BBC World Service
7 March 2001

The Chinese film director Chen Kaige, is perhaps best known for his successes with high brow screen epics such as Farewell My Concubine and The Emperor and The Assassin. However he has recently finished his first film in English, a psychological thriller, entitled Killing Me Softly.

Kaige was recently in London for the films post-production. Speaking to Di-An Chen, from the Mandarin Arts Review programme, he discusses his change in style and the highs and lows of filming in the UK.

The Fifth Generation

Winner of the Palme d'Or prize at the Cannes film festival for his epic Farewell My Concubine, Chen Kaige's international reputation has been defined by his ability to depict episodes in China's complex history. As one of the first film makers to emerge following China's oppressive Cultural Revolution, Kaige was amongst the young film directors dubbed "the fifth generation".

Graduating from the Beijing Film Academy in 1982, Kaige was determined to share China's experiences with the world. Of this period he has commented:

"When we started, we didn't know much about filmmaking. But we were passionate enough, and we had things that we wanted to tell people. During the Cultural Revolution we had seen people dying in front of us. We knew about political problems, enforced separations from our families. And all of a sudden we had the chance to express ourselves."

Killing Me Softly

Having spent two and a half years studying in New York in the 1980s, Kaige not only polished his filmmaking skills but also became fluent in English. This, coupled with his success with western audiences, has inevitably led him to crossover into English filmmaking.

His new film stars Joseph Fiennes and Heather Graham. It is an erotic thriller focusing on the obsessive love between an American woman in London and an enigmatic mountaineer.

Based on the bestseller written by British authors Sean French and Nicci Gerrard, under the joint name of Nicci French, the book belongs to the genre of Crime Writing. However viewers may find themselves more concerned with the psychological state of the two characters than discovering whodunit. Kaige explains:

"I think the story is basically about peopl's inability to communicate... it illustrates the increasingly apparent coldness between people today – not just in the West, but in China as well. Truth is beauty, and what we hope to do is to depict this truth in the film."

Having said that the film inevitably differs from the book. The main difference being that the female character is English in the text and on screen she is American. Whilst conceding that this change was partly due to "commercial considerations", Kaige is intrigued by the perspective that this character brings to the film, he comments:

"It's rather like experiencing her psychological journey: how she first met the man, how she fell in love, got married then became suspicious of him... You now have a foreign woman living in a cosmopolitan city. It's quite likely that she develops fears and feelings of insecurity."

Erotic Thriller

Whilst Killing Me Softly is erotically charged it does remain a psychological journey and as Kaige explains it was difficult for the actors to maintain such a level of intensity without the passion becoming repetitive:

"I want the characters and the plot to come together organically. You can't introduce much that hasn't been tried before into the physical aspect of the scenes, but you can bring some interesting elements into it."

"The male character is a mountaineer and they use ropes. In lovemaking he has fantasies. He told the woman that, "the ropes will catch your falling body" and he applied that to lovemaking."

"I think if you juxtapose different elements, you may still be able to get something different."

Cultural Differences

Killing Me Softly not only marks a change in subject matter for Kaige, but up until now he had mostly worked with oriental film actors. Having spent 11 weeks filming in the UK with western actors he has become aware of some of the differences of filming in the West:

"In the West the approach is very rational: they set great store by rehearsals – they want to know how you move from one spot to another, how a scene is constructed. I haven't paid much attention to this before, because I don’t want the actor to know too far in advance what the scene is about... it would be hard to get something fresh. However, having filmed here I do see the point of rehearsing – you have to explain your basic intentions."

Filming during a British winter, coupled with the limited hours of daylight, also proved problematic for Kaige. He explains:

"It’s winter, so there's only seven hours of daylight, but I am told that we must have an hour break. That doesn't make sense to me. Of course you want to make a film in a civilised way, but in China, if it's a tight schedule, you'd shoot all day."

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