Production
The film was inspired by and loosely based on a novella titled Survival by You Fengwei. However, the final screenplay was largely original, with only few similarities to You's novella. Director Jiang Wen and director of photography Gu Changwei made the unique choice of shooting the film in black and white in order to capture the details of the historical era depicted in the film. There were initial worries about the sales and distribution prospects for a black-and-white film, but the production eventually went ahead.
The Japanese cast members in the film, two of whom came to know Jiang while on exchange in the Central Academy of Drama in the 1980s, initially expressed concerns with the Japanese war crimes depicted in the film. Jiang spent two weeks discussing the issue with them, and showed them documentaries about the war, including some made by Japanese filmmakers. According to Jiang, the Japanese cast members eventually came to trust him. Jiang also used many non-professional actors and actresses in the film, some of whom were also members of the crew. Jiang himself also played the leading role in the film, which he admitted was a tiring experience. He said he also came to distrust what most of the crew members said about his acting, especially when they were tired and wanting to finish for the day.
An executive director from Beijing Zhongbo Times Film Planning, one of the three investors in the film, said in an interview that the total expenditure on the film approached US$3.9 million, way above the original budget, which he did not specify. Later, however, a general manager from the same company told a reporter that the initial budget was US$2 million, but the final expenditure exceeded this number by over 30 percent.
Read more about this topic: Devils On The Doorstep
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
“Constant revolutionizing of production ... distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)