Director Li Xiaofeng: Very Often, It's the Eggs That Make Up the High Wall | Interviews ⑩

That line has a first half too: "The high wall deserves sympathy as well." Li Xiaofeng cares about equality, and about people. He is intense and sharp.

In 2001, the film critic Li Xiaofeng went down to a basement in Xiaoxitian to talk with the "underground director" Jia Zhangke. The first thing he said to Jia was: can you tell the truth in today's interview?

The talk turned combative. Their exchange about independent film was written up as "meeting minutes" and posted on the Huangtingzi Film board on Xici Hutong, setting off a running fight between "academic film critics" and "grassroots film critics." Ten years later, Jia Zhangke wrote the preface to Li Xiaofeng's new book Song of the Loser (《失败者之歌》), describing his first impression of him: "I always felt he was like a revolutionary just back from the Soviet Union in the 1920s: young, idealistic, guileless, wanting to smash the old world without knowing how deep the waters of the domestic film industry ran — and therefore easily disappointed."

By 2017, Li Xiaofeng was a director. And it was again at the Pingyao International Film Festival, founded by Jia Zhangke, that his second feature as a director, Ash (《追·踪》), had its premiere. Late on an early-winter night, the post-screening Q&A ran an hour and a half. A fifth of the audience raised their hands. The moderator simply invited them all up on stage, and Li Xiaofeng, in a brown leather jacket, went through the film's details one by one.

Ash is about a murder committed ten years earlier. As in his previous film, Nezha (《少女哪吒》), the story starts in 1997. Li Xiaofeng worked in period detail: ballroom dancing, public theaters. The two leads meet over Tolstoy's Resurrection, and a character played in a cameo by the producer Fang Li says, in dialect, on the big screen: a person is the sum of all social relations.

Li Xiaofeng still resembles a revolutionary. He has read The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital. At 35 he finished Resurrection and was stunned by it; he felt he had grasped how many layers a life has. He wrote the question of "why Maslova fell in love with Nekhlyudov" into his film, and he keeps pressing Russian literature on the people around him. On the flight to Pingyao he read Somerset Maugham on Tolstoy — how, late in life, the aristocrat-born writer's view of the world changed violently, and he took up manual labor, plowing and mending shoes himself, building houses for peasants, and died in the end on a bench at a train station. "I think that's a magnificent ending," he said.

Li Xiaofeng's mother was a university teacher, and he was a rebellious child. After failing the college entrance exam, he spent a year repeating his final year of high school on an island in the middle of a reservoir. When the rebellious phase ended, he felt he had "learned how to deal with the world" — all of which he wrote into Song of the Loser. He later went to study in Belgium, and after returning to China worked in turn as a film critic, a columnist and a screenwriter. He was a literary consultant at Lu Chuan's studio, and then worked with Zhang Yuan, appearing in his film Dada (《达达》).

In 2013, Li Xiaofeng adapted the writer Lü Yao's novel Girl Nezha into a film and entered it in the Shanghai International Film Festival's project market, where it won the Most Creative Project award and picked up investment. He had finally become a director. The finished film, Nezha, was selected for the New Currents section of the 19th Busan International Film Festival in South Korea, and took two nominations at the 51st Golden Horse Awards in Taiwan, for Best Screenplay and Best New Director.

In one conversation, Wu Qi, editor-in-chief of Dandu (《单读》), described "losers" and Li Xiaofeng's films this way: "Very few Chinese directors film the history of the reform-and-opening era directly — and when they do, it is a glorious history marching toward a better future. Very few face the enormous price Chinese society has paid since reform and opening began, or the failure of those of us with spiritual pursuits... Facing failure, and becoming a loser yourself, is an extremely precious experience. It is a kind of nourishment."

