He Zheng: You Have to Make Something About Your Own Hometown, Like It's a Sense of Mission | How I Became a Director ①

The FIRST Youth Film Festival has pushed a lot of previously unknown names to the surface. We'll introduce you to them.

He Zheng was born in 1992 in Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province. In 2017 he graduated from the Shanghai Theatre Academy, where he studied film and television photography and production. A year later his first feature, Taihang (《太行》), was selected for the 2018 FIRST Youth Film Festival and nominated for Best Director — making him the youngest nominee in the field.

He says Taihang was really just his graduation project. "I still think of it as a piece of schoolwork. Honestly, I never felt it was my debut feature in any real sense."

Taihang takes place in a city at the foot of the Taihang Mountains. Its two leads are Taihang, a directionless high schooler repeating a year, and Captain Li, a police officer who has spent years chasing drug dealers. Shijiazhuang, where He Zheng was born, sits at the western foot of the Taihang range, and the story carries the marks of his own life. In his words: "It's really just fragments of my own life, and some of my friends' lives, pieced together, turned into cinema and strung into one story."

He Zheng sees that as a natural choice. "Everyone starts from their own experience — it's a kind of attachment you carry inside. If you get your first chance to say something, this is what you most want to say."

He can't say whether he likes Shijiazhuang or not; his words carry a certain ambivalence toward the city. At the end of the summer after his junior year, at the start of his senior year, he went back to the Shanghai Theatre Academy and found the subway announcements along the way strangely warm and familiar. Until then he had always meant to build his career in Beijing, which was also closer to home. But in that moment he sensed he would stay in Shanghai. "I thought, damn, I've betrayed the north."

And yet when he talks about the stories that interest him, He Zheng keeps returning to Shijiazhuang. "I think I've felt this since college — that you have to make something connected to your own hometown, like a sense of mission." Where the sense of mission comes from he can't say; it's instinct.

The rock band Omnipotent Youth Society has a song about Shijiazhuang. The lyrics run: "Living inside experience, until the building collapses… Living like this for thirty years, until the building collapses." He Zheng has an Omnipotent Youth Society poster on his own wall, and his feelings toward Shijiazhuang may be as tangled as the band's.

He has a childhood friend who, like him, loves rock music and film, and who once planned to take up motorcycles — but these days the two of them have less and less to talk about. "When we were young we each had our own ideals, but we were still hemmed in by the whole social system, by reality."

He has reached a verdict on Shijiazhuang. "At least in the past, Shijiazhuang was still that kind of traditional industrial city, and it limited how the people in it could live. A person might have seven or eight interests, seven or eight ways of living, but this city can only give you one or two. Over time, generation after generation, people forget the rest exist, and then you live inside that one mode forever."

Shijiazhuang also handed him material. The father of a close friend is a police officer there. "Sometimes when I go home for New Year I'll sit and talk with him at his place. He loves telling stories — a cop has been through a lot — and he'll tell me which ones could be made into a film. He can go on for half a night."

All of it fed into Taihang. Taihang the high schooler is a distillation of He Zheng and his friends; the officer who told him stories supplied a wealth of detail and real experience from a policeman's daily life. In the film the two leads' stories hook into each other, and both are bound up with how He Zheng sees Shijiazhuang.

In the summer of 2016 He Zheng started preparing the film as his graduation project. He pulled in his closest friend at school as his cinematographer, and the two began talking about what style it should have. He finished the first draft of the script around National Day, then made a major revision two months later, rebuilding the relationships between the characters.

The trouble a student project runs into was exactly the trouble He Zheng ran into on Taihang.

By past practice, the school reviewed students' submitted scripts before winter break, which amounted to permission to shoot. But for He Zheng's year, the school pushed the review back to the end of February, after the break — which killed his plan to set the film against a wintertime Shijiazhuang.

His advisor didn't like the script he submitted, either. Beyond thinking it too long — not the short film a graduation project called for — He Zheng suspected the teacher simply hadn't understood it. The advisor wanted to overhaul the script himself, to the point where, as He Zheng puts it, "about the only thing left unchanged would have been the lead character's name."

In March 2017, He Zheng took a crew of more than 20 people to Shijiazhuang. The schedule was tight and the preparation thin, so after each day's shoot he still had to go out with the art director or the production manager to scout locations for two or three days ahead. Some parts hadn't been cast, and he had to pull in friends and relatives at the last minute.

He Zheng refused his advisor's demand to rewrite, and finished the film his own way. To graduate, he handed the footage to the editor and the teacher, who cut it to a little over 20 minutes to meet the school's requirement. On his own, He Zheng kept working, cutting the same footage into a 91-minute feature — the Taihang that exists now.

