‘Masks’ Director Sees Changing Face of China

Nearly a decade after events in Tiananmen Square forced an extended stay in the United States, Wu Tianming, noted director and former head of the Xian Film Studio, is glad to be back in China. But he has mixed emotions about the state of the film industry there.

While things have changed, he observes that many filmmakers have become more superficial, interested only in making money.

At the time of the student protest massacre, Wu, the man most responsible for putting contemporary Chinese cinema on the international map, was in the United States as a visiting scholar invited by the Asian Cultural Council.

As head of the progressive Xian Film Studio, Wu had helped launch the careers of a number of major directors, including Chen Kaige of “Farewell, My Concubine” fame and Zhang Yimou, whose “Red Sorghum” would be the first in a series of stunning works.

Wu’s U.S. sojourn would stretch to 4 1/2 years, and he would end up operating a video store on Garvey Avenue in Monterey Park in order to survive. His daughter, a Santa Monica College student who is planning to transfer to UCLA to study film, was allowed to join him in 1992. His wife came the following year.

“Then, in November 1993, I was asked to come to Macao to revise a script I had written about a group of Chinese teenagers who had come to the United States to study,” said Wu through his interpreter during an interview at the headquarters of the Samuel Goldwyn Co., which is distributing his exquisite comeback film, “The King of Masks.”

“That deal fell through for a lack of financing, but at that time I received word from a friend of mine, Li Tie Ying, a cultural worker who is a member of China’s State Council, inviting me to return to China.” Wu, who was shocked by the massacre, had adopted a wary wait-and-see attitude about his homeland, but now felt sufficiently comfortable about returning.

At a small reception in Beijing he was officially welcomed home “to make some good Chinese films.”

He very quickly discovered how drastically things had changed.

His return feature, his first release in a decade, would be “Masks,” in which an elderly itinerant street performer (Zhu Xu) with a magical ability to change masks with lightning speed, must overcome a view of women--represented by the little orphan girl (Zhou Ren-ying) he adopts--as unworthy of carrying on his art. Its production went well, and it passed the government censor without criticism, a rarity in China. Released in 1996, “The King of Masks,” set against the turbulent ‘30s and financed by Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers, went on to garner a clutch of international awards.

“It got very good reviews, but the box office was not so good,” said Wu, citing several reasons. “People are very superficial now in China and not interested in human values. All they’re interested in is making money, and that goes for filmmakers, too. Also, many people cannot afford to go to the movies. A ticket to see my film would cost $3 to $4, and the average citizen of Beijing makes only $70-$80 a month.” (Many people were able to see Wu’s film on television, however, after China’s Youth Film Studio, the film’s official co-producer, sold it to China’s Central Television Station for up to $400.)

“The production atmosphere is greatly changed. When we made ‘Old Well,’ everyone was very dedicated and worked hard to turn out a good film. Now filmmakers are making more money, but their dedication has greatly decreased. Halfway through making ‘The King of Masks’ I had to fire 12 very irresponsible people from my crew. And Chen Kaige went through three production managers on his latest picture, ‘Jing Ke, Assassin of Emperor Quin.’

“Right now the cinema is not well-funded. The average grant is around $300,000, and a lot of that goes to the actors, with very little left over for actually making the film. And only Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou can regularly get foreign co-production money among the five or six directors capable of attracting money from abroad.

“If it’s already bad enough in films, it’s even worse in television,” continued Wu, who is currently finishing up the second of two TV miniseries he has done, “People of Yellow River.” “There’s even less money, and nobody seems to care whether a blue car in one shot is suddenly replaced by a white car--of a different make--in the next.”

A stocky man of 59 who looks no older than he did nearly a decade ago when he was living in a humble Alhambra apartment, Wu speaks with a wry sense of humor, which comes across as more exasperated than bitter. Since returning to China he has remained in Beijing, sarcastically referring to himself as a “private entrepreneur,” which means he is one of the approximately 70,000 cultural workers (or “semi-vagrants” in the arts) who are independent but do not have their own companies and who try to get their projects off the ground as best they can. (Demoted while staying in the United States, Wu is still a member of the Xian Film Studio staff, but his status is nonpaying; he visits Xian in the spring for its festival, to see his mother and to check out how things are going at the studio he made famous.)

Luckily, as a freelancer, Wu was able to follow up “The King of Masks” with another feature, completed in 1997 and up for international distribution, “Stand by Your Man,” backed by Hong Kong’s Golden Harvest. It’s a love story about a girl and a boy who go to high school together, with the girl going on to medical school and the boy to Beijing University to study biology. Then the boy falls off a cliff, which leaves him amnesiac and unable to walk. Despite pressure from family and friends to abandon him as a hopeless case, the girl dedicates the next decade to his complete mental and physical rehabilitation. Wu asks why shouldn’t she be regarded as much a hero as had the boy been a soldier wounded in battle? It’s not hard to read into Wu’s description of his film a highly personal allegory; he just smiles at the suggestion.

Prize-winning writer Chen Zhong Shi has declared that only Wu is worthy of bringing to the screen his novel “The White Deer Garden,” about the destinies of two families spanning the year 1900 through the ‘40s. “It’s one of the best pieces of writing of recent times, and I believe I will do it before I die,” said Wu, who hopes that, in fact, it will be his next film.

Not surprisingly, despite wrenching changes in the film industry, Wu admits freely that he’s glad to be back in China. “I can do what I want to do there. I’m a fish from that pond. It is perhaps saltier, but I had to go back to my own pond.”