It Takes a Village

On a recent stopover in Los Angeles en route to Beijing, Chinese director Zhang Yimou looked remarkably relaxed, a wide grin hooked across his lean, weathered face. And why not? At last month’s Sundance Film Festival, his latest film, “Not One Less,” a wry tale of a poor village school in backward Hebei province, garnered not only critical kudos but also something more material.

After the screening, as Zhang was fielding questions, a hat was passed through the audience, yielding $315 for the school.

“This is the first time it’s happened abroad,” Zhang says in his deep, rumbly voice, full of the rolling R sounds of China’s northern region. “It’s happened several times in China, but it was very moving that an audience would automatically take up a collection like that, in a faraway Western country.”

“Not One Less,’ which opens today, takes place in remote Shuiquan, a village where people are still eking out a living from the harsh land. Shuiquan has the equivalent of the little red schoolhouse, with 28 children of varying ages all crowded into one room. Except this schoolhouse is just a shack with dirt floors. Teacher Gao has requested a month’s leave to visit his sick mother, and the village head can only recruit a 13-year-old girl, Wei Minzhi, to take his place.

Teacher Gao has seen his enrollment fall steadily and promises the girl an extra 10 yuan (a little more than $1 U.S.) if she holds on to all the students. But when he leaves, pandemonium breaks out. Wei can hardly maintain discipline among the unruly kids, let alone teach, so she ends up sitting outside the front door, playing guard.

To make the film, the 48-year-old Zhang returned to a technique he tested in “The Story of Qiu Ju” (1992): using nonprofessional actors. In fact, he went further than “Qiu Ju,” which did include a few professionals, including then-girlfriend Gong Li in the lead; this time he used only amateurs. In fact, all the characters play roles close to those they hold in real life; the village head is the village head, more than half the children are children of Shuiquan, and so on.

This fable had its inspiration long ago. “In 1984, when I was shooting ‘Yellow Earth’ with Chen Kaige,” Zhang recalls, “we saw children attending school in caves. And every time I’ve been scouting locations in the countryside, I would look in on classes being taught in these small villages. I was always touched by such scenes, so I said to my colleagues, ‘Sooner or later, I’m going to make a film about this.’ ”

Three years ago, he commissioned a script on the subject but disliked the result so much that he dropped the idea. Then he read a novel about a country school by Shi Xiangsheng, who had been a teacher for 30 years. Zhang asked him to write a screenplay following Zhang’s own original story.

During pre-production, he sent location and talent scouts to villages in Hebei province--Hebei because it is just 3 1/2 hours by car from Beijing, where Zhang was then busily preparing for performances of Puccini’s “Turandot,” a European production he was directing at the Forbidden City. To cast the 28 schoolchildren, some 40,000 faces were captured on videotape; 150 of those were called in for auditions and tested for their chutzpah and ability to think on their feet.

The locals, adults and children alike, were only too eager to participate because they were to be paid a salary and fed three square meals a day. Zhang found ways to accommodate them. For example, unlike most features, which are shot out of sequence, “Not One Less” was shot chronologically, from beginning to end, over a two-month period in order for the amateur actors to more readily “live out” their roles.

Scripted dialogue was tossed out. Instead, Zhang worked closely with his recruits to invent naturalistic dialogue out of their own experiences. Thus, all the awkward pauses, the blank stares are left in, although the director admits that he often had to shoot a scene 20 times or more just to get the expression, the timing that he wanted.

There are echoes of “Qiu Ju” in “Not One Less.” There are, of course, the similarity of setting and style of filmmaking. There is also the inevitable confrontation between naive but stubborn peasant girl (Gong Li in the former, Wei Minzhi in the current) and the big, impersonal city, where people are too busy to help, let alone pay attention to one another. Furthermore, “Qiu Ju” won best film at the Venice Film Festival in 1992--and “Not One Less” picked up the same award last year, reinforcing Zhang’s position as a leading force in Chinese cinema.

Hard-Fought Battles to Make His Films

Ever since his directorial debut with “Red Sorghum” in 1988, he has had the distinction of making films--roughly one every year or so--that have regularly made the international circuit. Nearly every film he has made has been a hard-fought battle. In China, where film is looked upon as a tool of education and propaganda, scripts must be submitted to the Film Bureau in Beijing for approval before shooting. Story lines, dialogue and characterizations--especially by a director of Zhang’s stature--are examined closely for possible subversiveness.

He has shot films at variance with submitted scripts and sent films abroad that were banned in his homeland--and suffered consequences because of it. In 1994, the Chinese government prohibited him from going to the Cannes Film Festival with his film “To Live,” which was found to be, among other things, disrespectful in its depiction of Mao’s Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. So lead actors Gong Li and Ge You went, and Ge You ended up winning the best actor prize.

Afterward, Zhang was banned from working with foreign producers, but he got around that by making his next film, “Shanghai Triad,” for the Shanghai Film Studio, which in turn had major funding from the French.

Even the current film, which may seem the height of innocuousness, had to be reedited to suit the censors. What kind of changes? The director declines to be specific. “There’s always something; they always find something they make you change,” he says with a shrug.

In the past, his films have been accused of showing China as backward and feudal, of pandering to Western prejudices. “Oh, it doesn’t go away,” he says. “People are still complaining, ‘Why do you focus on these poor people? It gives Westerners the wrong idea.’ ”

He doesn’t care. “What interests me are story, the relationships between people,” he says. “This isn’t only a film about the problems with the educational system. In a larger sense, it’s about the growing distance between the peasant China and the urban China, about how we’re losing our old values, the values that held people together, and are becoming colder in our hearts.”

Zhang is taking the Sundance contribution to the school but points out that, in fact, charity had already begun during filming. He and his film crew voluntarily took up a collection and pooled together enough money to build a new school for the village. So while they were shooting in the dilapidated old schoolhouse, another one was being built from the ground up at a nearby site. When they finished shooting, they also finished the school, which was dubbed the Shuiquan Hope School.

In the last decade, a slew of Chinese and Hong Kong directors (John Woo, Kirk Wong, Peter Chan, Chen Kaige) have migrated to the U.S. to make motion pictures. Asked if he has any plans to go that route, Zhang quickly shakes his head.

“Look at my subject matter,” he says. “My stories are always about Chinese people and their lives--and they always will be. So it seems to me I’m bound to keep working in China.”