In the edit he found the film had plenty of problems; some discarded shots were picked back up, a usable stretch pulled out and cut in. By his estimate, about 90% of the takes approved during the shoot made it into the finished film.

"When students shoot something, I think it's very easy to end up missing shots. Say we're filming a conversation between the two of us — we might shoot every angle on your side, but only one on mine. Then in the edit you find that if I don't have enough shots, the rhythm is off, or the cuts don't connect."

His biggest regret may be in what the film is trying to say. He'd rather not go into detail, since it would give things away, but he sounds genuinely rueful: "I admit it's on me — for all sorts of reasons, including my lack of directing experience, and because the money was limited, I probably didn't handle the period setting clearly enough. At the time I thought it was a fairly clever piece of design on my part, but it may have misled the audience instead, or something like that. I do regret it. Frankly, there were just too many problems in my student years that I couldn't solve."

He came to terms with the regret slowly. Many friends who saw the film thought the finished version was open to interpretation. He Zheng's take: "Because those mistakes and shortcomings also gave the film several possible readings — which is actually rather interesting."

He gives his own "student assignment" a completion score of fifty or sixty out of a hundred. "Taihang wasn't nominated for Best Film. If it had been, I'd feel that was going too far." Later he said it again: "If I actually won Best Director, Chinese cinema would be finished."

He Zheng decided film was something worth making a career of in the summer between his second and third years of high school. He looked online for the routes into studying film, and once he understood them, decided to sit the arts college entrance exams.

His parents weren't keen, but they accepted it. His academic grades weren't strong, and the elders in the family all thought the arts track would get him into a better university. Looking back, He Zheng says his love of film came from his parents too. When he was small, every time his father went to the DVD rental shop he let He Zheng pick out a disc he liked. His mother, having heard that science fiction enriched a child's imagination, started taking him from third grade on to watch Science Fiction Film Appreciation (《科幻影视赏析》) on Hebei TV every week, right on schedule.

After two years of arts exams, He Zheng was admitted to the Shanghai Theatre Academy. He has reservations about the school; he thinks its strength is stage art, not film. What still rankles most is that the teachers wrecked his plan to shoot a wintertime Shijiazhuang.

But he believes a school like it offers at least one advantage: only in that kind of environment can you get enough chances to practise. Beyond classroom assignments, as long as you go looking, you can always find friends to shoot the things you actually want to make.

"At first, on set, you might only manage ten shots a day, or five — very few. Because on every shot you don't know when you should be directing the actors, when you should be talking to the cinematographer, you don't even know what you're supposed to be doing, and a lot of things aren't ready," he says. "Then bit by bit you can shoot twenty or thirty shots a day, or forty or fifty. Once you have enough experience, those problems sort themselves out."

Counted honestly, He Zheng didn't get all that many chances to practise. In his sophomore year he and some classmates set up a production crew, which broke up quickly over internal disputes. In his junior year he went up to the Northeast, hoping to shoot a dark-comic road short about an old man driving a tractor. The actor who had agreed in advance dropped out at the last minute, the old man he found as a replacement couldn't read and couldn't follow the script, and what came out of the shoot always felt to him like it was missing something.

"I felt it wasn't fit to show, so I didn't want anyone to see it." Later, someone who had worked on the short uploaded it to a video site. He Zheng was not pleased: "If you want to tell people what you've made, fine — but tell us first, then send it privately to whoever you want. Even if you put it online, at least put a password on it or something."

In that sense, student project or not, Taihang was unlike every student project He Zheng had made before. "I felt the film should at least get a little response, be of some use. I just thought that even entering it in some other competition or whatever might help me, so I told myself I had to finish it — otherwise I'd be letting down the people who helped me. I owed myself that much."

In the summer of 2017 He Zheng graduated from the Shanghai Theatre Academy and set to work on the Taihang that was truly his. He put together a rough cut, expecting about an hour, and got an hour and a half. "I don't have much experience — my grip on what's supposed to be a feature is still pretty weak. I just shot too much, and it turned into a feature."

His friends urged him to cut it down to a short. Under the FIRST Youth Film Festival's rules, anything under an hour counted as a short, and that also fit his original idea better. Looking at the many shots where a character sits there doing nothing for half a minute or a minute, they thought ten or twenty seconds would do.

