The Thrills--and Chills--of Freedom

Twenty years have elapsed since the Beijing Film Academy reopened its doors after China’s oppressive Cultural Revolution and unleashed an outstanding group of filmmakers on the world. The young directors graduating from its first class of the new era in 1982 were dubbed “the fifth generation.” They were given unprecedented, privileged access to Western films, and they sought to incorporate what they had learned into their own work.

The result has been a flowering of Chinese cinema. The Beijing authorities still monitor films for content, but several co-productions made with foreign money have scored subtle political points and attracted international acclaim. They include “Raise the Red Lantern,” “Red Sorghum” and “Not One Less” by Zhang Yimou; “Farewell, My Concubine,” “Temptress Moon” and “The Emperor and the Assassin” by Chen Kaige (the first great filmmaker from the class of ‘82); and Zhang Yang’s “Shower,” which took the international critics’ prize at the 1999 Toronto Film Festival. These films have amassed a substantial art-house following in North America and Europe. Audiences have found them so distinctive, intriguing and visually opulent that for years speculation has been rife about how soon a leading Chinese director might choose to work in the West.

Finally it has happened--and, fittingly, Chen Kaige is the director involved. He has just spent 11 weeks shooting a psychological thriller, “Killing Me Softly,” in England, and is here supervising the film’s post-production. He talked about the cultural differences involved in filming in a Western country while he rested briefly between scenes at Shepperton Studios (20 miles west of London) with his two stars, Heather Graham and Joseph Fiennes.

“It’s very different shooting here,” he said. “For example, we’ve been out on location. It’s winter, so there’s only seven hours of daylight, but I’m told we must have an hour break. That doesn’t make sense to me. Of course, you want to make a film in a civilized way, but in China, if it’s a tight schedule, you’d shoot all day.

“And yet there’s less time here. I spent three years on ‘The Emperor and the Assassin.’ That included 6 1/2 months shooting seven days a week with no break. You can’t imagine doing that here. Here, I’m under pressure to finish everything on time. It’s really tough. I’m not used to it yet. Still,” he paused to smile impishly, “we’re only one day behind schedule.”

He has also become accustomed to employing the master shot, an overall view that covers an entire scene. “In China, we don’t have that. We have a very specific shooting script, and often we’ll cut after one line. So you can need up to 20 shots for a single scene. That takes time. I’ve come to realize I don’t have to do that.”

Chen, 48, is a tall, broad man who strides confidently around the set, smiling often. He has spoken fluent English since the late 1980s, when he spent 2 1/2 years at New York University as a visiting scholar of film studies. “My English is good enough to work here,” he said, shrugging modestly. “It has to be of a certain standard.” (This factor may inhibit Zhang Yimou from working in the West--he speaks English haltingly and needs an interpreter.) Without Chen’s involvement, “Killing Me Softly” might seem a run-of-the mill film. It is an erotic thriller with psychological overtones about a passionate relationship between an American woman in London (Graham) and an enigmatic mountaineer (Fiennes) with a string of dead girlfriends in his past. The film has been adapted from a novel by Nicci French, the assumed name of a British husband-and-wife writing team, Sean French and Nicci Gerrard.

Yet Chen sees virtues in its story that might elude others. “One of the reasons I wanted to do this picture was the erotic element,” he said. “Sex is an important part of human nature, and if you can’t deal with sex, you can’t deal with anything else. But I would never have been allowed to make this film in China.”

He knows this for a fact, having suffered censorship over the years at the hands of China’s National Film Bureau. “Many of my movies got cut,” he said. “The bureau would ask me either to cut parts they didn’t like or abandon the movie. For example, ‘Farewell, My Concubine’ was cut in China. What you saw in the West was a longer version. I said I didn’t think I could cut it. There was nothing wrong with it, especially the part of the film that dealt with the Cultural Revolution. What I experienced in my own life was tougher than what [the film] portrayed.”

