His wife, Chenivesse Sandrine, had recently arrived on the set, along with their young daughter. Chenivesse was a tall, strikingly beautiful French woman who held a doctorate in religious anthropology from the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. I was standing next to her when they filmed the escape scene. We communicated in Chinese: I spoke no French; she didn’t feel comfortable using English. Between takes, I asked about the French reaction to Jiang’s Grand Prix, and she smiled with the memory. “After Cannes, we went on vacation to the south of France,” she said. “Everywhere we went, people recognized us. They’d say, oh, we saw you on television. Congratulations! If we went to a Paris café, people stopped drinking coffee and asked for autographs.”
That was the scene: the brilliant light, the endless Gobi, the blonde woman speaking Chinese with a French accent. The director called for the fifth take; everybody became silent. A soft breeze blew. The nearest town was an hour’s drive across the desert. There wasn’t a doctor on the set. The actor rode straight at the beam.
CREW MEMBERS SPRINTED over to where the man lay in the dust. Somebody shouted that it was Harrison Liu, who played a soldier in Jiang Wen’s renegade band. The fallen actor tried to stand but then fell back in the dust. He was holding his neck.
Jiang Wen swung his horse around hard and skidded to a stop, dismounting quickly. His face was black with anger—all day, the frustration had been building, because of all the accidents and delays. The son of a People’s Liberation Army officer, Jiang was a large, barrel-chested man with a scraggly beard. The Chinese often said that he looked like a liumang, a “thug”: short-cropped hair, bulging eyes, hard chin. His shoulders were broad. He smoked constantly. He had a deep and resonant voice—every word sounded like it started low in the gut and then rose through years of old cigarette smoke. But despite the liumang façade, he was well educated in film: a graduate of Beijing’s Central Drama Academy. In addition to his acting, he had directed two critically acclaimed movies.
Jiang Wen helped Harrison to his feet—at first, the man didn’t seem to be badly hurt. The two of them joined the other actors, who had gathered around He Ping, the director. They watched the playback monitor, trying to figure out what had gone wrong. It was growing cold; there wasn’t much daylight left. In front of the monitor, a horse sidled over and pissed triumphantly. A crew member in a PLA greatcoat began sawing off the treacherous wooden beam. Harrison was still rubbing his neck.
“We’ll have to shoot that scene over again,” He Ping said.
“My neck hurts,” Harrison said.
“You were riding too fast,” one of the other actors said.
“You were riding too fast,” Harrison shot back.
Jiang Wen stalked away from the monitor. He wore a helmet, gauntlets, and knee-high riding boots. His leather shoulder guards were studded with strips of armor. He clutched a whip in one hand. His face looked like he was about to explode. He turned to his personal assistant and barked, “Give me a cigarette!”
The man pulled out a package. The brand name was Snow Lotus and on the front there was a picture of a pretty white flower. “Wo cao,” Jiang said. “Fuck me. What kind of cigarette is that?”
“It’s the local brand.”
Jiang Wen stared at the cigarettes and finally grabbed one. He spun on his heel and walked off, muttering to himself. He lit the Snow Lotus and jammed it into his mouth. He sucked in hard.
LIKE ANY GREAT actor, Jiang Wen had a knack for occupying roles that captured the mood of a nation. During the first blossoming of Reform and Opening cinema, filmmakers celebrated the countryside of the loess plateau—the traditional heart of Chinese culture, the home to cities such as Anyang and the scarred landscapes of the Yellow River. In 1988, Jiang Wen starred in Red Sorghum, which was directed by Zhang Yimou and also starred Gong Li, who would eventually become China’s most internationally famous actress. In the film, the woman’s character rejects the advances of a peasant played by Jiang Wen. Stubbornly, the man returns to the woman’s liquor distillery, where she and her employees stand in awkward silence. Jiang Wen stares at them defiantly, with a sense of violence in his posture. Finally, he turns and pisses into the bottles of fermenting alcohol, one by one. Then he picks up Gong Li, hoists her onto his hip, and marches off to the bedroom. Throughout the scene he hardly says a word. The alcohol turns out to be the best the distillery has ever produced. Gong Li’s character bears a son. Red Sorghum became immensely popular with Chinese audiences, as well as a great success at international film festivals.
