Writing their own story
With self-made movie, scriptwriting couple pen a love letter to cinema, Xu Fan reports.
WWe waited outside the hall, my legs trembling with nerves. Then, applause and laughter erupted from inside, filling me with excitement.”
Shan Dandan, director
hen online presales opened for Christopher Nolan’s iconic Dark Knight trilogy, showing as part of the 8th Beijing International Film Festival in 2018, tickets sold out in just seven seconds. The first instalment of the trilogy didn’t make it to the Chinese mainland when it was released globally in 2008, which might explain the enthusiasm of fans to see it on the big screen.
Li Kuo was among the lucky ones, managing to secure two tickets. However, since his friend can no longer join him as planned, he has decided to sell his now spare ticket at face value.
Concerned about accidentally selling it to scalpers — who have already driven the price up to more than five times the original amount — and hoping the precious ticket would end up with a genuine movie fan, he came up with an interesting idea.
He posted a notice in a WeChat group, announcing that he would sell the ticket to the individual who could answer a question about Nolan’s movies, which he would release at 8 pm that night. The question was “what is the very first line spoken by Joker in The Dark Knight?”
“Only a real fan, who has watched the movie more than three times, will answer it correctly, as Joker speaks before he removes his mask, revealing himself for the first time. The line is ‘no, no, no … I kill the bus driver’.
It was an exciting moment, with more than 100 people online, and the fourth person to answer got it right,” he recalls.
The unique situation serves as a pivotal plot point in the comedy film, Galaxy Writer, Li’s directorial debut feature film, jointly written and directed with his wife, Shan Dandan.
Last year, the film received both the Grand Jury Prize and the Best Screenplay award at the 17th FIRST International Film Festival, one of the most significant events for emerging directors in China.
Having opened in theaters on March 30, the film revolves around two novice scriptwriters struggling to get their film green-lit. Their script is based on the life of character with a memory as fleeting as that of a fish, and their aim is to attract investors, but also ensure they maintain creative control.
During their journey, fraught with challenges, the duo — who are also close friends sharing a rented apartment in eastern Beijing — encounter many hurdles, ranging from being deceived, repeatedly revising their work based on empty promises, to enduring the overbearing attitudes of financiers who possess little understanding of artistic creation.
With a plot that clearly resonates with young people striving for success in bustling metropolises, but having to grapple with workplace pressures, the film has swiftly garnered a rating of 7.0 out of ten on the popular review site Douban.
Shan recalls that her scriptwriting career began after graduating from Peking University’s Department of Chinese Language and Literature in 2013. Some of the scenes in the film are inspired by her own real-life experiences.
Several years ago, Li was enlisted to write for an online drama that was being filmed in Xiangshan county in Ningbo, East China’s Zhejiang province. It was during this project that he first crossed paths with Shan, who, as a friend of the director, originally hoped to get some directorial experience, but later joined the scriptwriters’ team.
The scriptwriting and revising procedure lasted for a year, studded with frustrations, mainly due to investors often changing their minds overnight. But there is a positive outcome — Shan and Li have become accustomed to working together and continued the collaborative habit after returning to Beijing.
“Just like the two protagonists in Galaxy Writer, we called a nearby cafe our ‘office’ and would arrive there punctually and work there before heading to our ‘canteen’ — a small restaurant — at noon,” says Shan, who was, at the time, working alongside Li as a freelancer.
Having graduated from the Communication University of China, Nanjing, Li began his career as an actor, performing in over 300 comedy shows before transitioning to writing, creating scripts for projects ranging from online shows to TV dramas.
Reflecting his own experiences that inspired scenes in the movie, Li recalls a moment that particularly annoyed him: being forced to endure the disrespectful behavior of a producer who put his feet on the desk during a meeting with them.
“As he continued his endless speech, my thoughts suddenly drifted to a scene of Al Pacino in Scarface. I imagined a person storming into the office, wielding a gun, and starting to shoot everyone,” recalls Li, jokingly.
Despite the moments of despair, Li and Shan’s passion and love for cinema have never waned. In 2022, frustrated with film scripts that failed to get produced, they decided to use their own savings to shoot Galaxy Writer.
Everything that followed went unexpectedly smoothly. After completing scriptwriting in the summer, the filming started shortly thereafter. To save funds, they chose to shoot in the Changying area near eastern Beijing’s Fifth Ring Road, a neighborhood in which many film industry workers reside, with filming restricted to within 3 kilometers of their own home.
After watching the edited rough cut, Shan was quite moved.
She almost shed tears, as she thought of the multitude of scripts — millions of words — she has written over the years, all with little hope of ever being produced.
Li, who has faced similar challenges, finds solace in his own way. “One of our characters says that ‘suffering is the soil for creation.’ This belief is also mine, convincing me that obstacles will one day fuel my progress,” he explains. This time their effort paid off. When the couple attended the FIRST film festival in Xining, Qinghai province, in July last year, they were initially anxious about how the audience would react to their movie, which was premiering at the event.
Even though there was no arranged Q&A session after the screening, the couple wore T-shirts printed with their WeChat contact information and carried a billboard to introduce themselves.
“We waited outside the hall, my legs trembling with nerves. Then, applause and laughter erupted from inside, filling me with excitement,” Shan recalls.
What followed exceeded their expectations. They found themselves quickly encircled by cameras and journalists, with interviews continuing until almost 3 pm that day.
Now that their movie is reaching a broader, national audience, the two filmmakers see Galaxy Writer as a love letter to cinema and hope it will inspire young people to chase their dreams.