Zhengfan Yang is one of the winners of this year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. His fourth feature “Stranger“, a two-hour-long odyssey of diverse people spending time in their hotel rooms in a town close to Beijing bagged the Grand Prix in the prestigious Proxima competition program. A couple of days before the awards were announced, we met the director at the festival center to ask him about his trademark exploration of identity, the obstacles he met during the production of the movie, and the reasons he opted to work with both professional and non-professional actors.
“Stranger” consists of several short episodes that show people interacting with their temporary ‘homes’ of all possible types: some comfortable, some modest, and some a bit dodgy-looking. Only the introductory story is dedicated to a woman whose life is tied not to one, but to a large number of rooms due to her profession. It is also one of the most visually striking vignettes of “Stranger”, which shows the other side of the tourist machinery.
Tell us about the idea of diving into this world of transitory existence in such an impersonal space as a hotel room. How did you create your stories?
The idea for the portrait was conceived back in 2016, exactly one year after I moved to Chicago, USA. I think it’s this experience of living between two countries, China and the US, that intensified my feeling of being a stranger, experiencing alienation and isolation. As someone living in the US, I’m a stranger, an outsider in terms of language and culture. But the interesting thing is that whenever I go back to China, I still – because of the rapid changes in the country- perceive the place as almost unrecognizable. So I also feel like a stranger in my home country, no less than abroad. It is in this context that I started to develop stories using the hotel room as a device to signify my personal feelings of alienation, as well as the universal experience of isolation. Whenever people find themselves in a hotel room in the process of coming and going, it means one thing – that they are not at home. A hotel room is a space, a non-place that tries to give you a feeling that you are at home, but you are not. It’s an interesting space for me to tell the recurring theme not only in this film but in my previous films, too.
There are a lot of vignettes in your movie. Some are painted with humor others with great sadness, and there is even one of with a political touch with police officers harassing two men. To a certain extent “Stranger” reminded me of “Terrestrial Verses” directed by Alireza Khatami & Ali Asgari, the film that ran in the competition of Cannes last year, which analyzes Iranian society. The main differences between your films are the setting and pace. When you started working on the film, did you already have a complete idea about what it was going to be like, or was this exponentially growing with time?
There were two things that I decided on at the very beginning and remained unchanged throughout the whole production. One was that the film had to take place in a hotel, more precisely in different hotel rooms, and that this would be the setting of the film. The second one was that I had to use one long take for each episode because the hotel room is a world in itself. And so to capture the space and to experience the passage of time, a long take was the only choice for me. In terms of the stories, they vary a lot. They were coming to me during the writing of the script, and with every draft, I would include new ones. The inspection scene with the police that you mentioned, is the one that I decided on in the first stage of writing. I had it in my head from the very beginning, because it comes from reality.
Did you shoot in a studio or did you use real locations?
It all takes place in real hotel rooms.
Some of the rooms are crazy odd-looking, like the one we mentioned a couple of times now, with the police questioning two tired men in their room in the middle of the night. They sit in front of a disfigured window which gives on a concrete wall.
I did much of the location scouting online on different accommodation offering platforms. There are Chinese versions of booking.com and such popular pages in the West. So basically, I could see the hotel rooms online on many websites. The film was mostly shot in a small town near Shanghai because we wanted to make it in a city, but not in a big one out of the lack of budget, which was the reason we couldn’t make it in Beijing or Shanghai. Since hotel rooms are similar everywhere, it didn’t really matter where we were. We just needed the right rooms. Only one story (the before-last) with a street performer who puts on his monkey suit was shot in the US because I consider it as very personal. It directly reflects my own experience living between two countries. All the other scenes were shot in China.
Was the man in the US chapter an Asian-American actor?
No, he is a Chinese immigrant like me. He’s a filmmaker as well, and a performing artist. He’s not a professional actor. Out of budgetary reasons we couldn’t do another casting in the US, and we searched among friends to come in and do a scene.
This makes us wonder about the casting process in China and the decisions you made. What were you looking for in people?
