Yuan Ge stayed on set until late, thinking left and right, sighing long and hard, trying all the remedies he could think of, but in the end, he had to accept the fact that the scene of Qiuchen winning the Flowers of Opera Stage couldn't be made perfect. He was in a state of utter frustration.
Looking at the silent back sitting at his desk, not to mention Amélie Jiang and Du Jinghai, his two old partners, even the few young actors in the crew could tell that their director was in a bad mood.
Yuan Ge is normally a good-tempered man, and although he is a perfectionist and elitist, he is always patient with all the crew on set, unlike many legendary big directors who are tyrants. Even a girl like Zhao Lizhi, who was plucked from a chestnut stall on the street, had never been scolded for not knowing how to act. However, the unprofessional and cop-out attitude of Yin Fenghua over the past few days has completely broken Yuan Ge's bottom line - everything could be tolerated, but art, in his heart, is something that couldn't be tarnished or desecrated.
Everyone has spent a lot of time with Yuan Ge on set and they all understand why he is depressed. It's hard to be a director, and when you and your lead actor don't see eye to eye, it's futile no matter how hard you try.
However, shooting has only just started, so how can he pull the plug all of a sudden? The only thing they can do is not to disturb him, and to quietly help pack up the equipment and tidy up the set. Chestnut even left a flask of hot congee on the table for him.
***
Yuan Ge has worked alone at his desk late into the night, and when he looks up, everyone has gone and he is all by himself. It is so quiet. The entire set seems colder and emptier. Yet somehow, he feels an indescribable attachment to this century-old mansion, as if he needs to stay in such a place to calm himself down. It is not far to walk back to his flat in Yandai Byway, but Yuan Ge decides not to go back tonight.
Although everyone thinks that such an old mansion would be haunted, Yuan Ge cannot be sure what he is expecting at the moment. It might be too much to say that he is looking forward to seeing a ghost, but he does want to see Rong Qing in his dreams again - this is his home, and he has dreamt many times of him singing and practising under the ginkgo tree, resting and crying by the Dragon Pond. The world in his dreams changed in a strange and bright way, depicting the brief ups and downs of Rong Qing's life.
If I could see him in my dreams and talk to him, would I be saved from the chaos caused by Yin Fenghua?
And where is that strange, shy little loony boy? Yuan Ge remembers the first time he had met the boy who called himself Rong Qiuchen, also on such a cold night - he has disappeared since the incident at the police station, but Yuan Ge admits that he has never stopped worrying about him. Not only has he contacted the police station several times to enquire about him, but he has also searched for him constantly in this mansion, even keeping an eye out for anyone with long hair and white robes on his way home every day... However, many days have passed and where has he gone? Has he gotten tired of cosplaying and finally gone home, or is he still hiding somewhere on set? During the last few days of filming, he always had the feeling that he was being watched, which makes him wonder - maybe it was him?
With his mind in turmoil, Yuan Ge settles down on the office sofa and tries to get some sleep. However, it is not a place to spend the night, and the hard sofa combined with the cold night air makes it impossible to go to sleep.
Forget it. Tomorrow's shooting schedule is for an emotional scene between Qiuchen and Liang Zitang, which needs some essays as props. Instead of waiting for the props team to find someone who can write calligraphy, why not take advantage of the late night to make the props needed for these indoor study scenes?
Thinking of this, Yuan Ge gets up again, takes out Xuan paper[1] and brushes from the prop room, sits upright, and begins to copy the writings of Qing Dynasty literati.
The feel of brush touching the paper does give one peace of mind. Yuan Ge thinks to himself. He hasn't written calligraphy for some years and he really misses the smell of ink.
After writing for an hour, Yuan Ge feels a lot calmer inside. He pauses to admire his own good handwriting - and to this day, he is still grateful to his mother, Violette Fu, for the ferocity with which she forced him to practise calligraphy during his school days. For several summers, while other children walked around the streets playing games, he had been practising various calligraphy styles with a soft brush, learning how to control his wrist and the position of his strokes …
Nevertheless, at that time he often heard his parents arguing about the necessity of practising good handwriting. His mother, for example, always mocked his father, "Your father's handwriting is like that of a turtle crawling. When he was teaching in the classroom, he dared not write on the blackboard! Don't follow his example." His father, Yuan Fen, would always retort, "Voice input is fast and accurate. Pedantic people have no idea that technology is changing the world!"
Two professors, one studying cultural heritage, the other dealing with cutting-edge technology, who knows how on earth they had fallen in love. In any case, he - this poor love child of theirs - has never had any peace since birth, forever pushed and pulled between tradition and modernity by them.
However, when it comes to calligraphy, Yuan Ge is more supportive of his mother's approach. The good habits he has maintained since childhood have often led to him being complimented by those around him when he occasionally lifts his pen to write, especially in the fickle world of show business, where having such a seemingly useless skill is impressive. For this reason, Amélie Jiang often says enviously, "It's a pleasure to watch you scribble on set. It can almost be an honour to be written in your director's notebook, even if it's on your blacklist."
Whenever this happens, Yuan Ge would taunt her, "You've spent so many years abroad, but you've only picked up the dregs of the West and lost the essence of your own culture, a typical bowl of half-cooked rice." Then a flurry of little punches from Amélie would rain down on him, followed by, "You only know how to bully me, you smug bastard!"
Thinking back on this, Yuan Ge smiled unconsciously. To charm a woman, sometimes all it takes is a few unintentional tricks. Growing up, he has been forced by his parents to learn so many useful and useless things, but today it seems that they have not been wasted in his career. He really is director material.
Looking back on the trajectory of his growth from childhood to adulthood, and on his determination to embark on the path of film directing, Yuan Ge wondered - he has been communicating in spirit with Rong Qing in his dreams, but if one day he really stood in front of him, how much he would want to say to him, how many questions he would want to ask him, and how many topics about art he would want to discuss with him.
In that spiritual realm above the clouds, in the highest sanctuary of art, there are no limits of time or space, no limits of life or death. The human world is but a dream trapped in the earthly world.
Both he and I are fools, dreaming in a dream with bodies outside our bodies.
It is the destiny of an actor to create eternal dreams, to fold time and space, to overlap past and future.
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[1] Xuan paper, or Shuen paper or rice paper, is a kind of paper originating in ancient China used for writing and painting. Xuan paper is renowned for being soft and fine textured, suitable for conveying the artistic expression of both Chinese calligraphy and painting.