A filmmaker’s diary from the Thames and Yangtze rivers.

JUNE 27, 2023

2008. My film crew was looking out over the river. The water was brown, heavy with thickness. We stood on London Bridge against the backdrop of the Tower of London, the traffic vibrating under our feet. I waited for the camera woman to adjust her tripod, supporting a long-lens digital video camera. A Chinese actress was facing in the direction of the Shard, showing her profile to the camera. The film I was directing was a feature, set in both China and Britain. It was called “She, A Chinese,” after Godard’s “La Chinoise.” My film was about a Chinese woman’s journey to the west. I had decided to film along two rivers, as the story was set against two symbolic waterways — the Thames and the Yangtze.

The film’s main character, Li-Mei, was a teenage runaway, blindly fleeing her former Chinese life. For her, the destination did not matter, as long as it was not China. This location on the Thames would be the first place Li-Mei would visit after arriving in Britain. In the scene, she gazes at the muddy riverbank, the parliament buildings, St Paul’s Cathedral, and the London Eye. I wanted the actress to keep a certain void in her eyes and on her face. The life of her character was one of contingency. She was still a blank piece of paper upon which adventures could be written.

The film crew stood by. The camera woman and the sound recordist now gave an okay sign. I called out: “First position, camera rolling, action!” The girl began to run towards the bank, her hair flying in the English wind. Towards the end of the shot, a container ship passed below us with the Chinese characters 扬鸣 (Yangming) on its side. I wondered if it had come from the delta region of the Yangtze River, the location we would head to once we finished the U.K. scenes.

Even though the script was written as a chronicle of the girl’s journey, we had to film the U.K. part first due to the schedule imposed by the Brits involved. This approach to production was slightly confusing for us — we were a bunch of young filmmakers without much fiction filming experience, and were much more familiar with documentary methods. For me, it was especially challenging to shoot in a non-chronological way. I had to lead a British team as we filmed the end, then move backwards in time to film the China sequences.

Two weeks later, we packed our camera equipment and made the reverse journey, flying back to southern China, to a village near the Yangtze River, the home of the protagonist. Apart from the cinematographer and the sound engineer, who travelled with us from London, almost all of my crewmembers in China were Chinese. For me, it was a relief to work with locals in China, both professionals and non-professionals. Anyone drawn from the local farming community was better than an actor pretending to be a peasant. They knew the streets and alleyways so well and helped the crew to navigate locations. They also loved being involved in a film shooting because they thought it was a great entertainment outside of their work routine.

The skyline is vast in southern China, and the landscape unfolded in shifting contours as we drove along the winding river. It was September, the fragrance of matured rice and wheat permeated the air.

The fictional village where my character lived was set in a slum area outside of Chongqing. We chose the location because it was an interim zone between urban space and the messy patchwork of agricultural land characteristic of China. There were only two little streets and a few modest shops in the village. In the story, Li-Mei and her family raise pigs and grow vegetables on their patch of land. The bustling mega city Chongqing is only an hour away by bus, and has 32 million residents. But the girl has never been to the city. She has dropped out of school in order to help her family. Within a few days and with plenty of improvisation, we finished shooting the village scenes. As scripted, Li-Mei would now run away to the big city. We moved to Chongqing, settling in a hotel by the Yangtze River for the remainder of the shoot.

The skyline is vast in southern China, and the landscape unfolded in shifting contours as we drove along the winding river. It was September, the fragrance of matured rice and wheat permeated the air. In the markets, baskets of eel and shrimp and trout gave off a pungent odor that lingered in the nearby streets. The semi-tropical world had a life-affirming force, bustling with action and movement, which contrasted vividly with the serene and tame urban spaces we had filmed in England. Everywhere we went, there were immense banyan trees, lush bamboo and large-petaled flowers, but there were also huge rubbish dumps and endless industrial waste along the roads. Farmers with their animals blocked traffic, cars honked behind them. Workers drove by on motorbikes, weaving in and out of the clogged highways and narrow streets. As a southerner myself, this hectic climate was familiar to me. And as a filmmaker, I preferred to film in this environment, with its unpredictable interruptions, rather than confining myself and my crew to an enclosed studio set. I liked the dynamics between our artistically constructed scenes and the ever-changing world around us. All I needed was to place my actors in front of the camera and let them interact with the surroundings.

