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yonfan q&a: no. 7 cherry lane - best screenplay, venice film festival 2019
One of Asian cinema's auteurs, Hong Kong-based director Yonfan's No. 7 Cherry Lane, his first film in 10 years, his debut animation, and the first Hong Kong film since 2011 to vie for the Golden Lion top prize, won Best Screenplay award at this month's Venice Film Festival. Set in Hong Kong in the 1960s, the film tells of a love-entangled triangle between a mother, her daughter and an English-language tutor, whose visits to the cinema bring them magical moments and reveal forbidden passions. The era coincides with Hong Kong's turbulent times of 1967. Yonfan writes, directs and produces his own films, and also serves as art director on his projects. Two months earlier, ISBN met Yonfan and discussed the process of making his first animation and why the film feels like the director's love letter to Hong Kong, and to Art.
ISBN: You have described No.7 Cherry Lane as a love poem to Hong Kong. It also feels like a 125-minute love poem to Art.
YONFAN: I described my film as a love letter to Hong Kong, not a poem. Poetry is too big a word with which to decorate my humble self. I love the word art. It can be anything - high and low, beauty and the beast, rich and poor, east and west, physical and spiritual, democrat and republican... all the contradictions that give the motivation force, and that makes the art. I am fortunate to know my definition of art. Many people think art means only beauty that pleases one’s senses, but it is not. Art is also not a commodity that is defined by name and money. So if you say No.7 Cherry Lane is my love letter to art, I think you have chosen the right description.
ISBN: There are so many intertextual references in the film - to cinema, literature, to art, to philosophy, and more. Did you manage to include everything you wanted or did you make sacrifices?
YF: Through the years I have tried to learn not to be greedy. But with No.7 Cherry Lane I put many ingredients intoone movie - di erent styles of paintings, a mixture of eastand west culture, music in a classical form that clashes with that clashes with street music and even Chinese Opera, so perhaps I'm greedy putting everything in one oven to cook. I don’t know whether it works or not, but it’s good experience.
ISBN: The classic Marcel Proust novel Remembrance of Things Past is one of the first references made in the film. When and where did you first encounter this book and under which circumstances?YF: That evokes good memories. In 1970, I read the manuscripts of Wen Tong-he’s [Qing dynasty Confucian scholar] diary for Marina Warner’s first book, The Dragon Empress, in a Cambridge university library. I decided to spend a year doing the job. I hitchhiked to the university town and got a lift with an English undergraduate from Peterhouse [the oldest college at the university]. He invited me for tea in his room and told me about Proust. That was the first time I had ever heard about Remembrance of Things Past. Later that year, I saw volumes of the book in the library and thought how intellectual it would be to read it. I started with Swann’s Way but after two pages I decided I was not the literary type. I can still remember that kind, handsome young student though, who resembled one of the characters from Romeo and Juliet, and his name is Justin Shepherd.
ISBN: Much of the film’s drama (both intimacy and intensity) takes place within Mrs Yu’s lounge, and the scenes move very deliberately within it. Tell us about how you ‘constructed’ that high-key yet humble interior space and ‘found’ the speed, or stealth, with which to shoot?
YF: I really cannot tell how I wrote all those scenes and the dialogues in the movie. Probably it’s the magnification of my own ‘remembrance of things past’. You asked about my first experience with Marcel Proust, and coincidentally, it’s almost the same situation as happenedin the movie. I think probably the whole film is based on people and things and conversations with which I am truly familiar. Although this movie happens in a post-modern 1967, it was the period I knew best. I was 20 that year.
ISBN: At one point, a classic Chinese song morphs into a three-minute street rap by Mrs Yu’s 18-year-old daughter Meiling. It’s a remarkable and most unexpected juncture in the film yet epic in effect. What prompted this development and how challenging was it to execute and write lyrics for?
YF: No.7 Cherry Lane is a story about yesterday, today and tomorrow, and we have an original theme song Southern Cross to accompany it. To complete the cry out of the mother, the daughter and the lover, I asked BOYoung to write a rap song for the present and future. But for the past, I thought a traditional tune was needed.
That old-fashioned Chinese song is an excerpt from my musical work 50 years ago. In 1969, I was leaving America to go to Europe and I travelled to the University of Iowa. There I met Paul Engle and his wife Nieh Hualing in the renowned International Writers Workshop. A true poet from Hong Kong, Wen Jianliu, wrote the lyrics for me so I could make the music. I lost the full version of his poem and my melody, but a remnant of it stayed in my memory. Every time I hum it people think it’s old-fashioned. Against all the odds, I used it in the film together with the street-rap music simply because it felt appropriate. Wen Jianliu passed away young, he was 32, and I never became a music composer. But I was once a private student of Sir John Pritchard, music director of the London Philharmonic Orchestra.
