Feiran Zhang Director
Born in Zhenjiang City, Jiangsu Province in 2005, currently studying at Zhenjiang Middle School in Jiangsu Province. He enjoys writing, playing the piano, and watching movies. He is a director candidate who works hard and studies wholeheartedly. He loves the new wave in Taiwan and has been trying to find a connection between Schumann and Hou Xiaoxian’s predecessors. He is very persistent in exploring how to make literary films not boring.
Synopsis
This is a stunning debut film – there used to be a strange old man living in a private house in Tuergang, Shangdang Town. According to the villagers, he made cakes all day long, as if he had been in a daze. When the filming team learned everything and decided to rush to Lao Zhang’s house, which was rumored to be increasingly mysterious and full of absurdity, they found that the room was already empty.
Looking at the two cakes placed in the yard, the quiet and unfamiliar countryside seemed to inspire the director, evoking his longing for a loved one who had lived in agony due to his insistence on himself, as if he were right in front of him at the moment······
Can you use a few words to evaluate the protagonist of ‘Salted Cake’ ？
Feiran Zhang：The prototype of the protagonist I shot is a comrade of my grandfather, who is his best brother in the army. I call him Grandpa Sun. My biggest impression of him is that I went to his house to help him install a computer in junior high school. I asked him what his requirements were, and he said he could send QQ and play cards. When I visited him again, he was already playing League of Legends. I used to think he was a very trendy and cool person, but he was also isolated, contradictory, and disconnected.
He lives on the edge of the crowd, he is very independent, has his own world, and cannot integrate into the crowd. I think this emptiness is not due to geographical emptiness, not like the Peach Blossom Land, but when we talk about him, there is a feeling of both unfamiliar and familiar, it is a psychological unreality. Before starting the filming, I told the team that this time the subject was a person living in a semi basement. His head could see the entire countryside, his ears could hear everyone’s footsteps, but his feet and heart were hidden underground.
Actors are all middle-aged and elderly people, and the difficulty of actor scheduling should be relatively high. As a high school director team, how do you solve the problem of actor scheduling?
Feiran Zhang：In fact, the actors did not intentionally look for them because there were many elderly people gathered at the scene, including the filming venue, which were all places for elderly activities, such as the elderly activity center and nursing home. The more difficult thing is to adjust their performance. Because I found eight or nine elderly people at that time, half of whom were illiterate. They couldn’t read the script and didn’t know the lines they were going to say. So I would simply tell them four or five words, and they would expand their sentences based on these core words. The sentences they ended up saying were completely different from what I wrote in the script, but I feel like leaving this power to the actors themselves, Allowing actors to unleash their subjective initiative is actually half the effort for making movies, and this is a very important point that I have learned throughout the entire filming process.
In the film, there are many sections that use dialects for dialogue. Why do you want to design this way?
Feiran Zhang：There is still a feeling of cultural output, I think it is still quite important for now. There is actually no essential difference between Mandarin movies and dialect movies. From the perspective of language itself, it is a tool of expression. I believe that dialects themselves have a unique texture, which is that they can quickly bring us all into a cultural context, allowing us to quickly understand the time and space in which the movie takes place, including the social class and environment in which the movie is located.
When we speak in dialect, I feel that on the one hand, it is a way to eliminate barriers. Modern people like to label themselves, including speaking Mandarin and dialects, but speaking dialects is a very friendly thing. When the film comes up, the first sentence in it is dialect. If it were me, I would be completely different from that actor and character, It can establish a bridge of communication, I think you don’t treat me as an outsider, you treat me as a person of your own. So I think dialects will never be exclusive to literary films. Dialects are an expression element that can be used in all movies.
I have always believed that making a movie is about the director’s perspective and understanding of the world. It’s about what kind of movie I make that I actually want to make for everyone to see. What I want to make is nothing more than what I see every day. The elderly people in my film have been using dialects to express their emotions throughout their lives, and every move they make in conjunction with language, their expressions, and every wrinkle on their face, They will align with the dialects they have spoken for decades. If you ask them to act in Mandarin, they will be deprived of their ability to express themselves.
What was the biggest problem you encountered during the filming process?