We call the Yangtze 长江: Changjiang, meaning the “Long River,” for it is the longest river in Asia. It has represented the spirit of Chinese life for thousands of years. Almost one third of China’s population lives along the river. The part of the Yangtze where we filmed is especially important to the country’s irrigation, transportation, and industry. It is where the metropolis of Chongqing stands.

Chongqing is crisscrossed by many rivers, as well as mountains which rise and fall sharply. The meandering branches of the Yangtze and Three Gorges are the city’s central geographical features. The fog and mist hung above the river, enveloping this incredibly busy city. To the north stand the Daba Mountains, portrayed in so many classical poems. Towards the east are the Wu Mountains, and in the southeast the mystical Wuling Mountains which have inspired many singers. The foundation of this landscape is limestone, eroded by dissolution to produce ridges, fissures and sinkholes. For me, this is a great cinematic space. Not only can you explore its mysterious stone forests and limestone valleys, but you can also easily turn the camera to film the ceaseless flux of human activity around the factories, markets, streets and parks.

Every morning, the film crew had a communal breakfast in the lobby of the large hotel in Chongqing: steaming noodles, dumplings and all sorts of savory porridges (the very opposite of the takeaway coffee and soggy-cheese sandwiches of merry old England). Then we carried our film equipment down to the riverbank. We set up while the actors rehearsed their lines, though there were hardly any lines for them to memorize. Somehow, the China part of my film was almost dialogue-free; Li-Mei, the protagonist, simply needed to move about in the urban space, like a flâneuse. That morning, we would film Li-Mei and her boyfriend, a small-time hired thug, taking a walk along the Yangtze. There was nothing very special about this hired thug, apart from his masculine appearance, which aroused Li-Mei. He could be as ordinary as any un-educated Chinese laborer from a poorer part of the country, surviving in a big city by means of any available form of employment. In the script, this would be their first time in public as a “couple” after their night together. She isn’t sure if she wants to be with a lower-class man, someone who offers her no future. And he is only sexually attracted to her. Both of them feel a certain melancholy, that “love” is a fancy word that only appears in novels and movies.

In Chongqing, we were making a film without any official permissions, nor did we submit ourselves voluntarily to censorship. We knew how to play the game.

Now, with the sun beating down, we started filming. The girl walked ahead and he followed behind, slowing their pace as our camera team trailed behind. I had abandoned my monitor, even though it showed me precise framing and close ups. Instead, I walked alongside my camera woman, watching the scene as we went along. We were guerilla filmmakers, with a reflexively documentary style. I always felt this approach worked very well in China, though not so well in the orderly, rule-bound streets of the West.

In Chongqing, we were making a film without any official permissions, nor did we submit ourselves voluntarily to censorship. We knew how to play the game. The advantage of filming in provincial China, rather than in the capitals, is that local police are too busy dealing with their own issues. A small film crew in an ordinary street is not worth the attention of the police, unless you are deliberately shouting anti-state slogans. For every public space we filmed in Britain, we had to apply for permission as well as for a time slot. There, we could never improvise a cinematic scene.

There we were, with two “lovers” strolling along, letting the atmosphere of a throbbing semi-tropical city envelop them. There was all sorts of noise around them: sellers shouting out prices, children crying, loud speakers blaring, car horns, rickshaws and bicycles. The actors were supposed to engage with their surroundings, to chat with street sellers or stop in front of food stalls. It was all to happen without a deliberate design. I did not need to call out “cut” or “action.”

Suddenly, a deafening motorbike swept into the camera’s viewfinder. A middle-aged woman zig-zagged rapidly through the crowds, causing a wave of commotion. We continued filming, even though my cinematographer had lost her focus. The woman drove past our actors and down the slope of the riverbank. She parked by the water’s edge. We could see something draped around her shoulders and part of her back — something long, thick and undulating. As we got closer, I discovered that the long curvy thing was a python. Leather-skinned and thick as a large bamboo stem, it was several meters long, its two small but sharp eyes projecting a menacing look.

