China News Service, Hong Kong, November 24th. Title: Interview with Xu Anhua: It is the director's duty to accept comments
China News Agency reporter Han Xingtong
In the spring of 2019, Gulangyu Island in Xiamen gave Xu Anhua a glimpse of Hong Kong in his childhood memories.
Therefore, she chose to shoot "The First Incense" which has been in preparation for many years here.
Recently, during an exclusive interview with a reporter from China News Agency, Xu Anhua, the audacious director, had just returned to Hong Kong from mainland China with an overwhelming discussion about his new work "The First Incense".
After the film was released in the mainland, discussions about casting, adaptation of the original work, and even bad reviews came over.
Xu Anhua leaned on the sofa, with one hand on the back of the chair, and accepted all of these in a frank manner: "If you criticize, I will listen carefully. If you think they are right, I will improve. This is what we must do as a director. Accepting things, both good and bad evaluations, I think it’s just my duty."
Forty years since the filming, "Three Gu" Zhang Ailing, there is no such thing as practice makes perfect, Xu Anhua still finds it difficult.
The lines in Zhang Ailing’s novels tend to be stage-oriented. The transfer of the words and sentences is full of twists and turns. It is enjoyable to read, but it is difficult to translate into film language. "Even if it is a period drama, those lines are spoken by actors. Modern audience."
The adaptation of Xu Anhua and screenwriter Wang Anyi is based on the original intention of being close to modern audiences and their cognition.
Now it is considered by the outside world to pass by the audience expecting to see a "very Zhang Ailing" story.
"If you went to the movie with the original book, you didn't see our changes. I'm not saying that they were wrong, maybe we were wrong." After reflection, Xu Anhua guessed that the shortcomings of the adaptation might be putting the audience in the relationship between the original book and the movie. "They don’t know whether to read a book or watch a play."
When I first read Zhang Ailing's "The First Incense", Xu Anhua was in the year when he was still standing. He only glimpsed an old Hong Kong with foreign and Chinese from the lines, recalling the nuns, mixed-race classmates and so-called upper-class parents in the mission school that he attended when he was young.
Later, after decades of lingering between text and light and shadow, I slowly realized that Zhang Ailing’s writing is valuable in her equal perspective. “She treats foreigners and Chinese from the same perspective, instead of treating them as foreigners or aliens. Or not human. This point of view is very civilized."
Filmmakers familiar with Xu Anhua said that she is a rare intellectual among directors.
Directing Xu Anhua’s documentary "Make a Movie", remember that Xu Anhua said before filming the film "Men Forty" that she had a picture in her heart-a large forest with a bunch of fiery red flowers in the middle. .
The art of artistic conception, and the humanistic care that has always been upheld, have been consistent in the films directed by Xu Anhua.
Regarding these, she just smiled to disassemble the complexity of various discourses, "I did not deliberately have to make literary and artistic films. It may be that my personality and other aspects are suitable for filming, and the results are better. And now the director also Classification, I was classified as a director of literary and artistic films, so I always made literary and artistic films."
In fact, Xu Anhua has always been afraid of labelled things or empty concepts, such as female films, such as lack of funds for shooting, such as caring for marginalized groups.
"Do you understand that if you say one thing too many times, it will be boring?" She said, choosing the subject matter of the filming to see the feeling, never deliberately do it, and don't care about the effect so much.
It's just that as the film industry matures, costs and market benefits have to be taken into consideration, "so it's not as fun and exciting as before."
Occasionally, she still thinks of the "new wave" period that she experienced when she was young, and the days when she "came forward regardless of day and night, regardless of the consequences," she went through.
Now, Xu Anhua, who has passed the age of ancient times, decided to slow down and want to take a good rest for a while, "I'm afraid of stroke!" She loves to talk and laugh, and often makes herself amused by a few words.
At the end of the interview, Xu Anhua volunteered to come up with a "concluding remark", but the next moment he was stunned and laughed: "What am I going to say?" "Well, that's how we are directors." (End)