We used a combination of professional and non-professional actors. Some of them we knew from before, through film festivals or other film events. So, when we started with the project, some of the stories came to us immediately and I knew whom I was going to ask if they were interested. This is the case with our most discussed vignette today, where I knew who I wanted to cast for the roles of guys interrogated by the police. Others came to the open casting. We did a more thorough selection because in the past, in my previous films, I really didn’t need to work with professional actors due to the nature of the projects. But in this one, because of the confined space and the necessity to see their faces in detail, and to feel the pulse of subtle moments, we decided to do a mix of two. Of course, in the last scene with a lot of windows, there was no need for professional actors.
That particular scene is very reminiscent of your short “Down There” which competed in Venice in 2018 and is clearly influenced by some of the cinema classics.
I did use similar shots with different windows in my previous films. For me, the most obvious inspiration is always Hitchkock’s “Rear Window” (1954).
You are also active as a producer. How do you pick up your projects?
The films that I produce are directed by my partner Shengze Zhu. We have a production company founded together. So we produce each other’s projects.
She won the Caligari Film Award at the Berlinale for “A River Runs, Turns, Erases, Replaces”, which you produced in 2021.
Yes, that is correct. Working together is both easy and difficult because we are partners, not only in terms of work but also as a couple. We definitely have a similar taste, but we never co-direct. This is mostly because we know that cinema is something very personal. As much as we have similar tastes, we make different films. The best way to help each other is to produce and play that role for each other. We are also motivating each other, and coming up with ideas on how to pass censorship, how to take the best approach and even how to make money from the project.
Check the review of the film
When exactly did you shoot the film and how long did it take you to finalize it?
Because most of the scenes were shot in one city, we could luckily find different types of hotel rooms there. The logistics part was extremely difficult. We did shoot one scene after another and the crew members remained the same, but the actors came, finished their part and left. So that’s the most difficult part because we needed to have different actors on set, like every three or four days. Plus we had to finish it in November 2022 which was exactly the last peak of the pandemic in China. We literally had to move to different hotel rooms because we would be informed that someone would come to tell us that our place was going to be in lockdown in 3 hours. We did that two or three times during the production, which is one of the reasons that we chose to make the second last scene in the US. That one was also supposed to be shot in China. We wanted to have our last story happening in a five-star hotel in Beijing, in a presidential suite, but because of the whole country being under lockdown and people getting sick, this had to be cancelled.
Most of the vignettes are shot with a complete static camera, but in some, you decide to explore the rooms by moving it to reveal the details. Can you talk a bit about it?
For me, it was clear from the beginning that I’d start the film with a static camera for the initial few scenes in the first story which were a sort of introduction to the space that was going to define the film. Gradually, when we got to more subjects and added to the space and actors, the camera had to be moved. What interests me is the transformation of the static camera to a moving camera and going back and ending the film with another static shot.
Do you think that you will continue following the path of self-exploration in your future films?
For me, every film should be political and personal at the same time no matter how much I want to make something more acceptable for the audience. That’s the way I function. That’s why my wife and I chose to work with each other with a small company that we set up together. We always try to make something more positive, and more personal. “Stranger” is not only personal. In a way, it’s also political. I think the only thing that I might do differently in the future is to work more with the narrative, still keeping a bit of the personal touch.
How do you react to unpredictable circumstances?
I’m pretty open to all kinds of contingency as long as they fit into that profile of the movie. For example, during the police investigation scene, a dog started barking. That was a surprise we didn’t expect. We didn’t have a dog in the script and one of the actors started yelling at it. That was his improvisation.
Since it took a long time to finalize the project which was seven years in the making, many obstacles were coming our way. One of them was the pandemic which altered a lot of stories. it also intensified my personal experience and my feelings about China. So I think that’s why I was hesitating about how to proceed. Most of the stories were inspired by real events. I can not help but return to the one with the police officers and two men they are harassing. Quite often in the past, the police could knock on your door and disturb guests for different reasons. Most of the time the identity of people was the key. If they were immigrants, they were more likely to end up in such a situation. Other times, it would be activists or illegal gatherings. The police would already know who they are, and they’d give you a warning to better leave. One more reason would be an anonymous report about some strangers who look suspicious. There’s always a reason, but the reason would never be told directly, just like in my movie.
