Jia Zhangke Has a New Book. He Says He Has Always Been Facing and Solving "Entrenched Problems"

Jia's Thoughts II is his notebook on film from 2008 to 2016.

Film director Jia Zhangke's new book Jia's Thoughts II (《贾想II》) came out in January 2018. On the evening of January 5, Jia went to a book salon the publisher held in Beijing, where he talked about what he has been doing lately and about the book.

Jia's Thoughts II collects the notes on film Jia wrote between 2008 and 2016 — the same kind of book as Jia's Thoughts, 1996–2008, published in 2009: written records that run alongside his films.

Film, Jia says, is a form of expression with a very long cycle. A script takes six months, or eight; then come shooting, post-production, distribution, promotion. Even keeping up a feature every two years, a relatively high output, he cannot film everything, because real life produces new feelings every moment. He has that much he wants to say, and film cannot keep pace with all of it. Writing became his way of making up the difference.

Some of these notes start where his films start and arrive at something close to what his films arrive at. He gave one example himself at the salon. An essay in Jia's Thoughts II called "I Dreamed I Was a Traitor" began as a column in China Weekly (now closed). Jia had just taken a film around festivals abroad and met all kinds of people; back home he found among Chinese people a great-power sentiment and a nationalism stronger than any he had seen before. So he wrote: "I had a dream that I was a traitor."

"I Dreamed I Was a Traitor" was first called "A Startling Dream in a Foreign Land." It records a conversation between Jia and a member of the audience, a woman of about 20, who challenged him over I Wish I Knew: letting foreigners see "that filthy" Shanghai, she said, would hurt their impression of China. The essay reads: "After a brief silence, the girl gave me a contemptuous smile and said: 'That's right! For the dignity of the motherland, of course we shouldn't describe the situation of people like that.' Her words left me dumbfounded. I suddenly saw the logic of these 'patriots': it rests on an illusory idea of the nation and ignores the fate of living, breathing people. This is the deformed 'patriotism' that has somehow taken shape today."

"I Dreamed I Was a Traitor" was written between 2010 and 2013, in the gap between shooting I Wish I Knew and A Touch of Sin. In editing the manuscript, the editor arranged all the pieces along a timeline of Jia's films.

Jia has been making films for 20 years, and the two books happen to split that career in two. He said: "In the Jia's Thoughts I years — from my first short film in 1996 up to 2008 — well, I'm nearly 48 this year, and reform has been going on for exactly 40 years, which means China's reform began when I was eight. So in my first stage of work, what I faced was a society changing from one moment to the next, never standing still. It shook me and it excited me — including a character like Xiao Wu, who couldn't adapt to the change around him. And Platform covers 1979 to 1989, China's first and most important decade of transformation, which is also the stretch when I went from eight or nine years old to being a grown man. I feel I've always lived inside transformation."

"After I finished Still Life, and especially by the time of I Wish I Knew, I began to turn my eyes toward history. In this second stage, I felt the transformation I thought was under way had basically settled. What the settling revealed was a lot of problems: class lines hardening, regional gaps widening instead of narrowing, movement between classes seizing up. There's an essay in Jia's Thoughts II from the time I took part in Southern Weekly's Get It Louder exhibition, and A Touch of Sin in 2013 carries the same recognition. In the second stage, what I gradually worried about, or felt, was that the result of this reform had already shown itself — and that if we want to keep going forward, we have to face these entrenched problems and solve them."

Salon conversation:

Q: Questions from the moderator and the audience

Jia Zhangke: author of Jia's Thoughts II, film director

Q: Jia's Thoughts I and Jia's Thoughts II both cover a lot of geographic ground — places you've been and places you haven't. What does it mean for your work to keep moving between so many different places?

Jia Zhangke: First, it's a matter of temperament — I don't much like cities, and I don't like staying in one place. Then there's the job: making films forces you to travel a great deal. That's the jianghu, the drifters' world outside respectable society — you have to go out into it, you have to push your way through it, and that's where the fun is.

In the preface to Jia's Thoughts II I wrote about Old He. He's a local line producer we worked with in Dunhuang. He used to be a driver there, but so many productions came to shoot in Dunhuang that he gradually became a very professional producer. When we shoot there, we bring him on as producer and guide.

