From Alfred Hitchcock’s East of Shanghai (1931) and Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai to the recent Shanghai Kiss, Shanghai has long captured the imaginations of foreign film enthusiasts. Consider Dutch filmmaker David Verbeek and French producer Natacha Devillers part of this movement with their recently completed Shanghai Trance, a film that explores the many different social layers of the city.
Co-produced by Shanghai Film Studios and funded by Motel Films and the Dutch government, the film tells three independent stories of three groups of young adults who wrestle with issues of family, romance and identity. They are connected only by their environment: Shanghai.
We spoke with Devillers, whose production credits include Jia Zhangke’s The Platform, as she was deep in the final stages of making the film with Verbeek.
Q: Many foreigners have a fascination with the architecture and scale of Shanghai. Do you think that Shanghai Trance speaks equally to both Chinese and foreign audiences?
Natacha Devillers (ND): Some Chinese producers read [the script] and they said it was dead on. But we also did it for a foreign audience as well. [Shanghai Trance] shows Shanghai as a very modern city, which it is.The director came out here fascinated by the growth, an external element of the city that seduces everybody when they initially come out here. But the longer he stayed, the more he realized that this fast-paced change breeds a lot of insecurity among people his age. He felt that a lot of people were drifting a little bit, with no sense of direction.
Q: What special challenges do you face producing films in China?
ND: What you are allowed to show and not show on screen is the trickiest. You think you’ve done it right, and then it turns out all wrong. Then there’s the fragmented state of the cinema exhibitors. In Indonesia, one group owns most of the country’s cinemas so it is very easy to get a film into nation-wide release. Here you have to go from city to city, exhibitor to exhibitor.
But on the flip side, the crews here are great. They are so hardworking, even I have troule following the pacve sometimes. Back in the West, you just hand over your material to the labs or tell your crew what you want and pay them lots of money. Here you pay much less, but need to figure out how to do things by yourself all the time.
Q: In shooting this film in China, were you hoping to escape the 20 films a year quota and have the film shown on the Chinese mainland?
ND: No. [Shanghai Trance] is what we call a “director film.” It’s not a solely commercial film. If we were trying to make a commercial film, we would be doing everything we could to cater to a Chinese audience and we’re not. This is an auteur-driven film.
Q: What images of Shanghai will we see in the finished film?
ND: A whole array of places. There is a lot of Shanghai in this film. It was shot in 30 different locations over 40 days, all throughout Shanghai. [You'll see] the French Concession, the Bund, People’s Square and Pudong.
Q: No doubt expensive locations where you’re holding up traffic.
ND: No, because we’re doing both interior and exterior shots where we didn’t have to stop traffic. The director is really influence by Asian cinema, directors such as Hou Hsiao Hsien, Tsai Ming Liang and Jia Zhangke [known for location work] so there are lots of long shots where you see Shanghai. And I think we tried to take out some shots that were too cliche; this film shows more than picture postcards.