Director Rao Xiaozhi: "Like My Film's Title, I'm a Nobody Too" | 100 People With Ideas

"For me, what this film is mainly about is building people up — we even named it 《无名之辈》, nobodies — so I always say the credit belongs to the actors."

Before that film — A Cool Fish in English — pushed him into the public eye, Rao Xiaozhi was known inside the industry as a theatre director.

Rao's plays, approachable and funny, were favorites with college students. His "Hello" series — Hello, Robber! and Hello, Madman! — sat alongside Meng Jinghui's Rhinoceros in Love and Stan Lai's Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land among the works university drama troupes staged most often.

"Mainly because my plays aren't that complicated — not so complicated that they can't get their heads around them. I made a lot of my plays in my twenties, before I turned 30. My thinking then really was young. I don't mean immature; it was simply what I thought at the time, so it was probably what a young person at that age ought to think," Rao, now 38, told QDaily.

With almost no marketing before release, A Cool Fish became a market favorite on word of mouth alone — and pushed Rao well beyond the theatre world. On its third day in cinemas it beat Fantastic Beasts 2, which opened the same day, in single-day box office; by day five it had passed 100 million yuan. On November 21, its sixth day out, it overtook Venom, starring Tom Hardy, to take the single-day box-office crown. Its dignity-starved small characters — a down-and-out security guard desperate to become an auxiliary police officer, a woman left disabled and tied to a wheelchair, and a petty thief with outsized ambitions, played by Chen Jianbin, Ren Suxi and Zhang Yu — drew praise as well. On Douban the film scored 8.3.

As of now, A Cool Fish has taken 350 million yuan.

Although he graduated from the Central Academy of Drama, Rao's ties to film run just as deep: most of his childhood memories involve movies, while the one or two local-troupe plays he saw as a child left the opposite impression — something closer to a bad experience. He dreamed of becoming an actor, and even after he enrolled at the Central Academy of Drama the pull of film stayed with him.

In 2007 Rao spent a year trying to make a film; it came to nothing. He did not take the director's chair until a producer who had seen the stage version of Hello, Madman! approached him about adapting it for the screen. A Cool Fish came about the same way: Emperor Motion Pictures came to him after seeing another of his plays, Idiots.

"What I've always wanted to say is that my work — film or theatre — is my thinking and my understanding at that moment. I'm no master. With A Cool Fish, I can't give any answers either. I'm the same as the film's title: I'm a nobody too, spinning inside this whirlpool, unable to get out," Rao said.

The idea for the play Hello, Madman! came from an Italian news story Rao read, which set him thinking about where sanity ends and madness begins. The play takes place inside a psychiatric hospital, where seven strangers are locked up together; in their struggle to get out, the ugliest parts of human nature come fully into view.

The repeated reversals in the Chengdu case of the woman driver who was beaten were one starting point for the play Idiots. Rao wanted to stage a reflection on collective unconsciousness. Set in the future, Idiots turns on a law called the Kevin Act, which holds that if you cause someone else to commit a crime, directly or indirectly, you are guilty too. Say you give a stranger directions and he kills someone once he arrives; under the act you share the legal responsibility.

"The reason theatre is called theatre is that inside the theatre space it has to contain philosophical reflection. We all know the theatre is a space for exchange; without philosophical reflection, to me it isn't theatre," Rao said in an interview, explaining that he wants to raise questions in the theatre and get audiences thinking.

In 2016 the film version of Hello, Madman! made little impression at the box office, taking just over 15 million yuan. Rao said he had deliberately tried to erase the traces of the stage play, but audiences still found it too theatrical.

"First, I think it probably really did have a theatrical flavor. Second, there's a preconceived idea at work. Third, the closed-space setting of Hello, Madman! makes people feel they're watching a stage play," Rao said of the adaptation.

A Cool Fish is billed as an absurdist drama, and it too is a record of what its director was thinking at the time. Rao pays close attention to absurd events in real life: a news story about a Spanish woman who pretended to be blind for 28 years to avoid socializing kept him and Chen Jianbin laughing for most of a year.