Within five years, the fascination with the loess plateau had faded. In the early 1990s, in the wake of the crackdown on the pro-democracy demonstrations, a wave of anti-foreign nationalism settled onto the Chinese intellectual climate. In 1993, a television series called Beijingers in New York tracked a group of immigrants whose stereotypically Chinese character—cultured, moral, upright—was challenged by the stereotypically empty materialism of the United States. Jiang Wen played a transplanted artist who struggles to adapt to his new world. At one point, he hires a white prostitute, throws dollar bills at the woman, and orders her to say, in English, over and over: “I love you, I love you, I love you!” Beijingers in New York became immensely popular with Chinese viewers.
Those were only two of Jiang Wen’s best-known characters, and neither of them trapped the actor. That often happened in Reform and Opening—China changed so quickly that many artists had their moment and then slipped out of touch. But Jiang Wen remained popular, and he played roles from the full range of Chinese history. Over the years, he played Qin Shihuang, the ruler who first unified the Chinese empire, and he played Puyi, the impotent last emperor who watched the Qing dynasty fall apart. Jiang Wen played an imperial eunuch; he played peasants and policemen; he played petty crooks and small-time businessmen. He captured something fundamental about the psyche of the modern Chinese male: his aspirations and fears, his dreams and insecurities.
In 1994, Jiang Wen directed his first feature film, In the Heat of the Sun. Based on a short story by the well-known writer Wang Shuo, the film was set in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution. Often, historical movies are strongly narrative—characters’ lives intertwined with important events—but In the Heat of the Sun is driven by imagery. The movie’s first “script” consisted of pictures that Jiang Wen had sketched into a notebook: a teenaged boy peering at a group of dancing girls. In the film, the boy is often observing—he gazes through a telescope; he stares out from under a girl’s bed; he snoops through his parents’ belongings. The sweeping political campaigns disappear, and the standard Cultural Revolution mood—suffering, sadness—is replaced by adolescent yearning and sexual awakening. The boy, along with his friends, is basically unsupervised; their parents are distracted by political events. The film became an enormous success, especially among young people who had come of age during the 1980s.
Like many movies, it contained allusions to other films, but they all belonged to the Communist world. The teenaged characters reenact scenes from Soviet propaganda films such as Lenin in 1918. Hollywood seems far away, as it did to Jiang Wen when he was growing up. In the 1970s, he lived in remote Guizhou province, where his father was stationed with the PLA. Theirs was a railroad town: trains from Beijing passed through on their way to the southwest. Movies provided the only glimpse of the outside world.
“We lived in a big building that was like an old barn,” Jiang Wen told me once. “Right out in front was the town square, where they showed movies at night, twice a week. They showed them outdoors. I could see them from my bed, looking out the window. They fascinated me, because they came from so far away—places like Albania, Romania. I still remember The White-Haired Girl—that was a beautiful movie. Before that movie, I’d never seen ballet before. And the first time I ever saw Latin letters was in a movie. They were the letters U S on the helmets of American soldiers.
“Mostly, though, I remember all the pretty girls from those movies. Often they weren’t wearing m
any clothes—their shorts would be cut off, and their sleeves ripped off, and they’d have a revolutionary uniform belt tight around their waist, like this, and they’d be standing there with a gun. God, they were beautiful. I remember one particular scene from a movie about the Nazis and the Albanians. An Albanian woman had her shirt unbuttoned partway, and she was playing a guitar—I’d never seen a guitar before. I still remember that song distinctly.”