Song of the Loser holds 24 short essays, setting down junior-high classmates remembered from years ago and a stranger crying in a crowd. In one letter to a friend he wrote: I remember the first film crew I ever joined, and learning for the first time that a whole crew is made of people like this — divers, police officers, army veterans, farmers, construction workers... like a guerrilla band of drifters. And yet the director is the one film worker this society always notices first and last. I used to feel that was unfair. Why?

While shooting Ash, a local businessman came to visit the set and asked, "Hey, do you really need this many people?" It made him uncomfortable on the spot. "To me, every one of them is a film worker... So set everything else aside: at the very least you need to hold on to the idea that people should be equal to one another. I think that's the essence of it."

Every actor in Ash got the part through an audition, including Nie Yuan, Huang Jue and Luo Jin, all of them already well known. On March 25, 2016, the crew posted a casting notice, and the assistant director's phone rang all day. Actors came in, read for roles, swapped parts, waited to hear back. After the screening, audience members said that Luo Jin — known for the TV series Schemes of a Beauty — had given the best performance of his career in this film.

"In this business it's usually either the shop bullying the customer or the customer bullying the shop. Why can't customer and shop be equal? Why aren't director and actor equal jobs? Why does the director have to be the big shot, or the actor the big shot? Why does it have to be that way?" The question nags at Li Xiaofeng.

During the interview, Li Xiaofeng drank tea steadily and smoked one cigarette after another, and now and then, mid-sentence, he would suddenly lose the thought. We asked him why the subject of "equality" interests him so much. He said, "The high wall deserves sympathy too, actually — and very often the wall is made of eggs."

Song of the Loser also contains a story like this. At a class meeting, the homeroom teacher held an anonymous vote: who in this class has the lowest moral character? An unpopular boy knew the storm was aimed at him. The girl at the next desk wrote down his name and told him, "Sorry, but not writing your name just won't work." He was duly elected, and had to deliver a self-criticism in front of the whole class.

The last line of that essay is the boy's confession: "Here is what hurts most — I wrote my own name on the blank sheet too."

Later, Li Xiaofeng said the boy was him.

Q: QDaily

Li Xiaofeng: Director, screenwriter, film critic

Q: Why did you build a 10-year span into the film, and this design of "future and past" in time?

Li Xiaofeng: It was probably still about shaping how the characters change. The whole film runs from the late '90s into the 21st century. I don't know whether that's connected to the era I grew up in — the '90s were when China's economy began growing at high speed. It was also an era when all sorts of isms — romanticism and realism, materialism and love-as-an-ideal — met and collided. We had just come through the '80s, when reform and opening burst out all at once, with that liberalism that respected the individual. But go back a little further, and the Cultural Revolution had only just ended.

As for why it spans 10 years — the point isn't the 10 years. It could just as well be five; people today can change enormously in five years. I went back to Hefei a while ago and saw old classmates, and honestly, with many of them I felt the change was simply too great.

Q: A lot of them were unrecognizable?

Li Xiaofeng: Right. When Nezha screened in Russia, one viewer told me it reminded him of the changes in his country and the people around him after the Soviet Union collapsed — the old moral order ceased to exist in an instant. Take the smallest social unit, the family. In an era that didn't worship love and freedom quite so much, a family could still hold together. Later, in Marx's terms, this became a matter of productive forces and relations of production. The way I see it, a lot of families broke apart because the relations of production could no longer keep up with the development of the productive forces. The productive forces developed too fast and too violently, a lot of families came apart, and in the end it seemed there was nothing left to talk about except money. Even a boyfriend and girlfriend end up talking about money and houses. Why is that?

I think in the '80s love was still a pure ideal — people felt it was a wonderful thing that love existed in the world at all. But from the '90s on, love really did get mixed up with the hunger for money and the hunger to climb the class ladder. Never mind them — even the people in my own life have changed too much. Every morning I have no idea what I'll be facing. That's how it feels to me.

Q: So does the film reflect a change in you?

