calls on questions that mattered just as much, and in some ways more: how to adapt it, how to shoot it, who would act in it.

In October 2016, Han Tian traveled around the northeast with his screenwriting partner. "I wanted to see if that place could give us some new feeling before we decided whether to start this film," he said. He'd read the novel and found the story of junior-high kids scrapping too small in scope, "not that interesting." But he thought: the book is set in a northeastern school, and he was a Beijinger, so maybe it was worth going to look.

He went through Harbin in Heilongjiang, then Shenyang, Benxi and Fushun in Liaoning. Through friends he found some "streetwise" men, most of them born in the 1970s, and drank and talked with them, listening to what had really happened to them. That was how he felt he'd found a direction for the film.

Back home, they spent two months on the script. They set it in the northeast in 1996, the moment the old system came apart. Many people had told him about the industrial era and the wave of layoffs that came when the old state-owned factories collapsed, and he felt that was exactly the conflicted undertone a youth film needed.

"A cold backdrop — the ice and snow of the northeast, the decaying backdrop of the heavy-industry era — really sets off the heat and blood inside youth."

Of the film's 50-million-plus-yuan production cost, the most expensive part was rebuilding the settings of that bygone era: vocational schools, factories, nightclubs, gambling dens. As for the "aesthetic system" That Roaring Youth was meant to carry, he didn't want anything "pretty, sweet or glossy." He wanted "something that grew up out of the soil, that makes every person feel vividly alive."

"Everyone says youth films have been done to death. In my mind, one particular kind of youth film really has been done to death. There's an extremely boring aesthetic system that has blotted out part of it — blotted out the dark parts of youth, the lost parts, something destructive."

Han Tian gave the film's characters — Yang Beibing, Yu Yi, Ziwei — a quality of sincerity and fierce courage. He said he admires that spirit of resisting established rules without looking back.

Inventing these characters, he drew on his own sense of things: "In someone else's story, I found its connection to me. I think a film, whatever kind it is — a realist film or a science-fiction film — is really a dream, a process of conjuring something out of nothing. It's really about digging into what's in your subconscious."

For a long stretch, Han Tian was anxious. "There are some shows that, looking back on them today, I still think were failures," he said.

He trained formally, taking his undergraduate and graduate degrees in directing, first at Communication University of China, then at the Beijing Film Academy, graduating in 2010. He wasn't a confident student, and his instinct for image and sound came slowly, until the year he graduated, when he made a short film about two generations that was selected for international film festivals including one in Yokohama, Japan.

In 2010 the film market was just taking off, but opportunities for "the person in charge" were never plentiful. Han Tian made a single digital film for a movie channel and then had no more work, so he moved into television, where the bar was lower, and wrote some urban dramas. The best of them was the 2013 series It's Hard to Raise Children (《小儿难养》), starring Chen Sicheng and Song Jia, which aired on Hunan TV and topped the ratings in its timeslot.

The one Han Tian names outright as a "failure" is the 2015 Sohu web series Fleet of Time 2: Long Time No See, on which he was credited as co-director. At the end of 2014, Zhang Yibai's film Fleet of Time had taken 580 million yuan at the box office, making it one of the most profitable entries in that wave of youth films. The first season of the Fleet of Time web series was a hit in both traffic and reviews.

Fleet of Time 2: Long Time No See was the spin-off second season. It was one of Han Tian's most painful shoots. The reason was plain: he and the production company were unhappy with each other, "our aesthetic systems and requirements were in complete conflict." Sohu wanted an idol drama; what interested Han Tian was authenticity. After ten days of shooting, he walked away.

"The tide of capital is so fierce that it can sometimes make you waver. Back then I found myself with a huge doubt: what kind of person am I, really? Am I just not suited to this industry? For a while I was restless inside, completely at a loss. When the life you live every day, including the circle around you, isn't one you like, when you're working with people who don't share your aesthetic standards, you start wanting to take a step back and out."