Feiran Zhang：I feel like the elderly in the village are very practical in everything they do, but in fact, they are not suitable for this movie. What I want them to feel is that they don’t care about this old man, so I hope they can speak vaguely and vaguely, hoping that his mind will assume that this matter is not true. The most difficult part of the entire filming process is to make everyone believe and realize that many things in the film are fake and not true. Because they were standing in that place, their appearance in the camera was already realistic enough.
Do you have any other considerations for setting up this rather obscure outcome?
Feiran Zhang：When I watched ‘The Crossing’, I had a lot of hostility towards the shark in that fish tank. I always felt that there was too little white space at the end of that film. Why did he have to release that shark in the end? So when I was filming this film, I specifically made it a little extra, and it turned out to be a bit too much.
In this obscure ending, I really want to say: this old man may have passed away and is no longer in this world. When I was filming the entire film, I was very conflicted. I wanted to make you believe it and also wanted to tell everyone that it was fake, so I didn’t come up with a very precise ending myself. At that time, this was the best performance method I could think of. I have always believed that. Placing something that should be eaten in a place that does not belong to eating can give people a wonderful physiological response.
Which director and movie genre do you prefer?
Feiran Zhang：Hou Xiaoxian is my favorite director. I like his “Dust In The Wind” and his “The Time To Live And The Time To Die”. If one of his films is my favorite, it must be ‘The Time To Live And The Time To Die’. I think Hou Xiaoxian will never think about whether the story he constructed is a tragedy or a comedy when filming, and this is what he experiences in life. However, he creates a sense of sadness, which is only what we can see and feel. I really like this style.
There is a scene in director Hou Xiaoxian’s film “Dust In The Wind”. At the end, the boy goes home from the army and squats next to the vegetable field. His grandfather is planting in the field, and he hears his grandfather say that this year’s harvest will come. The faded cloth bag hanging on the edge of the field is swayed by the wind. At that moment, I was suddenly particularly touched. I think the sadness directed by Hou Xiaoxian is very soft. His sadness comes from a family, and in depth, it is actually a person’s concern about the beauty that is about to pass or the time that is slowly passing away. He wants to keep the beautiful moment, but ultimately cannot. Compared to the beautiful moment, all moments in life are like darkest moments. For director Hou Xiaoxian, he often allows sadness to dissolve in the kind of scenes full of a sense of life, and this kind of sadness actually has a greater aftereffect. The people in the film directed by Hou Xiaoxian live a very free life. They freely want to do what they want to do, but in the end, they find that no matter how many things they do, they still return to their original place. Even if they don’t get much, they end up losing. However, the film directed by Yang Dechang has always been losing and has never received anything.
In fact, when I first designed the split shot script, I borrowed from it and tried my best to imitate many shots of Director Hou Xiaoxian. However, when I went to shoot on site, I actually shot more according to our own understanding of the story. After filming, I also realized that Hou Xiaoxian is not so easy to become.
Do you have anything to say about teenagers who are interested in movies?
Feiran Zhang :Recently I have been reshaping or reconstructing some of my movies, or many things. I think any director needs to realize that we are living in this world, and we must realize that we are living, and we cannot make movies that surpass life. We can never make perfect films. I think the vitality of movies, including the vitality of a director, always comes from life. When you throw away life, everything is over. The director should be a clear observer, but at the same time, he should not be above life. He should be living in life and should live like all normal people.
I think the director must be a person who is both romantic and realistic. As a director, it is actually the existence of the soul of a crew. You need to understand many things, and you need to have your own views and understanding of many things. So the director must learn more, realize that there is no end to learning, and humbly view what you have already mastered and what you have not yet mastered. What you know, or what you learn, precisely determines what kind of film you can ultimately produce and what kind of director you can become. The film made is actually a reflection of the director’s values, so the director is really important.
Another thing I want to say is to cheer up. It’s a creative process where everyone is happy and truly happy to shoot together. It’s a process where everyone is mobilizing their valuable and sincere life experiences and emotions, and then bringing them together to complete an exquisite artwork. Of course, there is no need to make movies as sacred or as inviolable as religious beliefs. With a tolerant heart, try to appreciate the beauty of different movies.