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MillimeterFade to Black
Jul 1, 2003 12:00 PM, Darroch Greer
Chen Kaige, director
Chen Kaige is a world-class director. Not only has he
made films in his native China that have been critical and financial
successes worldwide — Farewell, My Concubine and The
Emperor and the Assassin — but he also works with an
international crew and draws on a wide vocabulary of film technique.
His latest film, Together, is very much a Western-style movie,
full of sentiment and pathos, about a violin prodigy brought to Beijing
by his father to become a virtuoso. It is a slick, confident film, and
one would never guess that it was made through several cultural and
language barriers in a quest by Chen Kaige to engage a worldwide
audience.
After making several epics spanning many years with many extras, Chen decided to make a more personal film, rooted in his love of classical Western music and his own yearnings as a child. “My father was a filmmaker, and he used to study drama at school a long time ago, before the Chinese Communist Party took over in China. Many Western films were not allowed to be shown to the public in China, particularly before and several years after the Cultural Revolution. But there is a film archive. That's where I went to see movies with my parents. My generation of filmmakers got some sense about Western schools — like French, Italian, or old classical Hollywood films. We're very familiar with that.”
In exposing his new film to outside influences, Chen's most important decision was the hiring of his Korean DP, Kim Kyljngkoo. “When I asked him to come to work with me he said, ‘I cannot come on my own. I must bring my whole team to China.’ That's quite expensive, you know, bringing 15 people to work on a sort of low-budget film. … But finally I said, ‘Fine, great.’ You can't work with a lighting crew where everyone's Chinese and you can't communicate.”
Kyljngkoo didn't just design the lighting; he had very specific ideas about the four main sets and a color scheme. As Chen relates, his DP also knew why he was being hired: “I'm a foreigner, and although our cultures are similar, you want me to have a different eye from you. Something you're familiar with that you never pay attention to, but that I find very interesting. … I said, ‘Right, absolutely.’”
Chen made the Korean team work six days a week instead of the customary five. Shooting lasted 12 weeks and went smoothly, as Chen spends a lot of time using his monitors and is very exacting. There were no surprises in post.
Chen went to Japan to do the sound at Nikkatsu Studio, where he's done the sound for all of his films. He feels the Japanese teams are more experienced and vigilant than the Western teams he's worked with.
“In the West, if you do a final mixing, for example, the mixer always says, ‘We don't need you until three o'clock in the afternoon, so you can come back at that time.’ But in Japan … if you want to leave, even to buy a pack of cigarettes, they become nervous — they say, ‘No, no, no, don't go, don't go. Stay here, stay here. We want to show you something. Listen to this sequence before you go.’ I really enjoy that very much, because we have made decisions through discussions, which are very, very important for a filmmaker.”
Chen is very proud that he was the first Chinese director to work with a Steadicam, and he says that he would like to work more in the West and avail himself of more specialized equipment. “[On] Farewell, My Concubine, my DP said, ‘Why don't we just put the camera on a track? It's the same thing.’ I said, ‘No, I don't think so.’ Because if you put a camera on track, you see the movement of the machine. If you work with a Steadicam operator, you feel that this is the movement of the human. It's very different. … I'm going to shoot this coming September, but I want to work with a Western cinematographer.”
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
