Applying the Hard Lessons

“It doesn’t require anything to be a director!” actress-turned-director Joan Chen says with a laugh, her eyes curled into half-moons of merriment. She has not only directed her first feature, “Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl,” but has quickly leveraged it into her next. “It requires a lot of skillful b.s.”

Then she grows serious. “It does require something if you want to be a good director. You need to have a love for reading, for literature; it helps you understand human drama and helps you understand beauty. An event is not a movie. You have to have a certain level of thinking to elevate it into art.”

Yes, art is important, but for someone without a track record of filmmaking, you also need tremendous fortitude, an aptitude Chen proved over and over again with “Xiu Xiu.” She co-wrote the script for the film that opens Friday in Los Angeles, raised $1 million to make it (some of it her own), and even after the script had been rejected by the Film Bureau in Beijing--it deals with the Cultural Revolution--she gathered cast and crew and shot it on the run in China.

As a result, last fall a fine was imposed on her by the Chinese government, which declared her guilty of the crime of making a film without a license. In the logic of Kafka-esque bureaucracies, the fine was calculated at 10% of her production budget for “Xiu Xiu,” or roughly $100,000.

“I think I’ve done the hardest movie of my life, so everything else will be a little easier,” Chen says with a sigh.

In the past, offending Chinese filmmakers, including Zhang Yimou (“Raise the Red Lantern,” “To Live”), have been banned from working with Chinese studios, and Zhang Yuan had his passport taken away when he returned to China after a trip because he made the gay-themed “East Palace, West Palace” undercover. Fortunately Chen, though Shanghai born and bred, is today an American citizen and living in San Francisco, so is less vulnerable to such interdictions.

While she overlooked--”forgot,” she says--the original notification of her transgression, a more recent threat to ban her from working in China got her attention. After all, she does want to be able to go back, whether to make another film, see her parents or be in the world that still feels the most resonant to her. So she has sent a formal apology, though the fine is yet to be paid.

Chen’s screen persona is nearly the opposite of the real-life reality. Movie audiences may know her as a passive, blank-faced beauty from such films as “The Last Emperor.” In real life the 38-year-old Chen is turbo-charged by a combination of nervous energy and restless intellect. She is articulate and opinionated, sometimes slipping into the machine-gun cadence of her native Shanghainese dialect, even when speaking English.

She Might Be Directing Gere and Ryder Next

Recently she has been zipping in and out of Los Angeles promoting the opening of “Xiu Xiu”--its U.S. premiere in New York last month garnered generally favorable notices--as well as preparing her future. Her efforts have paid off; she just cinched her first major directing gig, “Autumn in New York,” a romantic comedy from MGM and Lakeshore International that will star (as of this writing) Richard Gere and Winona Ryder and reportedly budgeted at $50 million. The project has been kicking around for some time, in search of the right director. With Chen signed up, it is now fast-tracked and due to start shooting in September.

Not bad for a woman whose career, despite a promising launch in the West with Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor” in 1987, had become stalled in the shallows of China doll parts. There was a slew of B-actioners such as “Wedlock” and “Judge Dredd.” Then came the quite hilariously bad “Wild Side,” in which she plays a vapid exotic who seduces Anne Heche.

She doesn’t regret making those movies; she says she learned from them. “When you work in bad movies you learn more than working in good movies, because you learn what not to do, which is a lot more important than what to do.”

And they awakened her to the fact that she really does care about the movies. “When I was settling for mediocrity I felt the kind of pain that only love would incur,” she recalls. “I wasn’t happy just making a living. I was deeply in pain.”

As a Festival Judge, She Was Inspired

Although directing had been on her mind for years, it was serving as a judge at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1996 that galvanized her into action.

“I was watching a lot of movies, some of them independent and sort of inspiring but some of them were just end-of-the-millennium, depressing movies--decadent, no hope, meaningless sex,” she recalls. “It was just really awful, and I felt the need to write my own [movie].”

