Bochen Gong Director
Born in Beijing.
Graduated from the Director Department of Beijing Film Academy as an undergraduate, and currently studying for a Master’s Degree at Beijing Film Academy.
Synopsis
Yanbian boy Da Yong is faced with a difficult time in his boxing career, but he still can’t let go of the idea of reaching the provincial team. Confronted with his coach, Mr. Guan, who wants him to stay on as a coach, Da Yong decides to leave him and seek help from his admired senior, Lao Cao . However, after seeing Lao Cao’s downtrodden life, Da yong becomes disillusioned with boxing. By chance, Da yong returns to the boxing ring after seeing his own beginnings in the club’s newest student, Hou Pu…
What was the inspiration for the movie?
Bochen Gong：In 2021 I was working on the same movie crew as Chen Yongsheng (the actor who played the lead role of Da Yong in Lost In Count). The shooting schedule on the wrap day was very tight, and under a lot of pressure, Chen hadn’t been acting very well. After filming a few takes, the director said to him, “That’s it.” But Chen believed he could definitely do better, so he made a request to the director for an extra chance.
But the attempt still didn’t turn out too well, and the director didn’t give him any more opportunities. What I remember vividly until today is that while everyone was busy preparing for the next scene, only Chen was obviously frustrated all the time. In that moment, I saw a character with a strong personality, and I was deeply touched because something similar had happened to me. I suddenly had an idea that I must tell a story about a man who has little talent in boxing struggling to prove himself, and that I must get Chen to be my leading man.
Why did you choose boxing as a vehicle to tell this story?
Bochen Gong：Since I box a lot, I am quite familiar with boxing. Although I didn’t go to a sports school, I went to a boxing gym where all the coaches were retired from sports schools, provincial sports teams, and some even from the national sports team. I heard them talk a lot about boxing, and after going to the sports school to learn more about the situation, I decided to use boxing to tell this story.
The age of 18 to 22 is generally the prime age of a boxer, after which a boxer’s fitness and reflexes will gradually decline, and coincidentally, this time period is just about the same as Chen’s age. Lots of people’s attention is only drawn to the top boxers, and we would think that they must be discovered and trained at a very young age, then enter the national sports team through professional training, which is the smoothest career path. But what is rarely noticed is that many players are eliminated in this process, just like the pyramid structure, fewer and fewer are left. So I’m curious about those who were eliminated, what were their lives like.
Another reason is that, I love genre films and I’m not very good at making literary films, so I ended up making that choice because I’m interested in boxing, and I’m more confident in managing genre films.
Why did you choose to shoot in Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture?
Bochen Gong：I learned through my coach that the vast majority of boxing students are chosen from the rural areas by the sports school, as in my film, the first scene is when Da Yong and the coach, Guan, go to the village to enroll students. I didn’t settle on a shooting location at first, and once when I was talking to my crew member, he said he had just traveled to Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, and what was very special about this place was that you could see a lot of Korean on the streets, so he thought it would be a good visual representation of the remoteness of the place, which could make the story more plausible. Another reason was that the winters in Northeast China are very cold, and the “halitus” was a good way to show the tough training conditions and create an ambience that lasted throughout the movie. And it just so happened that I knew a Korean boy from Yanbian who said he could be my guide, which was very convenient, so I finally decided to shoot in Yanbian.
The overall tone of the movie is dark and cold, only the final scene in the boxing ring is bright, so why is it designed that way?
Bochen Gong：When I wrote the script I thought a rock-like tone would be more fitting for the overall story, but it’s not really completely gray. During the filming process, my cinematographer and lighting technician had been trying to turn up the light ratio as much as possible, and then the colorist adjusted the whole tone, so that even though the tones are all greyish, the audience can still see the detailed information.
Regarding the highlights in the boxing ring, one practical factor is that after all, the student crew couldn’t afford to hire that many crowd members, and with highlights on the stage, the auditorium could be darker to cover that up. Also, I think part of the reason Da Yong kept boxing was because he needed the “holy light” to shine on him.
What role do you think genre elements play in the movie?
Bochen Gong：I love genre elements and I’m good at using them because I believe genre elements are things like primers that help the audience substitute into the story better. I want the audience to feel immersed, to be touched, and hopefully affected while watching my movies, and genre elements help me do that.
For creators, I think the hardest thing when utilizing genre elements is to tell a good story at the same time. In a boxing movie’s storytelling template, the training montage and the final match must exist. Generally, creators subconsciously think that the training montage brings emotional impact, and the final match is a fierce fight that the protagonist must win at the end, but I wanted to try to add more flavor to these two modules. That’s why in the training montage there’s the phrase “Inferior boxing players fight for emotion, intermediate boxing players fight for technique, and superior boxing players fight for timing.” as well as the expression of Da Yong’s tornness and his willingness to fight to the death. Fight scenes can easily turn into shallow sensory stimulation, and when my teacher saw my first draft, he said, “Even though the match is an action scene, there still has to be communication and story.” Later on, the footage of the final match gradually turned into Guan gradually realizing Da Yong’s hidden thought.
Where does the phrase “Inferior boxing players fight for emotion, intermediate boxing players fight for technique, and superior boxing players fight for timing.” come from? How do you interpret it?