I met him while shooting Ash Is Purest White. We drove from Dunhuang to Jiayuguan and on into Xinjiang, traveling together for so long that the Gobi scenery was one thing to me, and this man was another kind of scenery.

I liked him enormously. Very straightforward, full of experience surviving in the desert, and always talking about it. What did he talk about? Things like, "I saw a wolf yesterday." "Did you see the fox up on the hill?" He opened me up — it's hard to describe. It isn't that he gave me knowledge; he widened me, made me feel there is still so much in this world worth paying attention to. Different people's worlds of attention are all so vast, so wide open.

Once I dozed off in the car. When I woke up he said, "There was a mirage a minute ago."

I was furious. I said, why didn't you tell me? I've never seen a mirage. He said, you wanted to see it?! I see them all the time, there's nothing new about them to me. For him the legendary mirage was an everyday thing; for me it was a dream world I had never been in.

I think when you travel like that and run into different people and things, when you step into another field of life, another way of living, the farther you go the smaller you feel — and at the same time the more solid. It's a strange, wonderful contrast.

Why do you feel more solid? Because you gradually burn off a lot of hot air. Tangled up in a city, stuck in one fixed trade — director, lawyer, accountant — we blow up the things inside our own work and our own specialty until they suffocate us, until they wrap us in an exaggerated world. Traveling, meeting different people, puts you back where you belong. It makes you smaller, and at the same time more solid.

Q: There's a line in the book's preface — only by walking through vastness do you learn how small a person is. A lot of directors, especially auteurs, deliberately magnify themselves, assert their egos. As a director, how do you see the relationship between small and big? What you just said seems to run the other way.

Jia Zhangke: Asserting yourself is necessary, but admitting your own limits matters just as much. There's an old line worn thin by use: you need to have reverence. To put it more bluntly, I don't much like people who act like big shots. I think that usually means they haven't seen enough — the more you see, the humbler you get.

I know a painter in Shanxi, an obscure one, but he's an expert on murals. Once you step into his world of murals, he'll tell you about Shanxi's Yuan-dynasty murals, where the murals of each era are, which village has a temple at its edge and what wonderful mural is inside it.

He once said to me: "Little Jia, do you know Shanxi's houses are all gray? Do you know when Shanxi's houses look their best?" I couldn't answer. He said, the moment sunlight hits them, those houses become beautiful.

That moved me. That's the real thing, I thought. He was precise; he understood that space better than I did. I sometimes feel something is beautiful too, but I can't put it into words, and he could. He said, once the sun hits it the house takes on color, and then it is beautiful. He took an ordinary scene we live through every day and pointed to the exact poetic moment in it. So when you travel you are learning everywhere — from people, from nature — and in that situation you just keep getting smaller.

Q: You seem to have always been interested in the relationships between people — Xiao Wu's original title, for instance (Jin Xiaoyong's Buddy, Hu Haimei's Lover, Liang Changyou's Son: Xiao Wu). Why does that interest you?

Jia Zhangke: Because a person is made of all kinds of relationships — family, relatives, colleagues. None of us lives in isolation. To be precise, what interests me is the moving part of human relationships: the part that interacts, shifts, changes.

As for that title, I happened to come across a denunciation piece from the Cultural Revolution in the People's Daily. I forget who was being attacked — a writer, probably — but the attack laid out a whole string of the man's relationships. We define a person by his relationships.

From Xiao Wu onward, broadly speaking, what excites me in writing and shooting comes partly from space — The World, for instance.

The first excitement of The World came from that surreal, magical space: a theme park of the world's landmarks in miniature.

Earlier films like Still Life and Dong were about rivers, the Yangtze, the Three Gorges — the space along the banks of China's busiest river gave me an appetite for writing. But more and more now, most of the time, what interests me most is character. Some type of person I haven't written before, haven't filmed before, some kind of person I'm curious to understand.

I think we always used to say that writing a novel means creating a character. Ah Q is a character, A Tao is a character, Gao Jialin is a character. Bring that back to film as part of the larger idea of literature, and in the end what we're doing is describing people, discovering people. Film's creativity shows itself first in the discovery of people, of a certain kind of person.