She had brought along a copy of “Heavenly Bath,” a novella by her friend Yan Geling, an award-winning writer well known in the Chinese-language world and who, like Chen, lives in the Bay Area. A week after returning from Berlin, Chen gave the draft of her script based on the novella to Yan, and together they refined it.

The story of “Xiu Xiu” takes place during the height of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Following a glorious public ceremony, young Xiu Xiu (newcomer Lu Lu) is dispatched to the countryside along with hundreds of other Chengdu teenagers during a national campaign in the late 1960s to “reeducate” urban youth to the joys of peasant life. Except that after a year of the gritty labor and city slicker boredom in a dusty town near the Tibetan border, Xiu Xiu only wants to go home. Fate, however, sends her even farther afield--onto the grasslands to learn yak herding from a craggy Tibetan, Lao Jing (Lopsang).

Six months pass--what Xiu Xiu assumes to be the extent of her stint--but no one comes for her. She begins to succumb to the various men who pass by and say they will help her leave if only she will provide them sexual favors. Taciturn Lao Jing can only watch with growing distaste, mixed with pity.

Of course Chen considered other locations, but she decided to make it in China for reasons of costs (low), logistics (she was familiar with how things were done there) and landscape. First she went the official route; she submitted the script to the film bureau. Back came demands for revisions that would have drastically altered the story.

It was April 1997, and Chen had already raised the money and wanted to catch the spring weather. So she assembled the crew and plowed full speed, if secretly, ahead. Lu Lu, the photogenic Beijing-born daughter of an actress and a film director, was chosen for the lead role following a long search. Although Lu Lu was only 15 at the time, Yan Geling says, “She struck both Joan and I as just right for the part. She’s young but very mature for her age.”

Asked about the nudity that the film called for, Lu Lu says: “There were body doubles, but in some shots where I was taking a bath or being shot from the back, the director convinced me that it would be done artistically, so I did my best to do what was necessary.”

Shepherding a cast and crew of 60 through the hinterlands of China was tough enough. Everywhere Chen had to produce “borrowed” letters of introduction to mollify the local authorities. “Throughout the whole shooting I was very nervous,” Chen admits. “I could have been caught and kicked out.”

By the time they arrived back in civilization--and the Shanghai Film Studio--in June, they thought they were home-free. Then a week into the shooting, they were warned that the set would be shut down immediately because the production was illegal, and two days of shooting had to be collapsed into one.

Film Wins Seven Golden Horse Awards

To avoid the risk of processing the film locally, they were shipping film out of the country as soon as it was shot. And because the videotape machine broke down early on, Chen never got to see any dailies. When she left China in July, she personally took 140 cans of film with her, then had the film processed in San Francisco. It was a relief to find enough usable footage for editor Ruby Yang to cut into a feature film.

Last year the film made its world debut, fittingly at the Berlin Film Festival. Although she was hurt that the film did not win any prizes, she got her recognition at year’s end, when “Xiu Xiu” made off with seven major awards, including best picture and best director, at the prestigious Golden Horse Awards in Taiwan.

Chen bristles when she hears criticism of the film’s subject matter. “It’s not just another Cultural Revolution movie,” she insists. “This was as important to my generation and my people as the Holocaust is important to the world. Why did Oliver Stone make three Vietnam pictures? Why do people still make World War II movies?”

Chen hasn’t given up acting entirely--she went to Hong Kong recently to star in an action picture, “Purple Storm,” and she just finished a part in a Showtime movie, “A Class of His Own.” But in directing, she believes she has found her true calling.

The “Xiu Xiu” shoot was an arduous one, but she looks back to it with the breathlessness of first love. She says she felt exhilarated throughout, by the logistical and artistic challenges it presented, always on the lookout for the right faces, the right landscape, the right angle.

“You owe it to yourself to see things,” she says, “to live deliberately, to suck the marrow out of the bone.”

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“When you work in bad movies you learn more than working in good movies, because you learn what not to do, which is a lot more important than what to do.”