Bochen Gong：This phrase was actually put forward by Chen. When we were chatting, he said that he had practiced boxing on purpose to prepare for the role, reading a lot of novels and autobiographies of boxing players, and in the process, he noticed this phrase. I thought it made so much sense at the time, it was very summarizing, and it was exactly the line the movie needed, so I used it. I’ve always felt that when you make a film, especially a genre film, it must not just be the director alone who decides everything and the others just go and execute, but everyone comes up with the ideas that are finally combined to optimize the whole work.
I agree with this statement because I think boxing boils down to a battle of momentum and then seizing the moment to punch. A superior boxing player controls the tempo of the match, and then is keen enough to catch the momentary hesitation in his opponent’s eyes. An intermediate boxing player does not have this kind of awareness and judgment, and is just obsessed with technique. An Inferior boxing player fights with perseverance, relying on emotions. Da Yong sometimes fights with emotions, but sometimes he fights with technique.
The value of this phrase is that it doesn’t just talk about boxing, but it may also remind viewers of something in their own lives. I don’t want to say too much about the quote, so let’s leave some room for interpretation.
The film favors the use of ambient sounds and soundtracks over vocal dialogue, is this your preference for sound handling?
Bochen Gong：I especially valued the sound handling of the movie. Before shooting, I had determined that I must make a purely realistic work, not a bland, naturalistic realism, but one that extracts imagery from everyday life. For example, I must make the audience feel that there must be someone like Da-Yong in reality, but they couldn’t find him.
So how to create that feeling relies on the sound handling. I asked my team to find sounds from the environment to express the emotions of the characters in this scene. My teacher said, each scene that takes place is actually the mental world of the main characters. A very materialistic statement, but it makes sense. When I was writing the script I would visualize the environmental sounds and then look for more inspiration in the field. For example, after Lao Cao was beaten in the toilet, my sound engineer found the sound of a leaking water tap to amplify the emotion. I also requested that when the characters were walking on the snow, the sound effects should make it obvious that the snow was being squeezed, it’s hard for me to say why, but the atmosphere fits the plot better. In short, I had a lot of requests for sound.
For the soundtrack, we made a main melody first, which is critical and commentary. Then we developed the rest of the soundtrack from it.
What is your favorite shot in the entire film?
Bochen Gong：So many images popped into my head. I’ve watched this movie dozens of times in total, and until now there are many scenes that are still quite immersive when I watch them again. One of them is a long shot of the scene in the nightclub. Every time I watch it, I feel that my crew is too amazing for students to present such a big scene in such a good condition. Another one is after Lao Cao was beaten in the toilet, he sat on the floor and smoked a cigarette, halfway through the cigarette fell on the floor, he picked it up and took another puff, it was improvised by the actor, I despised the loser in that moment. Then there’s the moment when Da Yong is walking on the bridge and sees the birds in the sky, and in that moment he instantly relaxes, as if he wishes to be a bird too. And the close-up of Da Yong getting up after being knocked down for the second time in the final match, where his right eye is already swollen, but the power in his left eye is still there. I was very impressed by this look because I felt that I could see the characteristics of the character of Da Yong and the personality of Chen in it, which particularly touched me and it became my motivation when I encountered some difficulties.
Why is the movie an open ending?
Bochen Gong：Having been professionally trained in college, I instinctively think that the movie should have an epilogue scene. During the creative stage, I struggled with it. The original script was that after the final match, Da Yong takes over from Guan as a boxing coach. When he goes to villages to enroll students again, he meets another kid very much like himself, not very skilled but very stubborn, but this time, instead of enrolling the kid very readily, he starts teaching him how to box. The whole movie is gloomy, but in this scene, the sun shines on the faces of Da Yong and the kid, kind of like in Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine. But I also kept asking myself, why did it have to be an ending for Da Yong? Another reason is that it gets dark very early in Yanbian in the winter, and we couldn’t finish the scene before dark, so I just decided to have the movie end abruptly at the shot where Da Yong gets back up and rushes at his opponent.
I wanted to tell a story about growth through this movie, and even though the original epilogue scene could reflect Da Yong’s psychological growth, he is still faced with the question of “winning or losing” and “whether to continue boxing”. But without the original epilogue scene, it’s more like we’re discussing a somewhat existentialist topic: Sisyphus pushes a boulder, knowing he can’t get it up, should he keep pushing? The process of pushing becomes the meaning of what he’s doing. Da Yong decides to compete in the final match because he sees himself as he was at the beginning in a kid, and the very act of fighting on stage is far more important to him than whether he wins or loses. Although the genre film requires that the story must have a consequence at the end, I slightly abandoned some of the rules in order to be able to express it better.
Can you tell us anything about your new production?
Bochen Gong：It’s in the preparation stage now, I just finished the first draft a few days ago and I’ve been revising it lately, so I expect to start the movie towards the end of December. It’s been two years since Lost In Count, so it’s time for a new movie, and I want to practice my directing skills again.
The story goes that the wife ran away after a domestic violence and then the husband took his son with him to look for her. The son was quite resistant to his father, but during the search for his mother, the boy realized that his father was very nice to him, so the boy also started wondering why his mother didn’t take him with her to run away. Later they found the wife, but she found another chance to escape, and this time she decided to take her son with her, but the boy hesitated to go with his mom or just stay with his dad. This decision is not so simple for a six or seven year old. It’s still very much a genre movie.