Writing Xiao Wu, for instance, excited me. In that moment of transition, in that county-town space, a character surviving in the cracks between relationships — I badly wanted to write him. Even his appearance: when we designed Xiao Wu's look, two things mattered, as I remember it. The suit had to be one size too big, and the brand label on the sleeve had to stay on, not be cut off. And then there were his glasses.

I remember Wang Hong saying at the time that the glasses were wrong, that they made him look like Woody Allen. But who says a thief can't look like an intellectual? Plenty of thieves look like intellectuals. Even an appearance like that, I think, pulled me toward building a whole person out of one image.

Shaping a certain kind of person has always interested me. Take Mountains May Depart — what I wanted to film there was a person changed by time. Most of our films cover a short stretch, a year or two, three days or five, and one person's memory of it. But a life is a long process, like a river. How does a person get changed by time?

Someone who used to chatter and make noise, whose life hadn't opened up yet — how does he end up meeting one thing after another that life hands him, birth, age, sickness, death? How does a person ripen? How does a talkative person fall silent, and how does a silent person turn into someone who won't stop talking? I used to be a man of few words myself, and then becoming a director made me talk a lot. What changed me? The shaping of people, people who have been shaped, people changed by time — that's the kind of character that interests me.

Someone asked me just now what I was reading last year. I didn't read much that was new last year; toward the end of it I suddenly wanted to read Chekhov again, and the feeling now is nothing like reading him in my early twenties. In stories like "The Lady with the Dog" and "Anna on the Neck," the people gather up all the information of their era. The art of narrative is finding a new kind of person, describing a new kind of figure.

Q: Can you talk about the people and the relationships in Ash Is Purest White?

Jia Zhangke: This may be a spoiler. The jianghu has to have people in it, so I brought in a lot of friends to play it. Zhao Tao and Liao Fan are the "sons and daughters," and all the different people around them are their jianghu — people live inside other people's jianghu. The story starts around 2000 and runs to New Year's Day 2018 — we just finished shooting the New Year scenes — and passes through different people along the way. Better to just go see the film.

Q: There's a piece in Jia's Thoughts II called "Noon Again," said to be the only piece of fiction you've written since 1992. I'm curious about the fiction you wrote before 1992 — could you say something about it?

Jia Zhangke: Let me gossip a bit first. With "Noon Again," there's a girl who would know at once it's about her, while my other classmates wouldn't have a clue what I was writing about. That's the story. The fiction I wrote back then was very shy — adapt it today and you'd basically need some fresh-faced heartthrob to play it. A first-love story. Better not to read it.

Q: What subjects did you write about before 1992?

Jia Zhangke: Some of it is fairly alarming. There's an unpublished novella called The Very Edge (《最边缘》), about a village next to Shanxi University from the time we were studying painting — the kind of village where all sorts of people were thrown together, basically a jianghu story. But the embarrassing part, looking at it today, is how much it romanticized artists, so I decided not to publish it.

Q: Why did you suddenly go back to fiction in 2016? It seems abrupt, since everything you'd written before was essays.

Jia Zhangke: Because I needed enough invention that nobody would know exactly what I was talking about. Some of my classmates are in the audience tonight, and otherwise they'd see at a glance who I meant. So to me it still counts as documentary fiction.

Q: What did 2017 mean to you? Was there anything special about that year?

Jia Zhangke: What was special, I think, is that a year or two ago a lot of people started saying Jia Zhangke was turning into a capitalist, that this guy doesn't love art anymore, that he's out doing capital deals every day. That made me uncomfortable, even a little angry. I write and read every day, I'm planning new films — how did I become a capitalist?

There's nothing wrong with being a capitalist, but I really am still an artist. People get labeled very easily. A person who makes things should never label himself: know who you are, don't lose yourself. That's part of what writing does for me. It keeps me thinking, and it keeps my capacity to feel alive.

In 2016 I used capital to start Ke Premiere. In the year and more since, we've shown dozens of fine short films from around the world, and nearly every one has reached close to 100,000 viewers, often more, because China badly lacks platforms that screen short films and audiences lack channels to find them. Short film is a rich, lively, restless medium that hides far more cinematic possibility than people realize — most of them are made by young people, and they're full of fresh experiments with film language.