IN XINJIANG, AFTER finishing the escape scene, the actors rode a van for an hour across the Gobi, bouncing over rocks and sand. All of us were staying at the PetroChina Tuha Oilfield Company, a massive complex that was doing exploratory work in the region. After dinner, the pain in Harrison Liu’s neck worsened, and he wanted to see a doctor at the hospital in the oil complex. Jiang Wen, whose back and knees hurt, decided to accompany Harrison. Wang Xueqi figured he’d tag along, too; his ribs could use a checkup. Another actor wasn’t feeling so great, either. By the time we got to the hospital, there were six of us. It was after ten o’clock.
Somebody paged the vice-director of the general medicine department, whose name was Cao Jie. The actors apologized for bothering him so late; the doctor said that it wasn’t a problem. He remarked that he had always enjoyed Jiang Wen’s films.
Jiang Wen took off his shirt and Dr. Cao pressed points along his back, asking if they hurt. After the frustration of the day’s filming, Jiang Wen finally seemed relaxed; he cracked jokes with the other actors. His knees were black and blue. He pressed one of the bruises and farted loudly.
“That’s strange, doctor,” Jiang Wen said thoughtfully. “If I push here, I fart.” He pressed again but nothing happened. “Never mind,” he said.
Dr. Cao kept complaining about all the recent injuries. For days, a steady stream of actors and crew members had been making their way to the hospital. That afternoon, a man had appeared with a fractured ankle.
“He aggravated it by not going to the hospital sooner,” Dr. Cao said. “What exactly are you doing out there?”
“It’s an action film,” Jiang Wen said.
Dr. Cao opened a medical book and showed us exactly where the ankle had been broken. “His foot swelled up like a steamed roll,” the doctor said. “I just don’t understand this. Why didn’t he go to the hospital earlier?”
“I’ve been saying that we need a doctor on the set,” Jiang Wen said.
“It’s dangerous with the horses,” Harrison Liu said.
“You know what the main problem is?” Jiang Wen said. “The stuntmen don’t always go through the horse scenes first, and even if they do, they aren’t riding specialists. They’re martial arts specialists.”
An actor pulled out a pack of Zhongnanhai Lights and asked if they could smoke in the examination room. Dr. Cao took a cigarette as well, and all six of them lit up. The tiny room quickly filled with smoke.
“I’m telling you, I’ve never seen anything like this,” Dr. Cao said.
“I think it’s a human rights issue,” Jiang Wen said.
Dr. Cao fitted a neck brace for Harrison Liu. Like Jiang Wen, Harrison was a big man, and his girlfriend was also a blonde foreigner—a Belgian. In the Chinese arts community, it was a sign of success to have foreign girlfriends. Often the women were budding academics who had come to China to research a thesis about anthropology or sociology. Harrison Liu wore cowboy boots. After the 1989 crackdown, he had received political asylum in Canada, where he was now a citizen. He had taken his English name from the Beatle. Occasionally, he acted in Canadian or American films; in 1991, he had played a native Huron in Black Robe, which tells the story of the first missionary to Quebec. If you watch the movie closely, you might notice that one member of the Huron tribe looks Chinese. Harrison still remembered a line that he had spoken in the Huron language. He told me that it meant, “We don’t need to go with this white man.”
The doctor finished with the neck brace and announced that Jiang Wen and Harrison needed CT scans. Jiang Wen glanced at his watch.
“Look, it’s November seventh,” he said. “The anniversary of the Russian Revolution.” He hummed the “Internationale” on the way to the X-ray center. He showed me a text message that had just appeared on his cell phone, from a Beijing talk show host: “I’ve just found Devils on the Doorstep on bootleg.”
“I get messages like this every day,” Jiang Wen said proudly. His movie had never been shown in Chinese theaters, but two weeks earlier it had suddenly appeared on the streets. The actor smiled. “Look at everything that just happened,” he said. “We got hurt, we went to the hospital, we’re getting X-rays, it’s the anniversary of the Russian Revolution, and now there’s a message about Devils on the Doorstep. We could make a movie out of this.”