Li Xiaofeng: I wouldn't dare say that, but the film does reflect the changes in some people. At the same time it may not be all that realistic. From Nezha to this one, I don't think my films set out to be realist — they aren't realist films. It's about finding a road between the real and the invented, finding a way through. I like to call it "the third road." Not a middle road — a third one. It's an attempt at something.

Q: You like the phrase "the third road," and in the film the character played by Fang Li says "a person is the sum of social relations." Has Marx influenced you a lot? Why do you like using that kind of language?

Li Xiaofeng: Marx has had a huge influence on Chinese society as a whole. Our country today is a society run by a communist party. In any communist country, the core of life is political life.

Q: Do you think that's still true now?

Li Xiaofeng: Yes. Everything that happens radiates out from that political life and that ideology, without exception. That's certain. I don't think anything gets outside that range; a person can never transcend his own era. That's my own feeling. Marx as a thinker was genuinely great. Take the old way of sorting classes — aristocrats, peasants, workers, small artisans, a whole rich society. He came along and, bang, made a single cut: the propertyless class and the propertied class. That is a remarkable thinker. I used some of his lines in Nezha too, in fact — they carry real force.

Q: In your films he seems to appear not only in the language — there seems to be an influence on the thinking as well?

Li Xiaofeng: There's the line "all that is solid melts into air" — you must know it. So much in front of us now is like that. Solid family bonds, ties between kin that have turned into transactions, what's called "tearing away the sentimental veil." Between father and son, mother and daughter, the simple relation between people that used to exist is gone. That describes the state of things when a capitalist era arrives. It isn't good or bad, it isn't praise or blame. It's simply how things are.

Now when I open Moments every day, it's like watching the stock market. A couple of years back, in the two years when Chinese box-office grosses were growing at high speed, the first thing everyone did on waking was check the box office. I said, how is that different from watching the stock market? I said, isn't this Moments feed just a trading floor? You're all traders, deciding whether to buy this stock or that one this year, whether you're buying a growth stock or about to dump it. Relations between people have turned very strange. Just look at Moments and you can see it — the spiritual connection between people has narrowed a great deal. It isn't like when we were young, when you could talk easily about why you liked this director, why you liked that film. Now too much unnecessary stuff gets loaded into it.

Plenty of people are hot stuff — their box office starts at 1 billion yuan; and at the other end there's the Palme d'Or. It really is either fame or money. And then there's the other thing: either it's food, food, food every day, or every conversation is about the loftiest subjects, as if the only things worth discussing were the three big film festivals and the Oscars. I think that's desire showing itself; it isn't an understanding of the essence of things. Understanding the essence doesn't look like that.

Q: So what is the essence?

Li Xiaofeng: Understanding the essence means knowing that this person is kind, that person is upright — that we once pursued equality between people. Think about what we were taught as children: we knew this society was unequal, but at least we pursued the idea that everyone should be equal. Now it's the reverse. Now people take pride in pursuing inequality.

Q: How do you understand this "inequality," or what do you think we should do?

Li Xiaofeng: What I wonder is whether people can still think independently. You know people aren't equal, but can we still pursue equality — at least manage to respect that every person exists?

Back then a rich local businessman came to visit my set. Do you really need this many people on location? I was very uncomfortable hearing it. To me, every one of them is a film worker. The director, if anyone, is the one with nothing to do — cradling a big mug of tea all day, right? So set everything else aside: at the very least you need to hold on to the idea that people should be equal. I think that's the essence of it... This has turned into a straight philosophy interview.

Q: You keep saying things like "when I was a kid." You were born in 1978 — was that a wonderful time? How do you understand your relationship to the past?

Li Xiaofeng: No. I think now is pretty good. And I don't think the future will necessarily be better, or anything like that.

Q: It won't get better?

Li Xiaofeng: It won't get worse either. I think now is pretty good. The other day someone asked me, "Would you want to go back to ancient times? Which dynasty?" I said, why would I want to go back to ancient times? Some people say the Republican era — but frankly, that was the old society. In that society artists had no real standing. Fundamentally I don't think the Republican era was better than now, and I find it strange: why would anyone want to return to an era he never lived in? The Tang, the Song... what for?