Chen is resigned to the fact that censorship is a fact of life in China but still detests it: “Movies are our babies. I don’t want people to tell me, ‘Your baby’s hair is too long, so cut it,’ or ‘Your baby’s too tall, so find a way to shorten it.’ It’s not a decent way to deal with filmmakers.” And those same filmmakers are frequently asked to make propaganda films extolling the government’s virtues: “It’s honestly not easy to be a director in China,” Chen said. “You have to be sure you’re doing the right thing. It’s easy to be corrupted. It’s a temptation, and you have to be sure to say no.”

Was he ever asked to be a propagandist? He laughed: “Of course.” Still, Chen found a way to accommodate the frustrations of censorship; critics in the West have praised his talent for inserting oblique critiques of Chinese society into his films. But, he noted sadly, one of his “fifth generation” contemporaries, Tian Zhuang Zhuang, (who made the key film “The Horse Thief” in 1987) had been unable to cope with harassment from the National Film Bureau.

“His film ‘Blue Cat’ was banned in China,” Chen recalled. “And he received a piece of paper saying he was banned from filmmaking for two years. After that he said, ‘OK, I quit. That’s my attitude.’ And he has quit.” Now Chen seems genuinely delighted to be working in an environment free of such interference. He likes London (“It’s an international city where no one feels like a foreigner”) and intends to spend long hours at the British Museum during his stay. He has long been fascinated by the West, largely from what he has seen of it on film.

“When we were film students, China had been closed for ages,” he recalled. “I was the first student who went to film school in Beijing after the Cultural Revolution. Our professors didn’t know how to teach us, because they hadn’t been allowed to teach for 10 years.

“We were very curious about what was going on outside China. Our film school was pretty far away from the city, so we needed to take a long bus ride to its archive. We’d all go twice a week to see classic movies by directors from America, Japan and Europe.

“We’d see a film like ‘Citizen Kane’ or John Ford’s movies. I was also strongly influenced by the French New Wave and the Italian neo-realists. But for me, it was ‘Citizen Kane.’ You see that movie, and you understand a lot about other people and yourself. After seeing ‘Citizen Kane,’ I knew I wanted to be a filmmaker myself. You become a different person. I experienced that.”

He concedes now that the initial efforts by the fifth generation were amateurish: “When we started, we weren’t professional, and we didn’t know that much about filmmaking. But we were passionate enough, and we had things we wanted to tell people. [During the Cultural Revolution] we had seen people dying in front of us. We knew about political problems, enforced separations from our families. And all of a sudden we had the chance to find a way to express ourselves.”

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Chen’s pleasure at working in the West is matched only by that of his British colleagues on “Killing Me Softly,” many of whom signed up specifically for the chance to work with him.

“He has such impeccable manners,” said the film’s British producer, Lynda Myles. “A lot of people on the crew simply dote on him.”

Joseph Fiennes apologized for not finding words that could adequately convey the experience of working with Chen: “If he asked me to do any role, big or small, anywhere in the world, I’d be off at the drop of a hat. You really feel you’re collaborating on something exciting. In every scene he has this extraordinary understanding of human behavior in any given situation.”

Heather Graham noted: “He’ll read a scene and find things in it that you didn’t find. He makes you feel so involved. Right before a take he’ll talk to you and communicate what a scene means. He’s capable of really inspiring you.”

These words of praise bode well for Chen’s future. He has an apartment in Los Angeles as well as a house in Beijing and expects to make more films in the West. But will he ever direct again in China? “Good question,” he said dourly. “I’m still willing to do work there. And there are interesting stories there that should be told. But I don’t know how much I can do in China anymore.”

That’s a matter of sadness for him, but possibly good news for the world outside China. Recently New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane, reviewing “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” by Taiwanese-born director Ang Lee, floated the suggestion that leading Chinese-speaking directors might go to the U.S. and revive America’s filmmaking culture, just as a generation of middle European emigres had done in the 1930s.

“Well, I won’t go that far,” Chen said demurely. “I mean, I know Ang Lee and [Hong Kong director] John Woo. We’re certainly not from the same part of China, but we speak the same language. I admire them as directors. They bring something quite different from their cultures and put it into the movies they do in the States.

“With this movie I’m doing now, I’m delivering something from my own culture. I hope it can be fresh--maybe something different, maybe something special.”