How Xin Yukun's *Wrath of Silence* Got Made

After The Coffin in the Mountain, Xin Yukun asked himself: how do I keep being a director? And what kind of director do I want to be?

In 2018, director Xin Yukun came back into public view. He is 34 this year, has lost 15 kilograms, and feels he is "in a very positive state."

In April his second theatrical feature, Wrath of Silence, opened over the Qingming Festival holiday, and audiences liked it. Beyond that, for a director his age, turning out two theatrical films in a row is undoubtedly a piece of luck.

The luck again came from the FIRST film festival: Wrath of Silence is the first film to come out of FIRST's "Bingchi LAB" program.

In May 2015, four directors — among them Xin Yukun, Zhou Juhong and Wang Yichun — formally joined the program. Modeled on the Sundance Film Festival's Directors Lab, it picks three to five directors a year and puts a set amount of money behind them to support free creative work. The first Bingchi Lab class settled on three films, each with about 10 million yuan of investment. Xin Yukun's Wrath of Silence, then called Evil Men (《恶人》), was one of them.

Three years earlier, Xin Yukun's first feature, The Coffin in the Mountain, had made it into theaters, scored 8.6 on Douban and been called "the best Chinese suspense film in years." It cost 1.7 million yuan and took 10.67 million yuan at the box office.

The Coffin in the Mountain started at the FIRST film festival. In July 2014 it won two of the festival's top prizes, Best Feature and Best Director. From that moment Xin Yukun's life began a slow climb. Within six months he took the film to Taiwan for the Golden Horse Awards, then to Venice, Busan and Warsaw. In October 2015 it reached a wider audience in cinemas. Then, very quickly, investors of every sort came looking for him, scripts in hand, money in hand.

"At first it was, oh, this is great, the conversations were fun, I felt I could finally talk about film with these big names, which was something I'd always wanted. They'd ask whether I wanted to shoot this project or that one — IP was still the fashion then, so they asked about a lot of projects. And I thought, jumping to that level for my next film just doesn't seem workable. … What the companies wanted was obvious, and fair enough too: they wanted a profit. But I felt I really hadn't figured out how any of this worked yet, and I really couldn't give them that."

The question of whether to stick with directing had been settled. So what came next: how to stick with it, and what sort of director to become?

That question left him at a loss for a while. In 2015 he worked with the Singaporean director Tan Shijie on a commercial film, Distance, directing one of its segments; it took about 11 million yuan at the box office.

So Xin Yukun went to FIRST's founders, Song Wen and Li Ziwei, and asked whether the festival could offer "after-sales service." He put his doubts to them: "Do I sign with someone now and become one of their in-house directors, or do I shoot what I want to shoot? And I really do have something I want to shoot." Song Wen and Li Ziwei told him he was not the only one facing that question.

FIRST had by then run eight editions, and the films coming out of it were getting better known. In 2016 Zhang Dalei's The Summer Is Gone won Best Feature Film at Taiwan's Golden Horse Awards and Bi Gan's Kaili Blues won Best Director. After winning at the festival, these films went on to get their own theatrical releases, one after another, putting a batch of genuinely good work in front of both the public and capital.

"Directors who came out of the festival before that tested the water in the industry, and there were still conflicts, which bred a lot of distrust and ended in disaster," Xin Yukun recalled.

So at the end of 2014, planning for FIRST's "Bingchi LAB" formally began, and the shortlist was announced in 2015. Song Wen and Li Ziwei, shareholders in the investor Bingchi Pictures, are both founders of FIRST. They describe the program this way: "While preserving an artistic consciousness about cinema, we make sensible use of healthy capital, choose film projects with vitality and a free spirit, give young filmmakers independent room to create, tailor our approach to the qualities of each selected project, and open up a film-creation ecology with more room to grow within low- and mid-budget production."

In 2016, Wrath of Silence really did look out of place. The most popular film that year was Stephen Chow's The Mermaid, released over the New Year holiday, while fantasy-driven, big-IP, big-budget productions such as Time Raiders and Love O2O dominated where the money in the film market went.

Wrath of Silence tells a story from another world entirely. In Baotou, Inner Mongolia, the son of Zhang Baomin, a mute miner, disappears. Zhang goes into the city to look for him and is dragged into the entanglement between the coal boss Chang Wannian and the lawyer Xu Wenjie. The film runs three strands in parallel, one per man, and finally brings them together, peeling back the violence and the wrongdoing at every level — and at the end, Zhang Baomin's son is still nowhere to be found. The most-upvoted short review on Douban put it this way: "[The film] cuts open the social malaise like a scalpel: composure lost at the top, morals lost in the middle, speech lost at the bottom, humanity lost all round."

It was, in the real sense, Xin Yukun's first feature screenplay. By 2013 he had been drifting in Beijing for six years, living off promotional videos and commercials shot for film companies to fund his dream of directing. He was about to turn 30, the age at which one is supposed to settle down, and he decided to try one last time: "If it doesn't work this time, I'll go open a restaurant."

Ang Lee's Ten Years, a Dream of Film (《十年一觉电影梦》) had sat on his bedside table for a year. Taking as his raw material the strange mining stories he had heard at home as a teenager, Xin Yukun wrote a screenplay called Mountain Tracking (《山野追踪》). In Baotou, his hometown and China's "rare-earth capital," the most legendary stories always starred mines, miners and mine bosses. During military training in high school he watched an entire mine mountain collapse in front of him — "the smoke cleared and the mountain was down to half" — and the stories behind scenes like that had gripped him ever since.

More than that, he wanted to draw characters and tell stories: genre stories, forceful ones, stories that looked past his own line of sight.

