Born in 1965 in Shanghai, Lou Ye is arguably the most stylistic of China’s “Sixth Generation” directors.  He studied film directing at the Beijing Film Academy from 1985 to 1989, and worked as a producer and assistant director on various productions after graduation. In 1993, Lou made his feature debut Weekend Lover (Zhoumo Qingren), which won the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Prize for Best Director at the 1996 Mannheim-Heidelberg Film Festival.  His second feature, Don’t Be Young (Weiqing Shaonu, 1995), was nominated for Best Cinematography and Best Sound at the 1995 Golden Rooster Awards Ceremony of China.  Lou was acclaimed in 2000 as an international art-house auteur with his third feature Suzhou River (Suzhou He, 1999), winner of the VRPO Tiger Award at the 29th Rotterdam Film Festival.  In 2002, Lou finished his fourth feature Purple Butterfly (Zi Hudie).   

 

SYS: How did you start your film career?  Did your family have an impact on you?

LY: I have been studying painting since I was a child.  Before entering the Beijing Film Academy (BFA) in 1985, I attended a vocational high school for fine arts that had been set up by the Shanghai Animation Studio to train new talent for animation films.  Because of my love for painting, my dream was to attend the Central Academy of Fine Arts.  When taking the entrance exam in Beijing, I was told I could list another school as my second choice.  Coincidentally, BFA was also recruiting students at that time.  I therefore added their name.  As it turned out, I was rejected by the Central Academy of Fine Arts in the first round, which made me quite depressed.  But the road to BFA was exceptionally smooth.  There were four rounds of examination, and one by one I passed them all.  Since at BFA I studied film, it was natural for me to choose it as my profession.

Certainly family also had some influence on me.  My parents taught stage and theater performance at the Shanghai Drama Academy.  So, I was able to see many films that were not open to the public, such as Hitchcock’s and Japanese black and white films, including Twenty Four Eyes.   I was young back then and didn’t understand too much of what I saw.  But when these films were shown at BFA I thought, “Yes, I’ve seen these films before!”

When studying at BFA, I habitually skipped classes and went see films.  Wang Xiaoshuai  and I, our entire class even, saw so many films that Zheng Dongtian  once remarked: “Few Chinese directors could compare with you in the quantity of films seen at BFA.”  But the number of films we saw back then no longer seems especially remarkable, now that pirated DVDs are widely available.  There are not too many old films on DVD, though.  [At BFA] we saw a variety of films considered historically important, many of them black and white.  But it took some time for new releases to reach China’s film circle.

 

SYS: I understand you are one of the masterminds behind the influential article “The Post-Yellow Earth Phenomenon in Chinese Cinema,” which is viewed by many as the manifesto of your generation of filmmakers.  By publishing such an article, were you specifically targeting Fifth Generation directors? 

 

LY: “The Post-Yellow Earth Phenomenon in Chinese Cinema” is a result of casual talks several classmates and I had before our graduation in 1989.  Several of us, including myself, Wang Xiaoshuai, Lu Xuechang,  and a few others, drank and chatted at a Beijing friend’s home.  We stayed there for two days and spoke of nothing but film.  At that time, none of us had yet to make a film.  It was just empty talk.  [But] Someone took notes on our conversation and afterwards gave them to Hu Xueyang.   Hu might have been the one who sorted out the notes and later sent the article to the magazine.

We talked about a lot back then, but gradually came to feel that the situation was not quite right: there was only one kind of film being made by one group of directors and one set of producers.  This was not what we had imagined when we thought about Chinese cinema and the Chinese film industry.  We also debated what would be the future of Chinese cinema.  I remember Wang Xiaoshuai said to me: “I absolutely won’t be influenced by the Fifth Generation [directors].”  I replied that this claim itself reflected the influence of the Fifth Generation directors, because if you say “I am not the same as him,” you in fact have some relationship with him.  Perhaps you are opposed to the Fifth Generation tradition, but it cannot be denied that you will somehow continue it.  It is impossible, therefore, to completely dismiss the influence of the Fifth Generation directors.  But this does not mean that there isn’t indeed a dramatic difference in age and life experience between the Fifth Generation directors and us.  There have been astronomical changes in the period that separates the two groups of directors.  The generation “gap,” so to speak, is quite wide.  In France, this 10-year period [of 1980s-1990s] probably does not separate two generations of filmmakers in terms of style, because French society has remained relatively stable in recent development.  This is also the case for the whole of Europe.  But China is quite different.  I believe 10 years of change in China perhaps equal 30 or 40 years [of change] in Europe.  If you select any two French directors today who have a 40-year age difference between them, they will surely differ greatly in style.  In China, those 40 years are compacted in just 10. To compare the Fifth Generation with us, then, I must say that we are miles apart.  Even though some of us are making films at the same historical moment, we in essence are two different species.  I think we are as far apart as the sky and the sea in our views of society and the human race.  This is no longer an issue of just two generations.

Prev - Next >>