ISBN: Many films are personal or autobiographical in nature. But No.7 Cherry Lane feels acutely personal and poignant, as taut and epic and emotional as a violin string. It is an intensely captivating experience to watch - both agony and ecstasy in heart, mind, soul and feeling. Did you write all the material yourself, and how difficult was it to accomplish the writing given its level of sensitivity?
YF: I would say the story of No.7 Cherry Lane is simple, but the love in it is so desperate and my venture into the animation genre is a revolutionary cinematic step. You might call it a personal ego trip but I must take all the responsibility for this work, and that includes the writing. Usually, it takes a long time for me to think, but the actual writing is spontaneous.
ISBN: How easy/difficult was it to ‘direct’ and ‘edit’ this animation as compared with more conventional cinema? Can you illustrate that point by describing a specific scene, part, or line, from the film, by way of example?
YF: I started with my three published short stories, then made a scene-by-scene, shot-by-shot list and gave it to my animator Hsieh Wen-ming in Taipei to do the animatic storyboard. Then I gave that to my other animation master, Zhang Gang in Beijing, to make the picture move. Zhang told me he would do a 3-D animation, and after I approved all the movements of the 3-D version he would then hand-draw a 2-D animation with 60 artists. I believe in 2-D images because they leave more to the imagination.
ISBN: The opening line from Jane Eyre: “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day”, is one of the most iconic in all of Western literature. Your film voices it three times. What is your relationship to that line and why not once, or twice, but thrice?
YF: I repeat the line three times simply because it resonates. The first time is by the narrator, the second time is in Meiling’s imaginary state of mind, and the third time she says it in a desperate, loving way to challenge the man she adores. I just think it’s wonderful.
ISBN: Where would you ‘place’ No.7 Cherry Lane within the canon of your work and how much did the experience of making such an innovative and artful film increase your already passionate love for cinema? Would you ever consider making a sequel?
YF: I wrote a very big part of their lives and what happens afterwards - love, hate and regrets - in novella form already. But I don’t believe in sequels. That is left entirely to people’s imagination. Every movie I made, I thought would be my last picture. No.7 Cherry Lane is no exception.
Images: Courtesy of Yonfan
yonfan q&a: no. 7 cherry lane - best screenplay, venice film festival 2019
One of Asian cinema's auteurs, Hong Kong-based director Yonfan's No. 7 Cherry Lane, his first film in 10 years, his debut animation, and the first Hong Kong film since 2011 to vie for the Golden Lion top prize, won Best Screenplay award at this month's Venice Film Festival. Set in Hong Kong in the 1960s, the film tells of a love-entangled triangle between a mother, her daughter and an English-language tutor, whose visits to the cinema bring them magical moments and reveal forbidden passions. The era coincides with Hong Kong's turbulent times of 1967. Yonfan writes, directs and produces his own films, and also serves as art director on his projects. Two months earlier, ISBN met Yonfan and discussed the process of making his first animation and why the film feels like the director's love letter to Hong Kong, and to Art.
ISBN: You have described No.7 Cherry Lane as a love poem to Hong Kong. It also feels like a 125-minute love poem to Art.
YONFAN: I described my film as a love letter to Hong Kong, not a poem. Poetry is too big a word with which to decorate my humble self. I love the word art. It can be anything - high and low, beauty and the beast, rich and poor, east and west, physical and spiritual, democrat and republican... all the contradictions that give the motivation force, and that makes the art. I am fortunate to know my definition of art. Many people think art means only beauty that pleases one’s senses, but it is not. Art is also not a commodity that is defined by name and money. So if you say No.7 Cherry Lane is my love letter to art, I think you have chosen the right description.
ISBN: There are so many intertextual references in the film - to cinema, literature, to art, to philosophy, and more. Did you manage to include everything you wanted or did you make sacrifices?
YF: Through the years I have tried to learn not to be greedy. But with No.7 Cherry Lane I put many ingredients intoone movie - di erent styles of paintings, a mixture of eastand west culture, music in a classical form that clashes with that clashes with street music and even Chinese Opera, so perhaps I'm greedy putting everything in one oven to cook. I don’t know whether it works or not, but it’s good experience.