"I wanted to observe how people at the bottom and on the margins live, and to show it. What people don't notice is that everyone within our field of vision is the same sort of person we are. That's a kind of ossification."

The script was finished in 2014, but it was not a good moment to shoot it. Ren Jiangzhou, Xin Yukun's close friend and collaborator, thought "this film has to be shot at the several-million level, otherwise it's a waste." He also suggested that Xin Yukun test the water first with a small script from his own company. That is how Xin Yukun became the director of The Coffin in the Mountain, with Ren Jiangzhou producing.

The chances that The Coffin in the Mountain brought him made Mountain Tracking possible. In the Bingchi Lab's program the new film was titled Evil Men, "about the evil in human nature — every one of them has an 'evil' heart inside."

Gao Yitian, the project director running the Bingchi Lab, simply became the producer of Evil Men himself, taking charge of the script and acting as the link between the lab and the director. The investors who finally backed Evil Men were Bingchi Pictures Co., Ltd. and Hehe Pictures — one a sponsor of the 2016 FIRST project market, the other a main founding and supporting institution of the FIRST festival. Through financial arrangements such as trusts and minimum-guarantee deals, they raised the money to produce and shoot the film.

In 2016 Xin Yukun formally began prepping Evil Men. The project went "unprecedentedly" smoothly. The producers brought in Wang Hongwei, an associate professor at the Beijing Film Academy, as script consultant to rewrite and tighten the screenplay, and shooting started quickly. In July 2016 Xin Yukun took his crew to Baotou to scout, and settled on Wula Mountain National Forest Park as the film's main location. Sixty days later the shoot was finished and the film went into editing. His previous film, The Coffin in the Mountain, had taken 24 days to shoot.

There was still a clock to beat on Evil Men, still energy spent moving between locations and shooting, still the visit Xin Yukun paid in person, materials in hand, to recruit the actor Jiang Wu, and even an accident that injured his lead, Song Yang. Even so, he finally got to feel what it is like when "what you planned before the shoot and what you give up on balance out." As he described it: "Every day there was something new, new arrangements handed to everyone. More complicated, but also smoother." Unlike The Coffin in the Mountain, where he had studied every single yuan, this time a dedicated producer coordinated the film, and as director he only had to finish it in a reasonable time.

Once the shoot was done, Taihe Pictures came on to distribute, the release was quickly set for October 2017, and the title was changed to Wrath of Silence, a name closer to the film's genre character. Later, to avoid competing with the National Day holiday releases and to leave enough time for the promotional tour, the date was moved again, to April 2018.

So at 34, the fortunate Xin Yukun finally gets to see the film he wanted to make reach theaters.

Other directors have been just as lucky. After 2015 a batch of films — What's in the Darkness, A Joyful Funeral (《喜丧》), The Untold (《中邪》) — broke out of the FIRST festival and won follow-up funding and distribution support. At the 2017 Golden Horse Film Festival and the Busan International Film Festival, films of the same kind, such as Angels Wear White, Old Beast and The Looming Storm, took prize after prize and got release dates one after another.

These films share a trait: they are all the first or second work of a young director, financed through independent channels, small in scale but essentially made to standard industry process. They look at demolition, the environment, education and the various social problems that come with urbanization, and at people at the bottom — laid-off workers, farmers, urban drifters.

Some commentators in the industry have even used this to float the idea of a "new independent cinema," arguing that it marks the arrival of an age in which "the big studios weaken and independent film steps forward."

The social questions these films raise overlap with, but also differ from, those of "Sixth Generation" directors such as Zhang Yuan, Jia Zhangke and Wang Xiaoshuai. Beyond independent expression, the way the money reaches them is also different: Hehe Pictures, funded by China Minmetals Trust, handled the production of Wrath of Silence, with various youth film festivals sometimes organizing things in between. More important, this kind of film puts weight on the author's voice without rejecting genre elements or commercial appeal.

The argument over this "new independent cinema" has yet to be settled, but it does stand for something new happening in the film business.

Still, some of these directors face enormous problems.

Once they reach cinemas, these films have to face brutal competition. The Summer Is Gone, the Golden Horse winner, opened in March 2017 and took just over 4 million yuan. In November 2017 the next Golden Horse winner, Angels Wear White, drew attention because of when it was released and ended up with 22 million yuan, while Old Beast, out a month later, managed only about 2 million yuan.

Under box-office pressure, some filmmakers have also opened sizeable rifts with their backers. In October 2017 Hu Bo, a director under contract to Dongchun Films, the company run by the director Wang Xiaoshuai, hanged himself. His death was widely read as "the result of the conflict between young directors and the current production system," and prompted a long debate.

These independently minded films also still have to face the censors. Three other films were originally scheduled to open on the same day as Wrath of Silence: Knife in the Clear Water, Missing Johnny and The Untold. With a week to go before release, the latter two had already been pulled from the schedule for different reasons. Of the four, Missing Johnny came from the 54th Golden Horse Film Festival in Taiwan; the other three all came out of FIRST.

Xin Yukun started losing weight after he began prepping Wrath of Silence, back in 2016. By the time the film was first given a release date, in October 2017, his cheeks had hollowed out and the bracelet on his wrist had gone loose. With a new haircut and a suit, he looked more like a young director.

Compared with 2016, Xin Yukun is now working through a new set of doubts: "Once you're inside this field there are a lot of chances and a lot of temptations. You lose some freedom, you lose a lot of room to say things. You need the work to be seen by more people, you want more people to accept that this kind of thing exists. But you still have to hold on to the texture that belongs to film and to the author's voice, to bring the audience something beyond ordinary perception, and to understand the world together."

His next film, he says, might be science fiction.

Cover image: a still from Wrath of Silence.