Zhang Yimou, doing the interviews for his new show: “I’m not a man who cherishes his feathers”

“I want to twist my own body as hard as I can. And often there’s a cliff — and down I go again.”

A new show is about to open, so Zhang Yimou’s calendar has filled up with interviews. Two subjects keep coming up in them: why he doesn’t “cherish his feathers,” and why he always seems to have so much energy for work.

2047 Apologue (《对话·寓言 2047》), which Zhang Yimou directs, brings out its second season in June. The show is billed as a “conceptual performance” and runs seven separate acts. Each act lasts under ten minutes and pairs “an ancient craft” with “a formidable technology.” Put plainly, it looks like a shrunken, indoor version of the opening ceremonies he has staged.

After the first season closed, most of the comment online was favorable. The bad reviews, though, were merciless. One said: “Beautiful, yes, but form and spirit are at odds.” The publicity copy promised a dialogue with the inner self and a parable of the future, which drew this: “A folk-culture hodgepodge, with no sense of the future whatsoever.”

The audience for live performance is small and the reviews are few, so the bad ones are easily drowned out.

By the standards of a Zhang Yimou production, 2047 Apologue has drawn little attention and little argument. But Buick, which produces the show, is happy with the partnership. Zhang Yimou plus China plus technology is, for the carmaker, enough to count as striking up a conversation with its buyers.

When the first season was being made, Zhang Yimou was still in preparation on The Great Wall. Bao Ye, who heads Buick’s marketing department, came to him about the show and promised it did not have to turn a profit. Zhang Yimou decided that gave him room to create, and said yes. By the time the second season was set to begin, he was shooting the film Shadow and then staging the “Beijing 8 Minutes” at the PyeongChang Winter Olympics. Shadow is now finished, the “Beijing 8 Minutes” is over, 2047 Apologue has yet to open — and he is already preparing another film.

He Lulu, the show’s executive director, says the early work on 2047 Apologue meant an enormous number of creative meetings. Once rehearsals started, Zhang Yimou was no longer in the room, but he watched the rehearsal video every day and called every night, an hour or more each time.

At the press conference for 2047 Apologue, a reporter asked whether every film in his career had contained a breakthrough of his own. His first sentence in reply: “I’m not a man who cherishes his feathers. That’s why my work adds up to such a scattered picture.”

In 1987 his first film as a director, Red Sorghum, won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival — the first Asian film to take the prize.

Between 1987 and 1999 he directed Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern, The Story of Qiu Ju, To Live, Not One Less and The Road Home, collecting three Oscar nominations and five Golden Globe nominations.

In 2002 he turned to commercial filmmaking with Hero, followed by House of Flying Daggers and Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles. The reviews were weaker than before, but audiences turned out in force.

Then came Curse of the Golden Flower in 2006, and the doubts piled up. After that, A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop in 2009 and The Great Wall in 2016 — along with all the visual spectacles he took on after the 2008 Olympic opening ceremony.

“Up, then down, then up again. One moment the feathers are full, the next they’ve all been plucked.” “Some people think it isn’t worth it, some think it’s slapdash,” Zhang Yimou said. “I’m enjoying myself.” And: “My generation grew up in the old environment. We were already well-behaved, and there was pressure and there were limits. In my own work I often want to be restless, to twist my own body as hard as I can. So often there’s a cliff — and down I go again.”

He says all of this at greater length in the exchange below, answering in a hurried group interview. The lines may be what came to him in the moment; they may also be how he genuinely sees the world.

Q: Reporters’ questions after the press conference

Zhang Yimou: Born in Xi’an, Shaanxi, in 1950; regarded as one of the leading figures of China’s “Fifth Generation” of film directors

Q: Earlier profiles often describe you as someone afraid of wasting time. Is there anything that looks to other people like a waste of time, deadly dull, that you find interesting and want to do?

Zhang Yimou: Talking through the script. Sometimes we talk for a year or two, two or three years, every week. Anyone else would find it hard to sit there. Take “2047” — we talked for a very long time. Who joins? Whom do we use? How do you add one and one? How does it look on stage? Which part is the high technology, which part is the old tradition, how do the two add up? How is it staged? What about the music? The dance? The sound? What goes on the stage? And so on.

We talked and talked. Every meeting drove everyone mad — searching online, watching things, and throwing them out when they didn’t work. And the things we threw out were whole countries: the American act goes, the German one, the British one…

Talking through a script is the dullest work there is. Half the time everyone in the room falls asleep. An outsider sitting there would say: what does Zhang Yimou do all day, it must be so incredibly boring. But I think that stretch matters most for me. It isn’t the hands-on stage; whether you’re making a film or making a show, it’s the creative stage.

I always say there are three elements: ideas, ideas, ideas — the way property people say location, location, location. That’s where ideas come from. Only later do we talk about how much money went in and how much time. The original idea comes at the start. People watch the behind-the-scenes footage and see how hard it all is, but that’s the execution stage. The early stage is the dullest and the most crushing, and you are the one crushing yourself.

It takes a long, long time; it eats time. Sometimes there is one point you cannot get past, and nobody can save you. You think about it constantly, you can’t eat or sleep for it, you sit up in the middle of the night and write something down, and by breakfast you’ve thrown it out. Sometimes the team is discussing it, someone goes to the bathroom, and the whole thing gets thrown out.

That process is the hardest. Making something original is the hardest and the dullest. But for me it isn’t about liking it — the job is sitting right there and I took the order. It opens tomorrow; time doesn’t wait. That’s where the pressure comes from.

