In 2015, Chinese poet-turned-filmmaker Bi Gan announced himself as a major new talent with his debut feature. Set around the city of Kaili, Bi’s birthplace in southwest China, Kaili Blues was an unclassifiable masterpiece that spanned social realism and magic realism and featured a 40-minute-long take that distorts time and identities in transfixing fashion. With a starry cast and a bigger budget, Bi’s second feature, Long Day’s Journey into Night , has been received with reservations since it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last year. Undeniably challenging, it briefly became a top-grossing film in China this month as a result of a misleading marketing campaign. Bi Gan is blazing a trail for other indie Chinese filmmakers The backlash from those who thought they were going into a date movie was understandable. Tentatively about the return to his hometown of a Kaili native (played by Huang Jue) following the death of an old friend, and with Sylvia Chang Ai-chia playing the friend’s mother and Tang Wei a past lover, Bi’s film is visually striking yet narratively obscure – enough to divide even hardcore film buffs. For those who can look past the marketing misstep, however, Long Day’s Journey into Night marks another significant step in the development of one of China’s most exciting art-house filmmakers. Again, Bi incorporates an extremely long take – this one clocking in at almost 60 minutes, and shot in 3D – to indulge his fascination with notions of time and memory. Bi, 29, recently sat down with the Post to shed light on his filmmaking. A common reaction among audiences of Long Day’s Journey into Night is that it’s too difficult to comprehend what’s going on. What do you think about this? From my subjective view, Long Day’s Journey into Night is a narrative film; the fact that it confuses its viewers doesn’t mean it’s a non-narrative film. I care a lot about the narrative aspect of my work, but it doesn’t mean that I have to make my films easy to understand, or make them uninteresting. When I processed the story, I had to digest a lot of complicated elements first, so that the audiences can have a better experience with the story. The feelings they get are all because of what I’ve arranged. I would rather the audiences use their memories of the film to comprehend it after they’ve left the screening than try to understand it while they’re watching it. They would have a more accurate understanding of the film that way. Your first two features give the impression you might be one of those auteurs who tell variations on the same story in all their films. Do you think you’ll become one of them? It’s like the case of the French writer Patrick Modiano, as well as other writers: each of their books gives you the same feeling, but they’re actually all different. This is an illusion on the part of the reader. In the author’s subjective imagination, all the structural, formal and narrative elements in their stories would feel very different; to them, even the smallest discrepancies seem huge. Even though audiences may think my two films are similar, I personally find them very different. The characters [of the two films] may be inhabiting the same world, but they are different people in different stories. Then again, I do agree with the idea that a filmmaker should make only one type of film throughout his life. But of course, I’m not giving myself any restrictions yet; I may keep making these films or I may make something else – because I’ve only just started to make films. There’s an extremely long take in both of your films. How do they compare? When I made Kaili Blues , I realised that if I shot a segment of the film with one long take, it would attain the quality of real time. And that if I used that feeling of real time to depict something surreal, the discrepancy would evoke a very special kind of cinematic expression. This applies to Long Day’s Journey into Night too. The difference between the two films is that in Kaili Blues , this temporal twist belongs only to a segment of the film, while in Long Day’s Journey into Night , the long take is structurally designed to be a stand-alone element of the film. The subjects of the two films are similar: Kaili Blues is about an ordinary person’s perception of time, while Long Day’s Journey into Night is about memories and dreams, which of course involves time. From my subjective view, Long Day’s Journey into Night is a narrative film; the fact that it confuses its viewers doesn’t mean it’s a non-narrative film. Bi Gan This use of an extremely long take has become a signature of yours. Can we expect more in the future? It will depend on the film’s structure and story. If they call for the use of a long take, then there’ll be a long take in every film of mine. If they don’t, then there won’t be. It’s not the case that I must insert a long take into all my films. I don’t feel I have an established style [as a filmmaker] yet. As I said, I’ve only just begun to make films. So far, it’s the audiences and critics who have been telling me, and reminding me, what I’m doing. I myself have not given it too much thought. I imagine you must have been asked about the use of long takes and 3D in most of the interviews you’ve done. How do you feel about that? I think we can only answer certain questions after a very long time has passed. At this moment, a lot of your impressions are correct, and they are what I intended to convey. But it’ll be a long time from now before we see the actual results of what I tried to convey. It’s like what happened after Kaili Blues : after I made that film, people kept coming up to me and asking if the long take was necessary or meaningful. What I said then was: “Give us some time to think over this.” A year passed and nobody asked me that question again. Two years later, people even began to recognise the long take as an innocent and pure [decision]. Today, people ask if the use of 3D [in Long Day’s Journey into Night ] is necessary or meaningful. And I reply in the same way: “Give us some time. When you look back after a while you’ll see the value in it.” Long Day’s Journey into Night opens on January 24 Want more articles like this? Follow SCMP Film on Facebook