You can't do something like that without money; you have to raise funds to get it going. All of this work is built around film. I honestly don't have much interest in making money.

Someone also asked me just now how I see the situation young directors are in. It's very hard for young directors. There's a lot society can do to make things easier for them at the start — everyone's running project markets now, all kinds of support programs for young directors, building a bridge between the industry and them.

But some stages of life can't be skipped. Right after you graduate there's a hard stretch: not much income, a career that hasn't started yet. Everyone has been through it. I think back to what I was doing then. The year I shot Xiao Wu, besides shooting it, I had a classmate from the cinematography department who was working on a children's program at Beijing Television, and once a week I'd go play a monkey on it. One day out of seven playing a monkey, and I could stay alive and write my scripts in peace. I never once felt it was hard.

Q: I once read a very interesting piece of reporting — a journalist looked into it and found that Director Jia has 11 companies. Of those 11, how many make money and how many lose it?

Jia Zhangke: To be honest, there's our Added Wings program, under which I put my own money into a young director's first feature. Where did that money come from? The budget was small in absolute terms, but for an individual, once you're making a film, nothing is really small. So I set up a lecture tour, one talk in a different city each week, and the whole film was made with the money from those talks. So I genuinely don't know whether it made money or not.

Q: You posted on Weibo that this year is the 20th anniversary of shooting Xiao Wu, and you put the Xiao Wu poster next to the Ash Is Purest White poster and said that 20 years on, what still draws you in is the jianghu. Is there a connection between the two stories? Between the jianghu of Xiao Wu and the jianghu of Ash Is Purest White?

Jia Zhangke: I still don't like the halls of power. I like the world outside them.

Q: After Jia's Thoughts II, do you have a plan for the next eight years?

Jia Zhangke: I don't know how many years the next stretch will be, but there are already several essays written toward Jia's Thoughts III — it will certainly come out within eight years.

In the Qing Dynasty (《在清朝》) is now well prepared, and I hope to shoot it. The Meeting of Two Heroes (《双雄会》) is in the research stage. We've brought in a British historian to help us collect a lot of footage of Hong Kong in the 1940s, and the research goes on from there.

Over the next eight or ten years I hope to make some films that test what production can do — stories that need a good production team and good conditions behind them. Xiao Wu and Still Life could both be shot very improvisationally, but some stories, like Hong Kong in the 1940s, can't be improvised; they need solid conditions. I hope to bring several films like that to the screen in the next eight or ten years.

Q: You're very interested in outer space — would you consider making a science-fiction film? And what's happening with the VR film you mentioned before?

Jia Zhangke: Here's a small spoiler: in Ash Is Purest White, Xu Zheng plays a science-fiction writer in Xinjiang who runs a little shop there and dreams about outer space. When Xu Zheng read the script he said, isn't this Liu Cixin? The VR script is written. It's about internet celebrities.

Q: Why internet celebrities?

Jia Zhangke: Because I like internet celebrities, and I like livestreaming; it moves me. I haven't filmed young girls in a long time — 17, 18 years old, that young. I want to make a Flowers of Shanghai for the livestreaming age.

Q: This question was handed to me by a friend from the publisher. We can see that the Fifth Generation directors wanted to put their feeling for nation and family into their films — they had a strong sense of mission. Does Director Jia carry any burden or sense of mission?

Jia Zhangke: I have a strong sense of mission. I believe I have to contribute to the nation's rejuvenation. I'm not joking; everyone has a social side. But these past couple of years I've felt that society is very tangled, with an enormous range of views, even though everyone is aiming at the same target. What are people arguing about? They're arguing about the path. The same goal, a good goal, a very good one — but different people, with different educations and different views, disagree about how to reach it.

Q: Would you ever film your own youth, the way Feng Xiaogang did with Youth?

Jia Zhangke: The people in Platform are five to ten years older than I am. In 1979 I was nine and they were around 20. It comes from my early memory, but the life in it was lived by those older brothers and sisters; it isn't a direct account of my own youth.

Many directors make their own youth the subject of their first film. I happened not to. I was prematurely old, in a way, and wrote about the adult world first. I do have a youth story of my own I'd like to film. But I especially want to wait until I'm an old man to do it.

