Director Zhang Ming: If You're Serious About Something, You Think Long Term

"Keeping the right posture as you walk — that's what feels important right now."

Director Zhang Ming has been busy. Flying from Xi'an to Beijing for a preview screening of his new film The Pluto Moment, he spent the half hour it took to board doing an online Q&A with viewers, at one point unsure which of the questions popping up on his screen to answer first. All of this is new to him.

In May the film had its premiere in the Directors' Fortnight section at Cannes, the only Chinese-language work chosen for the section this year.

Until now, Zhang Ming's name has usually turned up attached to the label "China's Sixth Generation." The Pluto Moment is nowhere near his first film, but it is the first of his films to get a real theatrical release at home.

Twenty-two years into his career, Zhang Ming's name still has nothing to do with the mainstream of the film industry. In 1996 his directorial debut, In Expectation (《巫山云雨》), won several prizes at international festivals; it was then banned for eight years, and Zhang turned for a while to television drama. His path in independent film was blocked again and again, and in recent years all of his major works have been made inside the system. Looking back on the past decade, he feels he has "drifted out of everyone's sight."

The Pluto Moment, years in the making, is for him "a different kind of beginning."

The Pluto Moment tells the story of making a film. A group that includes the director and the screenwriter goes deep into the Shennongjia mountains, looking for the relics and legends around an ancient folk ballad, Song of Darkness (《黑暗传》). The story came out of what happened to Zhang himself about a decade ago. The money trouble the protagonist falls into was Zhang's own.

In the end the Song of Darkness trilogy Zhang had imagined got only a small amount of funding, and on an extremely low budget it came out as a single film, The Bride (《新娘》). The Bride surfaced a handful of times at small international festivals, never opened in Chinese theaters, and never made money.

The Pluto Moment counts as the second film, several years later.

For most of its running time the film moves at an even, almost conflict-free pace; what holds you are the small exchanges between the characters. A cigarette lit, a bag handed over, a glass of water passed — these gestures sketch the currents running under the calm.

Zhang buries a lot of metaphors and images in the film and, as usual, makes no attempt to explain them to the audience. But the image of Pluto is plain enough: the planet farthest from the center of the solar system, the one at the outer edge — as a character in the film says, "even at its brightest it's about as bright as the first grey light of dawn on Earth."

Shot as far as possible within the two windows of dawn and dusk, The Pluto Moment is wrapped from beginning to end in a dim, uncertain light. The director chose that.

It is also how Zhang sees himself within the industry: on the margin, and always there.

Beyond the generational line drawn around 1990, the "Sixth Generation" he belongs to marked the arrival of a group of filmmakers working far more from the self. A strong personal style and a clear aesthetic quickly made Zhang Ming's name in the film business, and created the confusion that has hung over his whole career.

Neither investors nor mainstream audiences had any instinctive taste for that oblique, private style, and for a long stretch of his career the biggest problem Zhang faced was that the money never turned up.

"All my films have been hard to distribute... nearly all their viewers came from pirated DVDs, and later from pirated copies online as well," he said in one interview.

Looked at now, Zhang Ming's films are almost without exception cheap to make and often cast non-professionals — a habit that carried into The Pluto Moment, where Lao Luo, one of the group at the center of the film, is in fact a man from Zhang's home region he has known for years.

For reasons of his own and reasons outside his control, Zhang has stuck to being small and independent, but he has not shut the door and admired himself with no sense of the industry outside. Funding pulled at the last minute, the banquet-table culture of flattery and forced smiles, a producer juggling several languages — the flashes of black humor in The Pluto Moment carry a certain amount of exposure and mockery of the trade.

Many people read that as criticism. Zhang calls it "laughing at myself" — the protagonist's awkwardness, embarrassment and inability to help himself.

Looking again at his past ten years, Zhang turns reflective.

From 2009 to 2014 he moved into filmmaking inside the system, working with local governments on a run of "main melody" films: Folk Songs Sung Across the Way (《郎在对门唱山歌》), Their Names Are Red (《她们的名字叫红》) and Goddess No. 9 (《9 号女神》). Money was finally not the problem, but he had to handle every other demand the government made. The experience has stayed with him.

Zhang is by nature a passive man; he made films with the government because at the time government money was the only money that came looking for him.

"I do think about this myself — whether I can connect more effectively with the environment in China today, so that at the very least the films I make can reach more viewers. Working with the theater chains now, working with Daxiang Dianying, is all about getting the film shown," Zhang said. From December 15 the film gets a short, limited run in theaters nationwide.

"Adapting" and "compromising" describe how his thinking has shifted over the past two years. He still holds firmly to a lot of his ideas, but the bottom line now is "getting it released."

"I don't expect a large audience for my films right now, but I hope the people who want to see them can."

In the past year or two the money has clearly come more easily. The market has suddenly warmed to directors like him, and Zhang reads that as a small bet on a big return — "my films are generally very cheap" — and, going by past experience, they do well at international festivals. After a run of expensive commercial films failed at the box office, capital started looking at the neglected corner of art-house cinema.