"It's probably a matter of what you pay attention to. I find life fun to watch, and people too," Rao said. "Because to me, China is still a worldly society, finely divided. There are so many people that nothing stays isolated the way it does in the West, where the sense of separation is much stronger. In the West, if you want to be left alone, you really can be. In China, if you want to be alone — especially in a small place — it's a bit hard. In big cities we're becoming more and more independent now. Take someone like Ma Xianyong: something huge happens to him, and before long he's dragged out to play mahjong again. He licks his wounds alone late at night, but he still has to get through the worldly business — people still try to set him up with someone. He still buys on credit. He still has a life to keep living. That's the part we find interesting."

Although the film is billed overall as an absurdist comedy, Rao did not shoot it the way comedies are shot. Pan Binlong, who plays Big Head in A Cool Fish and has appeared in comedies including Jian Bing Man and Goldbuster, suggested plenty of gags during filming. Rao turned them down.

"I didn't shoot it as a comedy, but I still define it as an absurdist comedy," Rao said. "From the actors' side, we weren't trying to add comic scenes on purpose. We looked for comic points that might come out of the characters themselves — points that fit the characters' logic and grew out of the situation."

In Rao's eyes the film A Cool Fish and the play Idiots are two entirely different things; calling one an adaptation of the other doesn't hold. The film takes only the relationship between the disabled woman played by Ren Suxi and the two thieves, plus the opening in which the thieves break into her room. The rest has nothing to do with the stage play.

Theatre's mark on A Cool Fish shows up mainly in the actors. Chen Jianbin, who won Best Actor at the Golden Horse Awards for A Fool, was Rao's senior at the Central Academy of Drama. In Rao's words the two are the same kind of person: theatre shaped both their worldviews, both love Samuel Beckett and Chekhov (Rao has a tattoo of Beckett, author of Waiting for Godot, on his arm), and they feel the same way about society and the small people inside it.

The character Ma Jiaqi, too, grew out of the role Ren Suxi played in Idiots. And before he drew attention with the much-discussed Dying to Survive and the Golden Horse Best Film winner An Elephant Sitting Still, Zhang Yu had already performed in the stage productions of Hello, Robber! and Idiots.

On a flight back to Beijing from the Edinburgh theatre scene, folk singer Yao Shisan's song "The Blind Man" came through Rao's headphones. He had thought he carried no homesickness at all — he saw leaving Guizhou for the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing as a breakthrough — but the song, sung in Guizhou dialect to lyrics drawn from the Song-dynasty poet Liu Yong's "Bells Ringing in the Rain," brought his hometown back to him.

Rao thought of a distant relative in Guizhou who had died, and found he could not recall a single detail of her life; from there he thought about the people back home. Those memories eventually produced A Cool Fish. (Yao Shisan later appeared in the film himself, in a cameo as a street singer.)

That origin decided the film's Southwestern Mandarin. "In a setting like this, a city in the southwest, if I had them speak standard Mandarin I don't think it would be vivid. It would feel strange to me. I'd feel these characters had no soul," Rao said of the film, shot on location in Duyun, Guizhou.

Five years have passed since his last play, Idiots. Rao is planning his next stage work, and a new film script is in development. He says his focus in film from here will be original work: "Actually, if I hadn't come from theatre, and if the first film they brought me hadn't been Hello, Madman!, I'd never have thought about adapting my plays for the screen... So from now on I won't be adapting my plays — though of course, if the right one comes along, it's still possible, since I don't have that many plays anyway."

Film or theatre, Rao describes himself the same way — "a storyteller": "I'm fairly lucky in that I have a kind of power: the power to speak through my work. I'm someone who likes telling stories, and that's finally why I became a director. I think I'll just keep playing that role well. I might tell a story on stage, or I might tell it in a film."

More From Our Conversation

Q = QDaily

A = Rao Xiaozhi

Q: What's the biggest way theatre has influenced how you work on films?

A: I think the biggest way theatre has influenced me — or people like us, the ones who came out of drama school — is that your concern for life and for society carries a theatrical quality. Because what nourished you were those playwrights and those famous plays. So it doesn't only affect you when you're directing a film; it affects you in everyday life too.

Q: From the point of view of directing actors, what's the coaching process like when you're making a film?

A: With actors this experienced there's basically no coaching needed; it's a matter of talking with them. As the director I only need to hold the direction — what feeling we actually want to give the audience. As long as they don't go outside that, I think they're excellent actors in their own right.

Q: What do you mean by holding the direction and the feeling you want to give the audience — the fate and dignity of small, ordinary people?

