Rolling Stone
The career of young director Ning Hao, 30, can be divided into "pre-Stone Age" and "post-Stone Age", with his black humor picture Crazy Stone (Fengkuang De Shitou) in 2006 as a boundary. The 4-million-yuan ($512,000) movie collected 20 million yuan ($2.56 million) at the national box office, and a rare phenomenon in Chinese cinema.
In the pre-Stone Age, he was just another young dreamer struggling in Beijing's lanes and basements, making a living by shooting music videos (MV) and photographs for singers.
Ning Hao has become the biggest dark horse in Chinese cinema. Jiang Dong |
In the post-Stone Age period he is a shining star, who turns down dozens of invitations from film companies. His shooting schedule is fully booked until 2009. "We have offended many people, but Ning Hao is really very busy," his assistant Pan Xiao said.
But there is one request Ning grabbed with both hands. CAV Warner Home Entertainment Co, a joint venture of Warner Home Video and China Audio Video (CAV), wanted to release a DVD collection of his all three directorial works last summer, because they wanted to support talented Chinese directors and introduce more excellent local works.
As well as Stone are Incense (Xiang Huo) and Mongolian Ping Pong (Lu Caodi) in the collection. The other two are fruits of the pre-Stone age.
Incense, Ning's maiden work, which cost every yuan he had saved from shooting MVs and photographs, focused on the only monk in a small village in North China's Shanxi Province. It was also Ning's hometown.
The monk rushed about to gather money to fix up the broken Buddha statue in his temple, so that he could receive some donations from pilgrims during the upcoming Lantern Festival. No one would help him, so he had to pretend to be a blind fortune-teller to earn the money. However when the statue was re-shaped, the temple was forced to be removed because it was in the way of "modern progress".
The idea of writing a script about a monk came up when Ning lived in a monk friend's temple in 2000, three years before he had enough money to shoot the film.
"When we think of monks, we often relate to Kung Fu masters," he said, "but during my stay in the temple, I found on one hand they were also ordinary human beings who have fun stories. On the other hand, they have faith. So an observation on them and their interaction with people around them can shed some light on today's Chinese people's attitude towards faith."
But Ning did not give any answers in his movie. His first feature was just his thoughts at that time on the issue; as for the answer, he said it was for every viewer to ponder.
Ning Hao and Tony Vaughan, head of CAV Warner Home Entertainment Co during a promotion activity for the film Crazy Stone in 2006. File photo |
Like many other young directors' first works, Incense was not publicly screened, but only toured at a few film festivals. But the small-scaled screening brought him the second chance to shoot a feature film.
In 2004, he received an invitation to direct a story about how a teenage boy and his ping pong team worked extremely hard to overcome one difficulty after another and win the championship in a provincial match.
He initially thought the story was a bit clich. "There is no suspense," he recalled. "Two kinds of balls are anything but suspense in China: One is football, the other ping pong. The first is always a disaster, while the other is always a triumph."
But like any young man dreaming of being a successful director, he had to accept whatever came his way. He tried to rewrite the story, but the inspiration hit him between the eyes, when he saw a landscape of grassland in a restaurant. He realised Han ethnic children would be intrigued by those people living in distant regions and under different customs. So he took ping pong balls to the hinterland of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.
Just like the film later describes, many children had no idea what the ball was. Although most of the time they just whispered in Mongolian, Ning could tell they were interested in the new toy.
"A boy played with the small ball for two days, until it was trod on and became flat!" he recalled. Mongolian Ping Pong's hero was then set as an Inner Mongolian boy, who thought a ping pong ball he accidentally got was a treasure, so he took a joke-filled journey to "give it to the government."
In this picture, it is already hard to neglect Ning's mastery on humor and narration.
The shooting of Ping Pong was a hard slog. Just before filming started, investors cancelled the investment.
Luckily, a friend lent him 100,000 yuan ($13,000). His girlfriend took all their savings to help.
In the foul weather on the border of China and Mongolia, he celebrated his 27th birthday with his small crew. One third of the original crew could no longer stand the hardship of living in the outback and left.
But Ning is not a person who easily gave up when he had set up a goal. The dream is always there, whether it was a stage set design, a semi-professional MV, or a student in the Beijing Film Academy.
"After finishing Mongolian Ping Pong," he said, "I found that no film could be harder than that."
Ping Pong took such a toll on the young man that he slumped into deep depression, his nerves shot to pieces. But more dramatic than his stories, the film helped him win 2 million yuan ($260,000) support from Focus: First Cuts, a plan initiated by Hong Kong star Andy Lau to financially aid young directors.
The money helped Ning create the biggest dark horse in China's film market in 2006 - Crazy Stone.
The story about a priceless jade, its guard and three groups of thieves reached the popularity many blockbusters, costing tens of millions, failed to achieve.
Ning's own road to fame as a director parallels his films, dramatic and absurd.
But as people know and believe, chance favors the prepared mind.
(China Daily 05/22/2007 page18)