At the post-screening event in Cannes, producer Shen Yang made a point of noting what selection for Directors' Fortnight meant: "If it hadn't shown up here, this film would be living through its own Pluto moment, with no clear future."

The film ends on a rather poetic note. The group leaves the mountain village at daybreak; from the cliff they look down on a city not far off, its lights thinning out as the sky begins to lighten. It looks like hope.

Zhang told The Paper in an earlier interview that the original ending was far more hopeless.

Zhang's own situation is much brighter than that. Investors and scripts keep arriving, and his new film, Hot Soup (《热汤》), is already in preparation. What worries him most now is that somewhere in the process he could lose control of his own work.

He has been directing for many years and still feels like a beginner. How to find his own place while adapting to the rules of the market is the question in front of him. "Keeping the right posture as you walk — that's what feels important right now."

Below is a short interview between QDaily and Zhang Ming:

Q: How do you see the past ten years of your career?

Zhang: One sentence: I never left film. I may have drifted out of everyone's sight now, but film never left me, and I never left film.

Q: What confuses you most about the industry itself?

Zhang: It still comes down to finding money from people who understand the kind of films I make. Investors need to understand what I'm making, rather than putting money in without a clue. That matters a lot.

Q: How should we understand "the kind of films" you make?

Zhang: In one word, I'd say serious — serious film. That can include commercial films and art films. But it treats the thing seriously, rather than capital coming in, grabbing a quick profit and leaving.

If you're serious about something, you think about the long term. I think a lot of things in China lack that long view. Nobody feels secure, so people grab what they can grab and do whatever chance puts in front of them. A filmmaker needs something to expect over the long term; only then can a creative life carry on in decent shape.

Q: When you were younger you went through a sharper, more combative phase, didn't you?

Zhang: I was stubborn about my ideals for film. Back then there were probably a lot of things I got wrong, a lot of naive spots, and I certainly didn't handle things as carefully as I could have.

Q: In how you think about filmmaking, what has changed and what hasn't?

Zhang: The films I made a few years ago, five years back, were a new experience for me. I hadn't worked with the government before; over those years I made four or five films, all with the government, all pushed forward by them. There was no commercial pressure, but they had demands of their own. Going through that, I came to understand the difference between purely commercial investors and purely governmental demands. Under those conditions, on that premise, I could use my own work to fit the conditions and still keep a certain quality, a guarantee of standard. I think that was a valuable experience. It has stayed with everything I've made since.

Q: You just said capital is gradually no longer a problem. Roughly when did that turn happen, and how do you see it?

Zhang: In the past year or two. I probably have a lot of plans for next year now, with different investors and different producers coming to me about different films. But I definitely still want to make the one I most want to make, which can put me at odds with the investors. Investment has become relatively easier than it used to be, but capital brings demands of its own, and that's the new problem to face.

The biggest rule of creation is that you can't put up with formulaic work for long — you don't have that much patience — otherwise the work turns into a formula. The essence of creation is that it has a new form of expression; that should hold whatever type of film it is.

Q: You started making films fairly early. How have the industry's changes over the past decade or so affected you?

Zhang: I've basically stayed outside the whirlpool — I've never really been pulled in. In that sense, even though what I make is very much about things happening in society, the way I make it may not be inside the mainstream. It's like my new film, The Pluto Moment — Pluto is the star farthest from the center of the universe, still out at the edge of the circle.

Q: Do you worry that from here on, wanting more people to see your films will force you into the whirlpool?

Zhang: If I walk into it, I'll do it knowingly. I won't be dragged in. I'll watch the road myself and go one step at a time, watching each stair.

Q: The film itself is about making a film, and some reviews take it as a quiet dig at the whole film market and the way capital works. Is that right?

Zhang: It isn't mocking the whole film market and industry. Most of the time it's laughing at myself. The character in the story realizes it himself — realizes he's fallen into a bind and wants to find a way out.

Q: The same as your own state?

Zhang: You could say so. A life is made up of countless long moments, and those moments often turn into a passage, a process. That was a low period for me, a period with no clear direction, and what I understood about the work then came out of it.

Q: How do you live with a state like that?

Zhang: Through film — thinking one up, or making one. That's how I fight the darkness in life.

Q: Over all these years, do you feel you've grown or changed as a filmmaker?

Zhang: It's simple, I think. The Pluto Moment is, for now, the work that pulls everything together: in my own style, with a very deliberate aesthetic in it.

Q: What state are you in right now?

Zhang: I've come out of that state, of course. The road ahead is clear now, but how do I walk it? What should my posture be? That's my own question. The chances you meet now are much wider than before, but there could be traps. It may look flat, but there may still be a trap, so keeping the right posture as you walk is what feels important right now.

Cover image: a still from the film. Courtesy of Daxiang Dianying.