Previously, works including The Moon Embracing the Stars, Crosscurrent, and Brotherhood of Blades II helped us examine Xin Zhilei’s roles and cultural narratives of eldest daughters, swordswomen, goddesses, and villainesses.

Here we continue through her work but turn from what is on camera to what happens behind it:How does an actor actually work? How does a production come into being?

Blossoms Shanghai gave Xin Zhilei a major career highlight and reinforced the “auteur myth” of Wong Kar-wai’s long shoots and repeated refinement. But when “dozens of takes” and “actors not knowing what they are performing” become amusing creative anecdotes, we also ask:What power relationship exists between director and actor? When did an actor’s obedience, self-doubt, and pain become packaged as part of “art”?

By contrast, the nearly sixty-thousand-word, two-hour solo play Prima Facie placed Xin Zhilei at center stage. An actress previously made into many symbols finally played a concrete woman with fear, struggle, judgment, and ideas.

From Blossoms Shanghai to Prima Facie, and from Wong Kar-wai and Ang Lee to different actors’ working experiences, we discuss the labor, power, and emotion behind performance and reconsider what becoming a good actor costs.

 

- Blossoms Shanghai: how was Wong Kar-wai’s “auteur myth” formed?

- The “Wong Kar-wai Victims’ Club”: behind amusing production stories, is it art or power?

- “Don’t ask; feel”: why do actors begin to doubt themselves?

- Do dozens of takes necessarily produce a better performance?

- Where are the boundaries of power in artistic creation?

- Prima Facie: when a woman who is watched finally begins to speak

- Why do actors crave a director’s approval so deeply?

- Can the sensitivity, vulnerability, and receptiveness on which actors live also be harmed by the fame machine?

- Divas Hit the Road 5: when an eldest daughter temporarily lays down that identity

 

- Crosscurrent (2016) (film)

- See You Tomorrow (2016) (film)

- Days of Being Wild (1990) (film)