Han Tian told QDaily that his biggest gain over these past few years has been "not wasting time" — he has stayed at work throughout. He has gradually found crew members he works well with.

In practice, up against the star-studded blockbusters lined up for the National Day box office, That Roaring Youth looks weak. On the ticketing platform Maoyan it has drawn only a little over 20,000 "want to see" votes. Both City of Rock and Sky Hunter have topped 30,000, and Mahua FunAge's new film Never Say Die has more than 240,000.

Han Tian talked at greater length about That Roaring Youth and his own career.

Q = QDaily

H = Han Tian

Q: One good thing about the film is its strong sense of period and place. How did you settle on the northeast in 1996?

H: The sudden end of the heavy-industry era in the late 1990s was an especially violent kind of ending. Huge numbers of workers were laid off — yesterday they were still at the factory, tomorrow they had no job. I think that sudden collapse of the factories matches perfectly with the way youth cuts off all at once.

Q: Besides the northeast, the other place you emphasize is Hong Kong. What does Hong Kong stand for? And why put so much weight on place?

H: Before the 1997 handover, Hong Kong was really another, faraway world, almost a dream inside those young people's heads. They might have heard Hong Kong pop music, seen Hong Kong films; in 1996 they were full of longing for it. You see, even our disco in the film is called "Little Hong Kong."

The story ends ten years later, in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region — by then that was what it was called. Look at Hong Kong now, at where it has been heading in all these years since the handover, at the social tearing that came later. It went from being such a proud place to having problems of its own. I think that flow of a bygone era, that flow across places, the fate of an era and the fate of a place, gets tangled up with the fates of these teenagers.

But all of that is only the backdrop, only the backdrop. We're still telling a story about youth.

Q: Isn't the ending a bit too formalistic — the young people all leave their hometown, and it lands on a somewhat pessimistic note?

H: Zooming out, the northeast today is a region losing a great many people. When we went out scouting locations, one sign was especially plain: some schools had been abandoned. Middle schools that used to be quite good, right there in the factory district, are shut now. There's no one left; the children aren't there, the young people aren't there. Within that historical setting, I think these characters leaving is a very fitting echo.

It's definitely not a pessimistic ending. Each of them seems to have become the person they once wanted to be, and yet inside that life they end up a little lost. That's a very obvious state in the adult world.

Q: Domestic youth films had a hot streak a few years back — films like Fleet of Time — and people felt they were fake, always stuffed with "melodramatic" devices. The last couple of years it has flipped: youth films now insist in their marketing that they're sunny and upbeat.

H: It's a kind of vicious circle. You use one fake thing to reject another fake thing.

The logic itself is false, so of course it looks fake. As for me, I don't take a side. I'm not saying I'm especially brutal, and I'm not saying I'm especially pure. I'm just following the logic of life, the logic of youth. I have a very pure side, and I also have a very brutal, violent side. I think all of that lives inside the logic of life, and it's the kind of thing that does happen.

Q: There are a lot of solid, very real scenes of violence in the film, including the portrayal of the "underworld" figures at the gambling dens. How did you think this part through?

H: We interviewed so many people, and hardly any of them had come through their youth without a fight — one way or another, you'd been in a scrap. I think worship of violence is baked into northeastern culture and society. The first people who struck out for the northeast in that historic wave of migration were, by nature, people with nerve.

Take the thread with the character Leiguan, what the "big brothers" were like back then. What business were the big brothers actually in? The "blue road" was underground casinos and loan-sharking; the "yellow road" was nightclubs and dance halls, and probably drugs and the like.

Later the big brothers moved into demolition, into real estate — forced demolitions and that sort of thing. Then they went into business. That is really how the big brothers piled up their money.