ISBN: The classic Marcel Proust novel Remembrance of Things Past is one of the first references made in the film. When and where did you first encounter this book and under which circumstances?YF: That evokes good memories. In 1970, I read the manuscripts of Wen Tong-he’s [Qing dynasty Confucian scholar] diary for Marina Warner’s first book, The Dragon Empress, in a Cambridge university library. I decided to spend a year doing the job. I hitchhiked to the university town and got a lift with an English undergraduate from Peterhouse [the oldest college at the university]. He invited me for tea in his room and told me about Proust. That was the first time I had ever heard about Remembrance of Things Past. Later that year, I saw volumes of the book in the library and thought how intellectual it would be to read it. I started with Swann’s Way but after two pages I decided I was not the literary type. I can still remember that kind, handsome young student though, who resembled one of the characters from Romeo and Juliet, and his name is Justin Shepherd.
ISBN: Much of the film’s drama (both intimacy and intensity) takes place within Mrs Yu’s lounge, and the scenes move very deliberately within it. Tell us about how you ‘constructed’ that high-key yet humble interior space and ‘found’ the speed, or stealth, with which to shoot?
YF: I really cannot tell how I wrote all those scenes and the dialogues in the movie. Probably it’s the magnification of my own ‘remembrance of things past’. You asked about my first experience with Marcel Proust, and coincidentally, it’s almost the same situation as happenedin the movie. I think probably the whole film is based on people and things and conversations with which I am truly familiar. Although this movie happens in a post-modern 1967, it was the period I knew best. I was 20 that year.
ISBN: At one point, a classic Chinese song morphs into a three-minute street rap by Mrs Yu’s 18-year-old daughter Meiling. It’s a remarkable and most unexpected juncture in the film yet epic in effect. What prompted this development and how challenging was it to execute and write lyrics for?
YF: No.7 Cherry Lane is a story about yesterday, today and tomorrow, and we have an original theme song Southern Cross to accompany it. To complete the cry out of the mother, the daughter and the lover, I asked BOYoung to write a rap song for the present and future. But for the past, I thought a traditional tune was needed.
That old-fashioned Chinese song is an excerpt from my musical work 50 years ago. In 1969, I was leaving America to go to Europe and I travelled to the University of Iowa. There I met Paul Engle and his wife Nieh Hualing in the renowned International Writers Workshop. A true poet from Hong Kong, Wen Jianliu, wrote the lyrics for me so I could make the music. I lost the full version of his poem and my melody, but a remnant of it stayed in my memory. Every time I hum it people think it’s old-fashioned. Against all the odds, I used it in the film together with the street-rap music simply because it felt appropriate. Wen Jianliu passed away young, he was 32, and I never became a music composer. But I was once a private student of Sir John Pritchard, music director of the London Philharmonic Orchestra.
ISBN: Many films are personal or autobiographical in nature. But No.7 Cherry Lane feels acutely personal and poignant, as taut and epic and emotional as a violin string. It is an intensely captivating experience to watch - both agony and ecstasy in heart, mind, soul and feeling. Did you write all the material yourself, and how difficult was it to accomplish the writing given its level of sensitivity?
YF: I would say the story of No.7 Cherry Lane is simple, but the love in it is so desperate and my venture into the animation genre is a revolutionary cinematic step. You might call it a personal ego trip but I must take all the responsibility for this work, and that includes the writing. Usually, it takes a long time for me to think, but the actual writing is spontaneous.
ISBN: How easy/difficult was it to ‘direct’ and ‘edit’ this animation as compared with more conventional cinema? Can you illustrate that point by describing a specific scene, part, or line, from the film, by way of example?
YF: I started with my three published short stories, then made a scene-by-scene, shot-by-shot list and gave it to my animator Hsieh Wen-ming in Taipei to do the animatic storyboard. Then I gave that to my other animation master, Zhang Gang in Beijing, to make the picture move. Zhang told me he would do a 3-D animation, and after I approved all the movements of the 3-D version he would then hand-draw a 2-D animation with 60 artists. I believe in 2-D images because they leave more to the imagination.
ISBN: The opening line from Jane Eyre: “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day”, is one of the most iconic in all of Western literature. Your film voices it three times. What is your relationship to that line and why not once, or twice, but thrice?
YF: I repeat the line three times simply because it resonates. The first time is by the narrator, the second time is in Meiling’s imaginary state of mind, and the third time she says it in a desperate, loving way to challenge the man she adores. I just think it’s wonderful.
ISBN: Where would you ‘place’ No.7 Cherry Lane within the canon of your work and how much did the experience of making such an innovative and artful film increase your already passionate love for cinema? Would you ever consider making a sequel?
YF: I wrote a very big part of their lives and what happens afterwards - love, hate and regrets - in novella form already. But I don’t believe in sequels. That is left entirely to people’s imagination. Every movie I made, I thought would be my last picture. No.7 Cherry Lane is no exception.
Images: Courtesy of Yonfan