In our school years, our class always had a party around New Year's Day, and the snow always seemed to arrive around then. Very romantic. So I don't dare film it yet. I'll wait until I'm old to shoot a campus love story.

Q: Why did you move back to Shanxi, open a restaurant there, do so many things there?

Jia Zhangke: There are many reasons I moved back home. One direct reason was the smog at the time. One day I suddenly noticed that the air back home was far better than in Beijing. The smog a few years ago put people in a bad mood; you'd open the window every morning and feel flattened. It made me think, why not go back? Why did I have to live in Beijing?

There's another side to it, tied to technology. There used to be no internet, no way to work remotely, no WeChat; nothing was convenient. There was no online shopping either — to buy a book you had to go to a bookstore, and back home that wasn't an option. For a long time after I graduated from college, my habit was to go to the Sanlian Bookstore on the street behind the National Art Museum every weekend.

In those days, if you left Beijing you might have nowhere that big to buy books. Now we can buy books all over the internet, on Amazon, on JD.com. It made me think that the things I need I could find a way to get at home too.

There's one more reason. After you've stayed in one environment, one trade, too long, you start to long for another kind of life, to miss another kind of life.

I often say that I like Beijing, but Beijing has always felt incomplete to me. In Beijing I have friends and no relatives — not one relative of mine lives in Beijing. So for nearly 20 years in Beijing I had no family around me, no cousins on either side, no one I saw regularly. That's a strange way to live too.

Since moving back I can see old classmates and relatives, go to weddings and funerals. At this stage, at least, I find it quite comfortable. Maybe in a few years I'll get tired of it and move back to Beijing. It's not fixed, so I stay a little freer.

Q: The cast of Ash Is Purest White includes Feng Xiaogang and Xu Zheng, both very bankable. Were you going for a commercial approach with this film?

Jia Zhangke: For Ash Is Purest White I'm especially grateful to several fellow directors who came to help — Diao Yinan, Feng Xiaogang, Xu Zheng, Zhang Yibai. While writing the script I kept feeling that the people in my film needed faces with real force in them, and it was natural to think of these faces I already knew well. To me that's where the pull comes from.

Look at Feng's expression, at Xu Zheng's expression playing a science-fiction writer, then at Diao Yinan's expression, at Zhang Yibai's — every face has a story in it. And I was lucky that they happened to have time to come and support me. The actor Liao Fan has that force too. On set, filming him, he says nothing; he and Zhao Tao simply act together, and the impact is like thunder and lightning meeting.

Q: You've said Ash Is Purest White was shot with six kinds of camera equipment?

Jia Zhangke: Six kinds of equipment, but two-thirds of it was shot on film.

As for why film carries the film this time — the six formats include film, SK and DV. About a fifth of the footage was shot on 1990s DV. For me this is a personal record of image memory: when I entered this world of images myself, to shoot people and environments and spaces, my memory of images is a mixture of many different pieces of equipment, including gear television stations once used, fused together with the best and newest digital technology.

Because the period I'm showing — when I think back on my own work with images — was full of that mixing, full of the excitement, in an age when technology was updating so fast, of being able to pick something up at any moment and shoot with it. I wanted that excitement back.

So a lot of the sequences were captured with different equipment, different image quality, different cameras. There is a vitality in that, I think. I'm not very fond of a strictly classical image style; I like this liveliness.

This was also my first time working with the French cinematographer Éric Gautier, whose credits include The Motorcycle Diaries and On the Road. Before we started, I showed him a documentary I shot in 2001, all of it on a Handycam and a small DV camera, and he had great respect for those images.

At this stage, I feel, it isn't about chasing a balanced image experience that audiences are used to consuming. Since this story covers such a long span of years, I wanted to bring together, organically, the ways of making images we lived through across those years.

Q: When young people step into life and face other people, get caught up in relationships, they can fall into pessimism. How do you balance pessimism and optimism?

Jia Zhangke: I've always been optimistic. When it comes to individual survival, individual memory, I always feel — to put it plainly — that I can live through any kind of life. What I need materially is very limited; keeping myself alive is a simple matter. I don't have many material needs. A bed and three meals a day.