So you save yourself, you have to deal with it. And you know you have to leave time for production, for outside coordination, for the team; you subtract the holidays; you can work the schedule out. Once you have the experience you know the whole sequence. When there’s a week left and you’re still at zero, how are you going to sleep? You drive everyone mad, and you drive yourself mad first. There’s no way around it.

So you find pleasure in it. What people call being in pain and happy at once is probably something like this. It looks very boring.

Reporter: You keep coming back to ideas. Over all your years in film, has every one of your movies contained a breakthrough of your own?

Zhang Yimou: Yes. I’m not a man who cherishes his feathers, so my work adds up to a scattered picture. Of course I could think about it another way — carefully build a posture for myself, give my work one overall direction, keep it looking the same, let myself feel whole. I don’t much want to.

My generation grew up in the old environment. We were already well-behaved, and there was pressure and there were limits. In my own work I often want to be restless, to twist my own body as hard as I can. So often there’s a cliff — and down I go again.

I choose material loosely on purpose. Don’t overthink it, don’t weigh the consequences. If it interests you today, do it today; maybe tomorrow you’ll change your mind, and we’ll deal with that then. So my work shows every sort of possibility. Some people think it isn’t worth it, some think it’s slapdash. I’m enjoying myself. I work hard at everything, even the things other people call garbage. I work hard at what interests me. Nothing is perfect. If a thing interested you at the time, go and do it. The consequences may be severe.

Working this way has taken me across a lot of borders, into a lot of different things, and I take on a lot — often three or four big projects in one year. Besides making films there is always something else bearing down. Of course I choose it; I could turn them down and be nothing but a film director, spend three years sharpening one sword. I would rather keep busy.

The people my age were all factory workers, and they’ve all retired. I’m lucky enough to still be a director, still doing something creative. Be grateful for this era: stop strolling, run while you can. As long as your body allows it, do more, and don’t fuss over whether it’s good or bad.

I’ve found that thinking hard about original work does the brain good — you take the lesson from one thing and carry it over into a film.

But film is the hardest of all. No director alive can say every one of his works is superb. Film really is a high thing; it takes in everything, absolutely everything. It’s a simple story, and yet it carries a whole view of the world, of life, of what matters — thought, feeling. It’s hard. A film the whole world agrees is good is hard. So we are all still learning.

Q: At the press conference someone mentioned that you received a doctorate from Boston University the other day. How many doctorates does that make now — do you remember?

Zhang Yimou: The foreign ones alone come to quite a few — the big ones are Yale, Moscow University, one in Korea. It’s an honor, and it’s people’s way of affirming you. But really I think it’s the era. China today is not the China of the past; Chinese culture and Chinese people are taken seriously, the country is stronger, its standing has changed, and so has the look of its people. I owe it to the era. The era made me, made what we call our first cohort. Without this era — I came through the Cultural Revolution — well, we caught the last bus and haven’t wasted a minute since.

Talk to people born in the 1990s or 2000s about the era, about how things used to be, and they feel nothing. But I know. Our fathers’ generation lost those years — the fourth-generation and third-generation directors.

China today is wonderful. The bar to directing is so low that anyone can direct, and out of nowhere a dark horse appears. That’s a fine thing. Today’s China suits young people starting out, especially in the cultural industries.

Film, television and web drama keep turning out talent. My own view is that in large-scale live performance, in stage work, young people aren’t coming up as fast as they are in film and TV — especially on mega-events like the Olympics, where hardly any really young people have come in. I’ve started a program in large-scale performance at Hunan University, training master’s and doctoral students in the field. I want to mentor them myself, and when I put a team together I look for people like them.

So China’s cultural industries are heading into a brilliant ten or twenty years, concentrated right here. I think this is a good time.

Q: (Abridged) At university, to learn from those ahead of you, you borrowed books from Chen Kaige?

Zhang Yimou: Of course, we borrowed books back then. There were 26 of us in the cinematography department, and I was ten years older than every one of them — they were younger than my own two younger brothers.

So in that class I felt small and thin-skinned; I thought I was much too old. The older cinematographers who lectured us put it like this: after you graduate you start as third assistant pushing the dolly, then second assistant, then chief assistant, then associate cameraman, then camera operator, then cinematographer. It will take you at least ten years to become a cinematographer, so make it count. I graduated at thirty-two. I did the arithmetic: forty-two before I could be a cinematographer. Too slow, I thought.

It seemed like a lot of trouble. Then I looked at the directing department next door. They admitted students at older ages than we did, and that group — Tian Zhuangzhuang, Chen Kaige and the rest — were all older than me. So I thought about switching to directing. That was my second-year idea, mostly so that making a living wouldn’t be so awkward. I asked Kaige and some other classmates to get me books to read. I was too embarrassed to say I was switching to directing.

I said I just wanted a look, to pick up some knowledge. Each of them wrote me a list of ten or twenty titles, and I borrowed and read them all. It was only because my age was awkward that the idea came up. I didn’t think much further.

Q: How do these big live productions and the element of “shadow” work together?

Zhang Yimou: I care a great deal about the visual, about light and shadow. There’s one thing this time that’s different from last time. Last time the show put technology and traditional art side by side. This time I’ve added a conversion: the audience sees a small robotic arm, we film it once, we film it twice, it comes out in real time, we enlarge it — the thing is carried across through the camera and through light and shadow. It’s a two-part visual creation.

I’m sensitive to light and shadow, partly because that was my training, and to the visual, which is the thing that matters most. Sometimes we say the simplest test is whether it looks good. It has to look good. If it looks good, everything else follows. Whatever argument you were making, nobody understands it anyway.

It comes down to one sentence: looking good matters most. The same goes for film. Does it look good? If it looks good, it’s good. If it doesn’t, it’s all over.

Cover image provided by the 2047 Apologue publicity team