5 Questions with Mei Liu ("Happy Ending")
1) Can you talk briefly about your background, and how you first got interested in filmmaking?
I’m from Shanghai, China. But I moved around different cities during my childhood. I remember being alone in apartment buildings, daydreaming to escape the feeling of isolation.
At age 14, I saw Adaptation by Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman on my computer. (I was watching so many illegally torrented foreign movies at the time.) It was the first time I realized that films are made by actual people. People that are as vulnerable, troubled, and real as I was. I wanted badly to do what they do - to make films, and to make sense of life from the act of it.
2) What was the initial idea for this project and how did it evolve from there?
There are moments in life that pierce through your routine interactions with people, that would make you realize your rehearsed set of words no longer fit, and that your curated version of self no longer feels truthful. These moments feel like little tunnels that allow us to glimpse into the truths of everyone we encounter, especially against a metropolitan backdrop like New York.
With HAPPY ENDING, I attempt to capture a moment of empathy that transcends language, race, and culture in an increasingly polarizing world with seemingly impenetrable national and ideological borders.
3) What was the biggest challenge in making this film? And the easiest part?
The easiest part was figuring out the visual language of the film, thanks to my DP Fanchao Meng who closely collaborated with me from the very beginning of the script.
The challenge was that I struggled to create the most free and creative environment as a director for my cast and crew, so that they can take bold risks and experiment in the making of the film. I strive to create a set where everybody is totally absorbed in making an organic discovery of something real, something meaningful to them, and not just to carry out a predetermined plan. As Mike Leigh once said, each of us on set should all be investigating a unique, personal experience. It’s an ongoing learning process for me, to know how to balance between improvisation and planning, between trying different things and getting things done.
4) What’s a film you’ve seen recently, new or old, that you really loved and why?
Pebbles by Vinothraj P.S., a winner of IFFR this year. It’s a surprising and genius example of how to make sense of life through a filmmaker’s gaze. The bleak daily reality of the villagers in Madurai, India, is transformed into a world full of whimsical, bizarre and unexpected events and characters. There’s one wonderful scene that I think about often: an emaciated family trying to catch rats from the ground to eat. A young girl from the family wanders off to pick up dry leaves on the floor. She then throws all those leaves into the air, watching the leaves twist and turn like birds. She laughs out of joy. The backdrop of the film shows a lot of the violence towards women in the family context, as well as poverty and starvation. Yet life is also the joy from watching leaves fly like birds. Both are equally real. It was a profound, poetic cinematic moment for me.
5) What’s next for you?
I’m shooting my first feature film, about a chameleon-like 17-year-old girl and her three-day Shanghai adventure filled with drastically different personas. In the end, she goes back to her provincial hometown, revealing only a glimpse about who she really is. There’s no pre-written script, just a DV camera, a long shooting period and a lot of improvisations. It’s an attempt to form stories on actual locations and form relationships between real people. I’m very excited to embark on this journey, since it’s pretty much the opposite of Happy Ending in terms of the filming process.
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