He Zheng found it hard: "If it isn't that length, it won't get the mood and the feeling I want." That may have something to do with his admiration for Tsai Ming-liang. "It's boring, sure, but I think if you sit down and watch it, it really can put you in a trance." After agonising for a while, he turned his friends down.

Next came the music. He Zheng found a junior-high classmate studying composition, who agreed readily. He Zheng waited — for more than half a year. "In the end the guy just vanished. I was pretty crushed, and had to scramble to get another friend in Shanghai to do the music, which ate up all that time. If everyone had actually been free and we'd worked on it together, it wouldn't have taken anywhere near this long."

To make the FIRST Youth Film Festival deadline, He Zheng called together all the friends helping with post-production, and after a mad rush finally couriered the finished Taihang to the festival's organising committee this past May.

That day happened to be the last day. Just after seven in the evening he called SF Express in a panic, because they stopped accepting packages at eight. He told the courier over and over that it absolutely had to go out that night — otherwise the ship date would read as the next day and the committee would refuse it.

More than a month later, on June 18, the committee's selection notice arrived. He Zheng was overjoyed and pulled his friends out drinking for two days. When the two days were up, he thought to look at the requirements on the notice: "The final version had to be mailed by the 23rd — I realised we only had three days." So there was another scramble. "We barely slept those few days. Everyone rushed to finish, because there were still a lot of small things to fix."

In the self-introduction he wrote for the FIRST Youth Film Festival, He Zheng made fun of himself: "After graduating I stayed on in Shanghai, where I concentrate on doing the laundry and cooking at home." Over the past six months, apart from post-production on Taihang, he has done little other work.

After graduating in 2017 he never intended to find a steady job. The teacher he was closest to at the time was one of the country's top stage multimedia designers, and thanks to that teacher's help He Zheng took part in a lot of stage work.

As multimedia technology has advanced, people staging shows have grown fond of using light and projection to build flashy effects behind the performers. "These days, the moment anyone puts on a new play, whether it fits or not, everyone treats this as an indispensable part of the stage design." But He Zheng thinks bolting new media onto every production is a mistake: "I feel a lot of people are just using it blindly, while plenty of good designs and ideas go unrecognised."

There was the opening concert of the Shanghai Arts Festival one year. "My teacher took me along for that one too. They'd designed a lot of fairly artistic, fairly abstract images, and we all thought they were great. But the director didn't like them — he didn't get them — so he swapped them all for Windows-desktop-style flowers and grass and whatnot. Afterwards my teacher walked us all out, said he was done, said it felt too stupid."

To focus on finishing Taihang, He Zheng stopped taking work at the start of 2018 and waited for his composer friend to finish — a wait that dragged on for half a year. Money got so tight in that stretch that he had to borrow from friends, or he "wouldn't have had anything to eat." After handing Taihang to the committee, he started looking for jobs online and sending out résumés, and was at one point ready to sign. But then the selection news came, and since he didn't like the company anyway, he passed on the steady job.

He Zheng now rents a room in an old housing complex in Shanghai's Putuo District. The room is small, and the household goods in it are the cheap, hard-wearing sort from IKEA. His life is by no means comfortable. In fact, going back to his student assignments, he has always leaned on his parents' money. Taihang's budget was not low for a graduation project; He Zheng and his classmates pooled it, and most of what he put in came from his parents.

"(I myself) don't really have much in savings — it's mostly come from my family. My parents don't actually know how much other people spend making films. And these past few years, when I've asked my family for money, it's been for making films. Normally I try not to have them buy me other things, everyday things. But making films burns money. I'm honestly not someone who's good at earning it, so I have no choice but to ask my family, and it's embarrassing. On this, though, I really do feel my parents have supported me."

Fortunately Taihang was selected in the end. His parents were delighted too; he hears his father now tells everyone he meets that his son made a film and won an award. "After they found out I'd been selected, my dad gave me some money and I paid the rent with it. My mom told me to eat properly."

He Zheng can't yet draw any direct financial benefit from it, but at least he has something to look forward to — a company has already approached him about handling overseas distribution for Taihang.

Even if he wins nothing at all at the FIRST Youth Film Festival, He Zheng, by his own account, has been lucky enough. He is only 25, one year out of film school, with a feature of his own, a place at the most closely watched festival in the industry in recent years, and recognition from the press and the trade.

He has his own fantasies about FIRST, too. If someone there were willing to put more money into him, should he go back to Shijiazhuang and shoot more footage for Taihang? Might some major director notice him and take him onto a crew to train and learn for another two or three years?

Not knowing always feels exciting.

In-text images and the cover image are stills from Taihang.

The lead image is courtesy of He Zheng.