![]() The third star would be Qu Chuxiao (known for his work in the sci-fi blockbuster The Wandering Earth), an actor Chen’s producer, Meng, admired. He asked himself, “What if I cast a really commercial-leaning actor in an art house film?” Chen saw another opportunity for creative challenge in Liu, especially if he cast him to play the moodiest character of the trio. Next was Liu Haoran, best known for starring in the buddy comedy blockbuster franchise, Detective Chinatown (the three installments, released between 20, have grossed $1.4 billion in China). She agreed quickly despite the haziness of his pitch. The first was his eventual female lead, Zhou Dongyu (whom Chen had worked with on his segment of the omnibus film, The Year Of The Everlasting Storm, which premiered at Cannes in 2021). ![]() He then started calling up Chinese actors he had come to know over the years. Like that cinematic landmark, he concluded his Chinese feature would center on an improvised love triangle - two guys and a girl. With only the vaguest notions of a mood for a script, Chen then thought back to one of his favorite films about youth, Francois Truffaut’s Jules and Jim. “Where we were going, it could get as cold as -20 degrees.” “I’m from Singapore I grew up in the tropics and I’ve never shot anything in the winter,” Chen says. For example, since the film would most likely shoot in December, why not set it in one of the very coldest parts of China? So, Chen set the story in Dōngběi, China’s remote northeast, bordering with North Korea. He decided that for nearly every creative choice on the project, he would push him far outside his usual comfort zone. I needed to make this movie to know that I existed as a filmmaker.” “We started in July, with no script, no actors on board - nothing - and we needed to wrap in January, so I could prep for my other film, Drift,” Chen says (Chen later finished that film in late 2022 and it premiered at Sundance to mostly warm reviews this year). He told Meng he needed to shoot a movie - in China and as soon as possible. “And I got really excited about the idea of doing a film that gives voice to this.”Ĭhen then called his former collaborator and producer in Beijing, Meng Xie, founder of the pioneering indie sales and financing outfit Rediance. “I was reading a lot of articles about how young Chinese people these days are struggling, because they feel like they’re not fulfilling their dreams - they feel defeated by the system, or defeated by tradition, and they’re sort of fighting to find a sense of identity,” Chen explains. The answer to the Shanghai critic’s question, he decided, was to shoot a film entirely in China for the firs time - and to make it about the frustrations and yearnings of Chinese youth.Ĭhen had been following a regular current in international press coverage of China’s ongoing social changes - the country’s Gen Z youth were facing rising unemployment rates and often feeling stuck, or adrift, in their lives. ![]() “We had just gone through the lockdowns of the pandemic and I was itching to shoot something.” Suddenly, he had a lot of time on his hands. That same summer, Chen was supposed to begin production on his first English-language feature, Drift, but because of his actors’ other commitments, the project got pushed back into the Spring of 2022. “So what he said just stayed with me for so long.” “I spent three years developing the scripts for each of my first two films, and I was sort of a control freak in the way I worked,” he says. Tobias Menzies Joins Brad Pitt in Formula One Apple MovieĪs the filmmaker wrapped up his time in Shanghai and flew back to London, where he was living at the time, the question came to almost haunt him, he says.
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