By Isabella Tianzi Cai

Yang Jin, director of The Black and White Milk Cow and Er Dong

In this interview originally published on Sina.com, director Yang Jin talks about the making of The Black and White Milk Cow (available through the dGenerate catalog). Yang discusses how he found his actors and how he worked with them. He also mentions his filming experiences, which include what he did to transition from one scene to the next, how he worked around his tight budget, as well as his experience with working with a script. He says that in Er Dong, he used a different approach, which was that he didn’t follow the script very strictly but filmed extra footage that could be used in the editing afterwards.

Translated by Isabella Tianzi Cai.

Q: May I ask what made you want to make The Black and White Milk Cow?

Yang: When I was still in school, my class did an exercise on making tragic stories. The requirement of the exercise was such as we needed to throw all tragic elements at one single character. I had read Chinese writer Wang Xin’s novella “The Black and White Milk Cow” at that point, and I considered the main character in Wang’s story extraordinarily tragic.

Q: So can we say that this film is a tragedy?

Yang: Yes.

Q: When did you shoot it?
Yang: I started it in the summer of 2004 and completed it at the end of that year.

Q: Were you still in school?
Yang: That’s right.

Q: Where did you shoot it?
Yang: I shot it in my hometown Caochuan county, which is in Pinglu, Shanxi. A few scenes were shot in the urban area of Pinglu, outside Caochuan.

Q: Why did you choose this place?
Yang: I had a small budget. Being able to shoot in my hometown saved me a lot of money. I didn’t need to pay my crew, neither for lodging. I am very familiar with the place. It is where my grandmother grew up. I have been there as a child. And I remember that there was a school in the village. Unfortunately when I started shooting the film, the school was gone. A family lived on the compound then. And we filmed there.

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