It probably has to do with how I grew up. My starting point is that I've lived that life before, and I believe that if I had to live it again I wouldn't feel any distance from it, wouldn't feel there was any problem at all. My mother says I'm an adventurer, but I tell her, Mom, you think I take a lot of risks because I'm not afraid of failing — to me there's no risk to take. At worst I come home and keep you company. If I fail, if something doesn't work out, at worst the two of us, mother and son, go back to Fenyang and eat three meals a day at home. That life is easy enough to keep going.

Why must I be an artist? I don't have to be. Being an artist is something many later things gave me. What a person needs is simple, and I'm ready at any time to stop being this artist. That would be fine too. Just live well, live as hard as you can.

Q: You had a long conversation with Xu Zhiyuan, and in it you said you've gradually lost interest in forming consensus. That question has bothered me for a long time.

Jia Zhangke: Forming consensus has a personal, stage-of-life dimension to it. In the film industry, and in public speaking generally — all the talks and lectures — of course you hope to spread your views, and you believe those views are right, and you hope some kind of consensus comes out of them. That work always needs doing.

But personally: one day I read something Sartre said, that we waste enormous amounts of time quarreling, waste it on discussions of stories that lead nowhere, and that what matters more is finding new problems and solving new problems. That fit my state of mind at the time exactly. Whenever I give a talk, for instance, someone will ask, "Director, how do you balance art and commerce?" I've been answering that same question for nearly 20 years, and I am honestly a little tired of it. I'd rather go do something else. Consensus gets formed by many forces working together anyway.

Q: When you first showed Xiao Wu to Martin Scorsese, did he really tell you that you should spend your whole life making small films like that?

Jia Zhangke: I didn't show it to him; he watched it himself. I happened to be in New York. He was in post-production on Gangs of New York then, cutting the film, and we met in his editing room.

The old man was very old-school, very much like the Qi Baishi I'd read about from the Republican era. A young person comes to visit, and he has carefully laid out all kinds of pastries, far more than one person could eat, every sort of little pastry, and he just wants you to eat, and sits there watching you eat, delighted.

One thing he said mattered a great deal to me. He said he liked Xiao Wu very much, that it reminded him of his uncle, and he told me stories from his childhood. As he walked me out of the editing room, he said I'd be better off sticking with low-budget films. What he said then, I think, had to do with his own circumstances at that moment, and with his understanding, built up over the years, of the film industry and its conditions.

Q: I went to Fenyang, to the locations in your films. Some of the buildings that appeared in them are still there; some are gone.

Jia Zhangke: When I'm writing a script and making a film, I keep a kind of reference book in my head, and that reference book is a map: a map of the place where my story happens, of the space itself. The map doesn't really exist. It's the radius within which a character can move. I'll ask whether there's a church in this place, whether there's a lumber yard beside it, whether there's a train station, whether troops are stationed here, whether there's a big factory or only a small repair shop, how many streets there are.

In the course of imagining that map of a character's movements, the space itself starts to form. Sometimes the space is invented — say there's a church, and troops as well. What does that mean? It might mean the character hears the bugle from the barracks every morning or evening, and that feeling is different. If there's a train station he can easily go somewhere far away; if there isn't, he might go to Taiyuan instead.

None of this gets written into the script, but the structure of the space produces a character's language and a character's behavior. In Mountains May Depart, for instance, there's the Yellow River — Fenyang is actually more than 200 kilometers from the Yellow River, quite far — but when I was imagining that film's structure and space, I felt there ought to be a river, especially in winter, in a county town. That's how a sense of space forms, so that whenever a character appears on screen, he arrives carrying that environment and background with him. Many actors interpret a role as they build it. For me, as screenwriter and director, my character biography is a city map, an imagining of urban space, and it stays hidden in my head like a character biography.

In the Qing Dynasty, for instance, hasn't been shot yet, but I already have a complete map: where the temple is in that county town, where the county office is, where the market is, what lies north of the city wall and what lies south, all of it clear, so that people walk through a space that has already been built. That way characters aren't dropped in from the sky. Often, if the space hasn't been imagined that carefully, you feel the people have parachuted in, drifting past like scraps of paper.

Images courtesy of Imaginist.