Wang Bin

One of my chinese professors is good friends with the film screenplay writer Wang Bin (To Live, Hero, Fearless, House of Flying Daggers, the incident of my young wife, etc). He hooked us up with a chat today after lunch. I believe he is a very wise man. He fielded many of our questions at length. Here is an overview.

Wang Bin: I have not been able to spend much time in America, but from my perception of America and the time that I've spent there, I feel that the American obsession with legality has undermined the extent of its freedom. Laws are much less hardened in stone and our justice system is not fleshed out to such an obsessive extent so that I feel much more free when I am in China than when I am in America.

When I was younger I would see American films and I wouldn't think much of them. Now that I am older and Chinese films have been around long enough to begin to make comparisons, I have gained much more respect for contemporary American films. Even in the most commercially base films, there is an American spirit underlying as the premise of the film. A sense that one should help those in need and that people should work together. This kind of national spirit is still absent from Chinese films. In my films I have been attemping to create a sense of this Chinese spirit through revitalized Chinese nationalism. After the humiliation and hardships of the last 150 years, I feel that an increase in Chinese nationalism could do nothing but good. This is not to say that I espouse a narrow minded exclusive Nationalism. Instead it is about finally understanding and evaluating the concept that we Chinese are no different than westerners. At the beginning of the modern period, Chinese believed themselves superior to westerners and all others. The westerners had trinkets and inventions but were culturally inferior and backwards. Then after we were repeatedly defeated and subjugated we came to believe wholly that we were in fact the ones who were backwards and primitive. We rejected our tradition and attempted to destroy it. The teachings of confucius and buddhism were stripped away and we entered a period of chaos. Now that order and unity have been restored and the Chinese people move into a world leadership position again, an appreciation of Chinese nationalism and tradition would do all well. This is not a concept of necessary Chinese superiority but of necessary Chinese equality. American films have very much exhausted most of the topics of contemporary western life. In order for us to make chinese films that can compete artistically and commercially right now, we must capitalize on that which we have and others do not: Chinese national culture and tradition.

Note: This is my paraphrasing of professor Chen's translation. Neither did we record it directly nor did he speak in english.

-Winkler