The creature immediately seized our attention. Perhaps none of us had seen such a large snake before. Now the two actors stood by the water, taken aback by the appearance of the giant python. The woman, wearing a short jumpsuit, walked straight into the water. One of her arms cradled the animal’s head, while she held its tail with her left hand. Her hands held the creature and guided it in the water back and forth in a gentle movement. My camera woman continued documenting the scene, though she was unsteady, her feet submerged in the water. The sound recordist had also waded in, his boom now directed towards the snake rather than the actors. Li-Mei and the hitman turned to me for directions, so I made a sign that they should go into the river and mingle with the python and the python master. The two understood well, and went into the water accordingly. My actress maintained her calm body language, although her face betrayed a certain uneasiness as she approached her hand to the snake’s back. Slightly afraid, she did not quite touch the creature, but kept her hand a few centimeters above the python’s scaly skin.

No one said anything. The woman did not even raise her head to look at us or our camera. Perhaps she did not notice us filming at all, or she was indifferent to our existence since there were so many tourists with video cameras in the area. Gently washing the snake, the woman let the creature swim for some moments, then held it loosely again with both hands as though to prevent it escaping. Now my actors were blocking the camera’s view, so we had to adjust our position in the water. Everyone was wet. All I knew was that we should film as much as we could as long as the python was around. In my mind I was already cutting to the next scene — a crucial scene about the separation of the two lovers, when the man dies and the woman leaves China for Britain. If the current scene with the giant python was effective, it would serve as a transition leading to the climax of the story.

After the snake lady left with her pet on the motorbike, our team finally took a lunch break. The actors were relieved. Everyone sat in the shade by the riverbank, drinking water in the hot and humid air. During lunch, I noticed two mandarin ducks floating on the water where the snake once was. The mandarin ducks — Yuanyang, as they are called in Chinese — had beautiful orange feathers. They played peacefully, dipping their beaks in and out of the water, searching for fish. Most of the time, one was never far from the other; they glided side by side gracefully.

A large container ship was passing by slowly, with two Chinese characters, 扬鸣 , “Yangming,” written on its side. Could this be the same container ship that we had filmed on the Thames in London?

That evening, we went back to our hotel base and filmed the lovers’ separation scene. Even though it was a pivotal scene, I thought to myself: still, it’s a pity, filming in an indoor set, devoid of interaction or surprising elements. In a way, I wish I could always film outdoors, in an open space where life is happening all the time, with the python, the mandarin ducks, or indeed whatever else might come along.

In the end, this documentary scene featuring a python in the Yangtze river worked well in the final cut. A month later, in London, I edited out many scenes, but I always kept this improvised one.

On our final day in China, we packed our luggage and got ready to go to the airport. We stopped by the Yangtze one last time. We bought some green tea in the area where the python lady had shown up. This time, we saw neither snakes nor mandarin ducks. A tourist boat had just arrived, bringing hundreds of people from faraway regions. I noticed their different dialects as they rushed onto the bank. Street sellers instantly ran towards them, hawking small goods. On the stairs leading to the embankment, a couple was blocking the way, arguing loudly and violently. They spoke in Shanghai dialect. The woman could not stop cursing the man, whereas the man, looking very frustrated, stopped fighting back, instead biting into the chunk of sugar cane he held in his hand. Crowds gathered around them. A large container ship was passing by slowly, with two Chinese characters, 扬鸣 , “Yangming,” written on its side. Could this be the same container ship that we had filmed on the Thames in London? I would never know. The river was shimmering under the sun, enigmatic and indifferent to our activities. As we were leaving, a group of half-naked children ran into the water. They played and giggled, fought and splashed water onto each other’s faces. Around them, rubbish and plastic bags floated about. Life melded into one stream, the ever-flowing river.

I thought of the Thames, to which I would soon return. Perhaps I should dip my feet into the Thames, swim in it, drink a handful of water even though it might be full of dirt and silt. Only by doing so could I begin to understand this cold northern river — a river, like the Yangtze, of the imagination. It was with this river that I had now chosen to share my life.