After weaving together footage shot over 20 years to create the expansive Caught By The Tides, veteran Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke said that he wants to return to his pre-pandemic “routines and rhythms” and make a film every two years.
Jia also told Deadline that he is set to begin production on his next film in October or November this year, which will be a “road, travelogue film” following a “female character who will travel from a place that is extremely cold, to a place that is extremely warm.”
Jia won Venice’s Golden Lion for Still Life in 2006 and Best Screenplay in Cannes for A Touch of Sin in 2013.
Caught By The Tides had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival this year, before having its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.
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The Chinese auteur said that the foundations for Caught By The Tides were laid more than 20 years ago, in 2001, when he got his first digital camera.
“We were young back then and with my actor Zhao Tao and our DP, the three of us would spontaneously go to different cities and capture some moments of daily life,” Jia said. “We didn’t really think about how and what this would turn out to be. We kept doing this on and off for many years and I didn’t expect to continue for so many years.”
However, when the Covid pandemic hit, Jia turned to his trove of footage and decided to put together a film. “We became isolated in our own environment without the opportunity to travel, move around and make films. I thought that it was the right historical moment and juncture to bring this project to a close. Also, as a creator and artist, I didn’t want to stop for such a long time without any creative output,” Jia said.
Filmmaking as a kind of “quantum physics”
Caught By The Tides is a love story that follows Qiaoqiao (played by Zhao Tao, who is also Jia’s wife) and Bin (played by Li Zhubin) in China from the early 2000s to the present day.
The film begins with Qiaoqiao and Bin enjoying their time together in Datong, a city in northern Shanxi province. One day, Bin decides to move to a bigger city. Some time later, Qiaoqiao decides to go on a journey to look for him.
For over two decades, Jia took videos of Zhao Tao and other friends, filming near the Three Gorges on the Yangtze River, to Zhuhai in the far south, to China’s north-east and south-west.
Jia’s cameras and technology have also changed over time — from simple digital video cameras to the ARRI Alexa, as well as virtual reality cameras.
“Looking back, I was just a man with a digital camera and my thought was to find a way to break out of the conventional film industry procedures and modes of production, to move away from going straight from a script to a film,” Jia said.
“I had a question: what can we accomplish with this new technology called the digital camera, and achieve a sense of freedom away from the conventional modes of production within the film industry? During the time of the pandemic, without any physical freedom to go anywhere or to make films, I was thinking about how I can break away from physical constraints and reflect on the freedom in thoughts, feelings, emotions and imagination.
“If you look at a lot of films made in the past, they tend to follow a logical and causal way of thinking, almost like the rules of physics, something that is very linear,” Jia said. “This is something that I’m trying to break out of, to think about filmmaking not in terms of conventional rule physics, but more like quantum physics. It’s more about the correlation or the mutually influential factors of all the things that we experience in life that on the surface, may not even relate to each other. This could be anyone who has been captured in my footage who might not have direct connections to each other, but if you dig deeper, they have a kind of interconnection.”
Observing 20 years of change
To begin work on Caught By The Tides, Jia’s first task was to digitize all the footage in his collection.
“I suddenly realized how much I have forgotten about the things and materials that I captured on film in those 20 plus years,” Jia said.
He added that creating Caught By The Tides was a kind of time machine.
“You see how technologies have evolved, how the appearance of people in different eras and different generations have changed through time,” Jia said. “The most memorable for me, and what really caught me by surprise, was to see how the atmosphere and the feelings of society have shifted. At the turn of century, in 2001, it was chaotic, but you can sense this exciting, vivacious energy in society. But now, you do see that the society has gone from chaotic to a lot more orderly and rational, in the way that people live their lives.”
Jia added that making Caught By The Tides was a way of observing society as if “outside a fishbowl.”
“It did bring me sorrow and sadness seeing how we have evolved through these different years but at the same time, this project gave me pause as a filmmaker to have that kind of necessary distance to see from the outside in, rather than just always seeing through the camera that I use to capture these images,” Jia said.
The film is an X Stream Pictures, Momo Pictures, Huanxi Media Group Limited (Beijing) and Wishart Media (Quanzhou) production, in association with mk2 Films, Ad Vitam and Bitters End. Caught By The Tides was produced by Casper Liang Jiayan, Shozo Ichiyama and Zhang Dong.
On his return to Cannes for the world premiere of Caught By The Tides earlier this year for the first time since the 2018 premiere of his film Ash Is Purest White, Jia said that like the characters in his films, he had to learn to grapple with change.
“The film industry, the films shown and the audiences have all changed,” Jia said. “The media outlets and the press are not the same as before. There are new film critics coming up and the entire ecology of the international film circuit has changed quite a bit after the pandemic. For those 10 days in Cannes, even though a lot have changed, I felt that this is where I want to be and it’s good to be back.”
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