A technician scanned Harrison’s neck and said it looked like a sprain. Dr. Cao examined the pictures of Jiang Wen’s knees and back. He thought there might be a problem with the fifth and sixth vertebrae; tomorrow a specialist would examine the actor. Before we left, Dr. Cao asked Jiang Wen to autograph three photographs of the doctor’s daughter and niece. It was nearly midnight. They were typical Chinese pictures: two tiny girls staring at the camera with startling animosity. On the back of each photo, the actor wrote: “Jiang Wen—the fifth and sixth vertebrae.”
DEVILS ON THE DOORSTEP, Jiang Wen’s second effort as director, is set in rural Hebei province, in 1945—the final year of the Japanese occupation. Like the Cultural Revolution, this sensitive period tended to be portrayed in set ways. Chinese films showed the brutality of the Japanese, as well as the heroic resistance of everyday people. There were staple heroes, like Wang Erxiao, the Chinese shepherd boy who led Japanese troops into an ambush.
In Jiang Wen’s film, the war shrinks to a single Chinese village and a single Japanese garrison, isolated together in the remote countryside. The movie opens with a sex scene: a peasant named Ma Dasan is having an affair with a young widow. Suddenly, there is a knock on the door, and an anonymous Chinese resistance soldier delivers a Japanese prisoner and his interpreter. The men are bound; Ma is instructed to interrogate the prisoners and keep them hidden from the local Japanese garrison. Terrified by the responsibility, Ma, who is played by Jiang Wen, asks his fellow villagers to help.
Instead of working together, the villagers bicker over petty issues: whether Ma should be sleeping with the widow, how much flour the wealthiest woman in town has hoarded. Virtually every character is motivated by self-interest, greed, stubbornness, or cowardice. The Japanese prisoner, who is initially determined to die honorably, quickly loses his pride, and eventually the villagers feel sorry for the man. They end up trading him to the Japanese garrison for six cartloads of flour. In celebration, the occupiers and the occupied meet for a banquet, which is interrupted by the news that Japan has surrendered. In an escalating panic of fear and shame, the Japanese soldiers slaughter the unarmed villagers.
During the filming of Devils on the Doorstep, Jiang Wen refused to shoot outtakes. If a small part of a scene was unacceptable, he insisted on reshooting the entire thing from the beginning. In the film industry, this practice is unheard of, and Jiang Wen reportedly used every roll of Kodak black-and-white movie film that was available in China—five hundred thousand feet, or roughly five times the amount required for the average feature film. The rural set could be reached only by boat, and the actors worked in brutal cold. There were local distractions: one village sued another over who had the right to lease land to the film production company. The movie cost an estimated five million dollars, twice the original budget, and it was two hours and forty-four minutes long. Even when it was victorious at Cannes, most critics thought that it needed another edit. Internationally, it was released in only nine countries, and nobody in China ever saw it in a public theater. When I interviewed people who had worked on the film, they invariably asked to speak off the record, because of the political problems.
Before traveling to Xinjiang, I visited the location in rural Hebei where Devils on the Doorstep had been filme
d. From Beijing, it was a five-hour drive, followed by a thirty-minute boat ride; the set was located on the banks of Panjiakou Reservoir. It consisted of a dozen houses surrounded by rugged mountains and a crumbling stretch of the Great Wall.
The village had been constructed solely for the movie. In China, where labor and materials were cheap, there wasn’t a specialty industry for set design: directors simply used real things. Near the Flaming Mountains, one of the horseback injuries had occurred when a log fell on an actor’s leg while he was riding. On a Hollywood set, the object would have been made of Styrofoam, but in China they just used a real log. At the Panjiakou Reservoir, all of the houses were made of granite, brick, and tile; they had working fireplaces and stoves. In a country where so much was jiade—knockoff brands, shoddy restorations of ancient structures, fresh paint on the façades of old buildings—the film sets were real. Sometimes they lasted longer than the movies themselves.
It had been two years since Devils on the Doorstep had been filmed, and nobody was living in the film set; the soil on that side of the reservoir was too rocky for farming. But peasants from a village across the water were trying to turn the place into a tourist attraction. They had set up a ticket gate and charged about seventy-five cents for admission. When I purchased my ticket, the man at the gate had nothing nice to say about Jiang Wen.
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