In Benxi we interviewed a boss who wasn't even a big deal. What had he done before? Benxi has Benxi Steel, and the mills ship steel out — because they were fighting over the transport business tied to land requisitions, the two sides would literally fire homemade guns and cannons at each other. He said it was just fighting, nothing else, because back then the ways of making money were so primitive, with no technical skill to them. Take mining, same thing: whoever owned the mine made the money, whoever dug the coal out made the money. Whoever ran the trucks on that road made the money.

It's not like today, when the internet isn't something just anyone can do. Back then there was no technical skill involved, so what could you do? You could only fight and be the toughest — hence that so-called worship of violence among streetwise men, where whoever had the hardest fists came out on top.

But that same boss, sitting with us at the dinner table today, is so gentle, so thoughtful of other people — putting food on your plate, afraid you weren't being looked after, then saying, "ah, I really can't stay and drink with you tonight, my kid's had a fever these past couple of days, I have to get home." He had suddenly gone back to a completely orderly life. You hear how tumultuous his past was, and today he's this gentle person anyone could seem to push around. Really interesting, what this kind of span of time does to a person.

Q: Huang Jue plays a big brother, Leiguan, who comes out of the factory system and turns into a "bad guy" out in society.

H: Leiguan is a pretty typical figure for that era. The old rules had collapsed, the factories had all collapsed. All at once the whole way of life under the planned economy had collapsed, and the new rules hadn't been built yet — so what do you do?

Someone like Leiguan wasn't the so-called "upstanding" kind of worker to begin with, so he'd go looking for his own rules of survival. He left the mainstream system to find his own way of living and getting by. And Leiguan lived like there was no tomorrow — he'd tell people, my life's worth nothing anyway, what's there to be afraid of, right?

Q: Which directors and films do you admire?

H: I really love the American director Sam Mendes's Revolutionary Road. I think great works, brilliant works, don't have to find their greatness inside some sensational story — they can find the great part of something inside a very ordinary piece of life.

The novel behind it was written by the American writer Richard Yates — he wrote Revolutionary Road, The Easter Parade, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness — and what he does is dig into a person's inner strength inside an utterly everyday situation.

At first we only see a couple already in a midlife crisis, feeling their life holds no hope, spending each day in a small town in extreme boredom. Then one day it occurs to them: why are we living like this, let's go to Paris — and they set off.

It's set in America in the 1950s, when the hippie movement and all those other movements of the 1960s hadn't begun yet, when the future was only about to enter a very revolutionary era. But in the 1950s life looked calm, everyone lived an especially comfortable life, and then you realize that real revolution doesn't come from outside, doesn't come from confronting society, confronting the world, going out to protest in the streets.

Real revolution comes from within, and it is the most brutal kind. The hardest thing to keep going is the revolution against your own life. When you find something's wrong with your life, can you really go through with it?

Q: How do you see the film market, and the opportunities it can bring you?

H: The biggest benefit of capital coming in is that it has enlarged this market and made more opportunities. But there's an equal problem, of course: capital is a very blind driver, because it isn't professionals leading this money, so you find a lot of sameness.

Everyone rushes into period fantasy at once, then everyone rushes into science fiction — I hear a crowd of people are making sci-fi films next year. That aimless, herd-driven push is the problem capital brings; it drives the market's aesthetic standards toward convergence, toward uniformity. I find that frightening.

Q: Now that you've made your first film, what do you think matters most for continuing in this industry?

H: I think it's a fairly practical matter: knowing what matters and what doesn't matter as much. Making a film is like that, and so is the shoot itself — don't get hung up on things, just hold on to the film and that's enough. As for the rest, you'll always run into problems; don't let them get to you. I think it's the same in life.

Q: What matters most to you personally?

H: Freedom matters most. Yes, you need to make money, but that isn't the final goal — it's still in service of greater freedom, of being able to meet the demands of your life. The freedom to create, the freedom of time, the freedom to choose.

You'll have to give something up for freedom, you're bound to give something up, but you need to be able to tell the difference.

Images from film stills.