Please tell us about the projects you worked on before making ‘Subway Stories - New York’. How did you start, and how did you learn to make films?
Sometime in April last year, I received a notification from a famous domestic director in China that my movie script “Highland” could not pass the censorship department's opinion. This is the fourth director who has failed in his efforts for this.
And this is not a precedent; quite a few of my novels and screenplays have encountered similar problems, and a direct result: although I have sold quite a few film and television adaptation rights for my works, none of them have yet made it to the screen.
At this time, I came across AI-generated technology, and I began to try to use these tools to turn my short works into film and television products. the AI-generated images were stagnant and raw, but it also brought me another kind of surprise: the splendor of the images, the stability of the characters, and the possibilities of narrative under the multi-media means. But I have so many works that I want to make into film and television products, and after some attempts, I found that it is still difficult to realize complex stories and long stories with Ai. So I wrote the small script “Subway Stories - New York Chapter”. I must admit that I have a certain ambition, I hope this story can be enjoyed by audiences in the East and West, including the United States, and be impressed by its unique story while possessing the premise of watchability.
Subway Stories - New York has clearly achieved that, with countless viewers sending in comments on various platforms, impressed by the story and blown away by the omnipotence of AI.
This result firmly determined me to continue my attempts with the Ai generative approach, so I started to systematically learn all the mainstream AI generative tools, from images to videos to music. And while Ai is still iterating and progressing, after three months, the feature-length movie I'm working on, the ninety-minute Wolfpack, is showing amazing movie results.
Tell us about ‘Subway Stories - New York’. How do you describe it?
Subway Stories - New York is a love story and an anti-war story where I happen to live and see the unique flavor and humanity of one of the most complex cities in the world in terms of people, ethnicity and internationality. As a staunch anti-invasionist, I thought it made sense to write this story and make it into a short film. An important lesson learned is that placing a moving love story in the context of the times is always the most favorable way to build a drama.
Please tell us about your favorite filmmakers.
Frankly, I have too many favorite filmmakers. From Kubrick, to the Coen brothers, to Akira Kurosawa, to Jia Zhangke, to Ridley Scott, to Villeneuve. Scott, from Villeneuve to Paul Haggis and Clint Eastwood, a host of brilliant filmmakers. Eastwood, the perfection of so many brilliant filmmakers has always guided me to more moving works of literature. And because I am a writer, I can read and learn from the literary texture behind their films and movies.
If you were given a good budget, what would be your ideal project?
If I had such an opportunity and such a budget, my first thought would be to bring my work of fiction, This Fucking War, to the screen. It is an epic of the suffering of Chinese peasants, a panoramic portrait of China's tragic destiny. Unfortunately, this 900,000-word novel is now difficult to publish in China. I hope that the whole world will be able to see such stories in China, and that they will have a deeper understanding of today's China.
Describe how you would ensure that production is on schedule. What steps would you take?
Quite simply, a serious, strictly timetabled work plan, working strictly on an optimized process, with the finalization of the script as a prerequisite, followed by the subplot design - this step is crucial. When the subplot is finalized, execute the production of the footage strictly according to the plan and don't change it because of an interesting and exciting idea - Jiang Yan told me that most of such changes end up leaving you scrambling, and going back to the original plan. Good material management, labeling and noting every step of the work, from images to video to sound and music, is the best guarantee of getting twice the results with half the effort.
What was the hardest part of making ‘Subway Stories - New York’.
The hardest part, still, is that you want to make the images move more smoothly and be able to achieve the movie and TV effects you want, but to be honest, Metro Stories is limited to the AI capabilities, and I think it's only 10-15% of what I expected it to be. But at that point I was confident that this limitation wasn't a problem for me with this script and story, and that it too would be solved day by day as the tools iterated.
If possible, tell us about your next work. What plans do you have for your future work?
I'm currently working on an AI-generated feature film, Wolf Pack, a screenplay I finished years ago, which is both a suspenseful police procedural and a sweeping road movie. It's a story that takes place in the Mongolian steppe, where a group of police officers have to chase an escaped criminal into the deepest part of the Mongolian steppe. Beyond the human struggle for life and death, they find that they are already under a greater common danger - wolves ...... I'm currently halfway through this movie, with a group of amazing ordinary people completing the voices for the characters in the film, and I've used the Ai tool to complete the soundtrack for it and the theme song. I believe it's a good looking movie - closer to an industrial movie level Ai movie, and perhaps the world's first truly original scripted AI feature film. It will finish its premiere at Harvard and make its way to mainstream streaming platforms.
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