JOURNEY TO THE MIDWEST
Famed opera director (and Gorillaz collaborator) Chen Shi-zheng discusses his debut film, DARK MATTER
Actor Liu Ye and director Chen Shi-zheng on the set of DARK MATTER.
By Hua Hsu
Though DARK MATTER is director Chen Shi-zheng’s first film, he might be one of the most distinguished artists the AAIFF has ever hosted. The award-winning theater and opera director has been a fixture in the global arts scene for nearly two decades, even earning the title of Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters from the French government in 2000. During this remarkably productive span of time, about the only thing Chen did not do was make DARK MATTER, a film he began thinking about in the early 1990s. While DARK MATTER borrows heavily from the true story of a disgruntled Chinese graduate student who went on a shooting rampage in 1991, the film doesn’t traffic in violence. Instead, DARK MATTER explores issues of displacement and disillusionment, as well as the at-times absurd setting of the university campus. Fresh off the successful debut of his latest work, the Gorillaz-assisted, genre-collapsing opera Monkey: Journey to the West, Chen talked to us about the ups and downs of making DARK MATTER.
Cinevue: First off, I was curious about what inspired you to pursue filmmaking?
Was it a natural progression following from your work in theater and opera, or was it just this particular story that entranced you?
When you say "progression" it implies that one thing follows after another, but for me, stage and film are both possibilities for artistic expression that co-exist, and I try to find the right medium for the story. In the case of DARK MATTER, I always saw it as a story that needed to be told in film.
Cinevue: Can you walk me through the process here: did you originally come up with the idea of DARK MATTER, or was it a pre-existing script? What was it about the story that intrigued you, and how did you come across it?
The idea for DARK MATTER had really been with me since 1991. I was reading articles about the tragedy at the University of Iowa, and besides being profoundly shocked, I remember being deeply stirred by it and trying to get at what might have been the motivation behind such an action. The movie is not about that incident, but about the human experience of disillusionment and despair and confusion that happens when you move into another world, into a culture that is so different from your own.
At the time I had been living in the U.S. for four years, and had a lot of friends in graduate programs who were struggling with some of the same issues. A few years later, I started talking with my friend Billy Shebar, who is a writer and filmmaker, and we started to work out a script. From there it was just a really long, arduous process with a lot of ups and downs, stops and starts, to actually get the film made. In the end we had very little budget and very little time. We shot the whole movie in twenty days.
Cinevue: How was directing or casting for film different from (or possibly similar to) your previous experiences directing for the stage?
Casting was very similar, in that you look for the actors who can deliver your vision and then you hope their schedules will work out. Directing was very different. In theater and opera you start with fewer people and end up with a lot of people on the stage. In film, you start out with lots and lots of people on the set and in the end it's just you and your editor sitting in a dark room all day and all night eating pizza.
Cinevue: In particular I was thinking about the film's score—I really enjoyed Van Dyke Parks' work—as well as the eclectic musical selections. Was it different managing a vision for film, without built-in cues for music?
I had certain music in my head when I was shooting, and had selected a Chinese children's choir because of its purity and innocence, and because that kind of music—Chinese children singing American folksongs—was very popular during the late 80s and early 90s. That coincides with a time when many Chinese students were romanticizing about coming to America. Van Dyke added beautiful orchestrations underneath.
Cinevue: I thought Liu Ye and Meryl Streep were great—had you worked with either of them before?
I had not. I cast Liu Ye in China, and this was the first time he's ever worked in English. He was great. Meryl was a dream to work with. She is the angel behind this whole project.
ACV: Do you have any anxieties about the film being misunderstood or misread, in light of this being a somewhat controversial year for what the news media might refer to as "disgruntled Asian American men"?
No. That's not what this film is about.
ACV: Do you have any future film plans? And how did your current Monkey: Journey To The West project come together?
I hope to make more films and have a couple of ideas I am starting to work on.
I was commissioned by Théâtre du Châtelet to create a new opera. I've wanted to do something with the Monkey story since I was a kid, and I've also wanted to make a circus opera, and luckily they loved this idea. We needed a composer and set designer, and I met Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett, a.k.a. the Gorillaz. We went to China together to do a lot of research and felt that we could make something fantastic out of it. Monkey just finished its premiere at the Manchester International Festival and got tremendous reviews.
It's going on tour soon. It's really a new kind of theater, with animation and acrobats and martial arts and opera and folklore and Buddhism...I hope you have a chance to see it.
Hua Hsu is the editor of CineVue. A frequent contributor to Slate, he will join the English Department at Vassar College in the fall.