Q: But people's lives back then may have been purer.

Li Xiaofeng: That's all something we imagine. By that logic, primitive people were purer still — was primitive society purer? I don't think it works that way. I think now is pretty good, whatever state you're in it's pretty good. Just keep walking forward. What else can I do — I think about that too. Whether, beyond making films, I could do a bit more, realize a bit more value. Or whether, after I die, anyone will still be watching my films. Sometimes I do think about these things.

Q: You wrote a book, Song of the Loser. How do you define a "loser"? Or do you think of yourself as one?

Li Xiaofeng: I think if I'm a loser, then everyone is a loser. "Loser" shouldn't be a label. Frankly, the losers are us. The things the two of us sitting here can't see must all be failures — some old longing for beautiful things that probably hasn't been reached.

Q: Maybe it's already been shattered?

Li Xiaofeng: In a way, yes. In the film, for instance, the only person who hasn't failed, as I see it, is Yu Yingying. The reasoning really isn't that deep. Doesn't killing someone carry a cost? Say you kill a person and go on the run, and off you go, riding a motorcycle down an American highway — that's an American thing. Whether it's as big as murder or as small as betraying someone, deceiving someone — you can't say that's fine. You can't say, well, we've all lied, we've all deceived someone. But you can't say lying is good. You're always talking about the white lie, so there must be malicious lies too. What I mean is, there's still a standard for these things.

Q: You started out writing, then film criticism, then gradually screenwriting, and now directing. Why does doing things matter so much to you? Is there something you've always wanted to say?

Li Xiaofeng: It isn't really about saying something. I've always felt that film is bigger than a person — film is a vast ocean, and in it you're really a small boat. At the start there may have been only me on that boat; now there might be more people on it. One consistent thing I've always wanted to say — I don't think there is one.

Q: It keeps changing?

Li Xiaofeng: Right, right. I still hope to become more well-rounded. To be able to try different subjects when I make films. I hope we keep moving toward something more open. I also hope I can understand more and more kinds of people, instead of shutting myself off from them.

Q: In the course of contact with real life, do you consciously try to change things through your films?

Li Xiaofeng: I think our film has already achieved one thing. A lot of people ask me how we got these actors. As I said yesterday, we cast them through auditions. What does that tell you? We did something perfectly normal. It's how it's supposed to work; it follows the logic of the film market. Being right for the part is the first requirement. But why do people nowadays keep building a project around a particular actor? I find it strange. As for change, you do it one concrete thing at a time. I read Maugham on Tolstoy — at one point he told his wife, I'm giving you all my property, and I'm leaving. His wife was beside herself. In his eighties, the man just said goodbye, and died in the end on a bench at a train station. I think that kind of ending is a magnificent ending.

Q: Why do you care so much about equality? From what I can see, your own life is fairly elite.

Li Xiaofeng: True, my mother was a university teacher. But I was rather rebellious, and never took to being disciplined, even as a child.

Q: Do you feel with people at the relative bottom, or people who've been treated unjustly?

Li Xiaofeng: Not exactly. Actually I think everyone deserves sympathy. I like that line of Haruki Murakami's very much: "Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg." But I keep thinking, the high wall deserves sympathy too — and very often the wall is made of eggs. These things can't be sorted out.

Q: Are you an idealist? Or were you one once?

Li Xiaofeng: I don't know, I think I'm quite realistic. I think I'm fairly balanced. I shouldn't say that about myself, though — as Jia Zhangke put it, you shouldn't turn your own experience into poetry. Of course, being able to make better films, to realize my own worth step by step, to put a band together — being able to do things that good, what more would you want, right? To be able to use your creativity, release it, let other people see it and hear it — what a good thing that is. Isn't it?

Cover image and in-text images: Douban