A: For me, what this film is mainly about is building people up — we even named it 《无名之辈》, nobodies — so I say the credit belongs to the actors. They made the characters stand up, and what comes through the characters is the fate they carry. The things you see happen to them in the film reach the audience through the actors; it's enough if it makes people feel some resonance, some empathy, if they find a shadow of themselves or someone near them in it.

Q: Does a label like "small people" sum up your preference in stories?

A: I think it's mainly about human nature; you really can't just say small people. Shakespeare wrote small people, but he wrote the great ones too, right? So you really can't say what we like has to be people at the bottom. Look at A Cool Fish — there's a boss who isn't badly off, he's just fallen on hard times, but he did well for himself before that. Ma Xianyong is the same; you could say he had it good before, too. So on this point I don't think you can say we only make films about small people. When we choose a story, what matters most is whether the story and the people in it can carry what we, at that particular moment, want to convey about our own feelings.

Q: It seems different people understood the characters differently. In the first draft, the ending had Zhang Yu's character shot dead in a hail of gunfire, and he apparently liked that ending, but you later changed it to the version that reached cinemas. Where did your readings diverge?

A: It's not quite right to call it the first draft; it was one draft among several, since we had quite a few endings, and that was one version. To me, apart from the age gap, Ma Xianyong and Glasses are basically the same kind of person. I felt one shot was enough: the bullet that hits Ma Xianyong hits Glasses in the heart. They both take it.

Q: Then why did Zhang Yu prefer that version?

A: He probably felt it was a more complete arc for the character he played. I haven't talked it through with him — no time yet. There was one time he'd had a few drinks and blew up about it, at me. But everyone has their own angle. Take the characters and actors in this film: a lot of them never even met on set. It's not that they knew nothing about each other's storylines, but at the very least they didn't know how we were shooting the other threads. I'm the one holding the whole thing together, so I had to think about it as a whole. What he was talking about was probably how he felt inside his own thread — and from there it felt more complete to him.

Q: There's also been some criticism of the multi-thread narrative — that some characters and threads are more fleshed out than others, and that where the threads meet they don't do much to drive the plot. What do you make of those comments?

A: I've seen those too. I don't have strong feelings about it; I think it's fine. Of course, for reasons of pacing and running time, we did drop a lot. Take the Gao Ming thread, played by Wang Yanhui — we really did cut a lot out of it. But that was also a matter of overall balance. This is a commercial film after all, and between running time and pacing you always have to give something up.

Q: A lot of people mentioned that the scene where Ren Suxi's character loses her dignity left a deep impression. Can you say more about shooting it, and the thinking behind it?

A: These three actors — Ren Suxi, Zhang Yu and Pan Binlong — joined the shoot fairly early. They had about a month, on top of practicing the dialect, to work their characters through until everything held together. So shooting it wasn't hard for me. They're all good actors; they can get to that sense of shame. And the staging on set delivered too.

Q: There are some romanticized moments in the film — helping Ren Suxi's character fulfill her dying wish, say, and the ending where the criminals lie on the ground watching fireworks. What was the thinking behind shooting those?

A: I think ideas like this are sometimes hard to describe; they're a matter of inspiration. The lollipop bit, for instance — I handed him a lollipop on the spot, while we were shooting. It suddenly came to me that on Xishan Bridge, Big Head should give Zhenzhen a lollipop. As for the photograph, our earlier plan was for the group to go out somewhere, an amusement park or something. Later, because of the shooting schedule and other things, and while we were putting the script together, everyone felt it wasn't really necessary.

Q: In an earlier interview you singled out the example of the Spanish woman who pretended to be blind to avoid socializing. Is that the same "worldliness" you're describing?

A: That's right, so it has a great deal to do with your own way of observing. Because life actually holds a lot of absurdity — in some sense its nature is absurd. Plenty of things, once you put them in a film, strike people as hard to believe. To me they really do happen in life; it's just that we compress them into a film, or line up a series of absurd events inside one. Our time, our lives, run longer than a film does. Over a lifetime plenty of things stop surprising us. But once it's up there on the screen, it becomes a magnified shape.

Q: What's your usual standard for judging whether something has turned out well?

A: Instinct and experience, mostly — or a standard I use to guide myself: does it move me. It has to move me first; only then do I start thinking about moving the audience or anyone else.

Cover image from: Douban Movies