Shanghai Portraits Project: Gianpaolo Lupori

Creative Hunt 

http://www.creativehunt.com/shanghai/articles/gianpaulolupori-shanghaiportraitsproject-rovingdreams-shortfilm

Published November 12, 2010 

First up is Italian Gianpaolo Lupori, who took time out from his busy filming schedule to chat with Creative Hunt about his contribution to the Shanghai Portraits Project. What made you decide to come to China and make films?I've been here almost 6 years now and moved here with my family, partly because I felt fed up with the way things were in Europe – Italy in particular – where doing media work can be very difficult, and the political and cultural environment doesn’t really appreciate and cultivate creativity. I'd initially planned to come here for just six months, really for a break, but then realized that there's so many interesting stories to be told as things develop here. There's a huge amount of information from an economic and political perspective – companies moving into China, the car industry and so forth … but no cultural information specific to what it is like to be Chinese right now... there isn't that much from a human point of view. China is not all rice paddies and China is not the Cultural Revolution, nor is it all glass buildings, it's a lifestyle – like everywhere. And of course where there’s all this movement there’s an incredible amount of drama and wanted to be able to tell these stories. It’s that that made me stay. Is that what we should expect from your film? Some of this movement and drama?Not so much in this one – it only touches on it in only a very marginal way. It's an aesthetic piece, it looks good but could be punchier. It's Shanghai nightlife told from the point of view of a taxi driver. It's not so much about the driver himself, more him as a connection, a point of reference between so many different lifestyles and strands of society that come together in Shanghai. A taxi driver is an important figure in so many situations. Shanghai does accentuate things in a particular way, for better or worse, and there’s moments when you're super excited in a taxi and this particular driver has met so many of those people in both positive and negative situations: after a night out, on their way to an important meeting, being lost... what are the traces left in his life? The idea was to get a feel for him moving around the city and talking about not so much himself but more his relationship with people. Watching the film, there were moments when I was unsure whether I was watching a fiction or a documentary. Which was it, and was the ambiguity a conscious decision?I don't come from a documentary background; I come from a fiction background. I do like the documentary aesthetic, but I also like having control over what's being said. I have done other pieces which are more documentary in look, but with this one I wanted to flip things around and make a documentary which has a cinematic feel, which looks more like a movie whilst still being a documentary. We stayed with the one driver and everything that is spoken about is recreated in various sequences or fragments. It's quite staged – there was lots of lighting and rigs involved, not that kind of shaky camera, guerilla feel which I do like but for this I wanted [to create something different]. The only element which is unusual is a kind of questioning of what makes a documentary: there’s this notion that they're like the bible, that they have a strong element of truth and therefore a certain authenticity which is very, very relative. I mean just the fact that you are following a particular story, that you gather a lot of material and you put it together in a certain way makes for a strong editorial point of view, but if you push this idea further, where does it tip over into fiction? Just the act of putting a microphone in front of someone and asking a question [means that people end up saying] things that they wouldn't necessarily say on other occasions, and just because there's a microphone and you’re not giving them a scrīpt doesn't necessarily mean that it's any more authentic than had it been scrīpted. I think often movies are better able to capture reality, the essence of something than, say, the news. Everyone was aware of the camera – people were told to either act like themselves or do certain things. The overall structure is documentary in that there’s no narrative and that it’s based on an interview with this one guy How was it working with the taxi driver? How's your Shanghainese?My Shanghainese is awful! I have a collaborator who helped me so much: she was translator, production assistant, assistant director and producer. She helped us find the guy and yes, [language] was an issue, I realized that that is a wall that you end up banging up against as a foreigner. We did a first interview and I was very, very unhappy with it. When we first met the guy he told us some crazy stories – women offering themselves to him in exchange for payment because they had no money, people making out in the back of the car and asking him to wait outside, all sorts of crazy stuff, and I thought this is going to be fun. But then when we started interviewing him he became like cardboard, very materialistic and optimistic. When we asked him about why he felt people came to Shanghai he replied for the Expo – you know, things that you can’t put in a piece which is about a mood and not so much about details. We had to redo the interview. Initially, I just wanted to let him talk and we gather some things and then the visuals would follow, but in the end we had to tell him that we wanted him to talk about people and prompt him a lot more – we don’t want to talk about Expo! 

Sounds like quite a challenge!Yeah, also the guy was a bit deaf which added an extra layer of difficulty when it came to communicating! But the thing is this guy had been an extra in a few movies so he knew how to work with the camera. He's rather dramatic in his movements and he followed instructions, he was easy to work with in terms of being fine with all the lights and rigs we put all over his car and he enjoyed the limelight. You decided that your 'My Shanghai' should be from the perspective of a taxi driver – did you learn anything unexpected or surprising about them while filming it?Yes, that Shanghai drivers are not as philosophical as I’d hoped! I've had some conversations with a few that have been very interesting and you imagine these stereotypical figures, the figures that we see in popular culture who have so much contact with society on various levels that it's easy to assume that they all have this street knowledge and wisdom that will just come out spontaneously and that’s not necessarily the case. What attracted you to the Shanghai Portrait Project in the first place?As a freelancer, you can be very free, you cling to the fact that you're free to do what you want, but often you're not free to do anything at all, you can end up a little complacent. Sometimes you need a deadline for that spark. At first I didn’t want to do a documentary piece, it’s not really my thing. I’d thought that unless you spend a year with someone you’re not going to get enough information, the depth of their real emotion, really get behind their front. But then I knew if I said yes then I'd have to do it. I also liked the attitude of Lazy Susan Productions: the stylistic element was important to them, that it's not 'just' a documentary, it's 50% subject, and 50% author, which made it a lot more personal and gave me room to play around with it a little bit. There’s the idea of a patchwork too, I'm interested in seeing how it fits in with the other films. 

What's next for you?This was a very aesthetic piece, all about the look. There's this camera called a 5 D Mark II and there's something happening now that I’m not especially happy about – to myself and a lot of other people. There was a time when video cameras became very accessible, everyone was making their own little movies, but the cameras wouldn’t allow them to look good so instead you had this very cool, in-your-face, guerilla feel that everyone moved towards and there was no real question of personal style because that was all you could do. The camera became dominant … but then all of the sudden there’s this new camera which is just the opposite. Suddenly it’s very easy to make something that looks good and a lot of people fall into this trap where the aesthetic aspect overshadows the content. I think I've gotten this 'beautiful' thing out of my system now and I’m back to why I’m in the media business in the first place: meaning. I’m not saying the two can’t work together, but you can get sidetracked. 

I'm currently working on a feature version of a short film I made a few years back which is all about Chinese popular youth culture, the effect of the internet on society, personal engineering online... I'm very upset that this Facebook movie just came out, which I guess is very much along the lines of what I’m doing. Three years ago I made this film about people desperately trying to get famous online... Gianpaolo, they copied you!Ha ha! It's kind of like Trainspotting from an internet point of view – you have people bury themselves in this alternate reality, and to some extent, they're liberated, but it can also throw them into a worse situation and you end up unsure of which reality is safer. It's about the positive and negative elements of the internet, especially in China where it’s very unique. 

It seems you manage to strike a nice balance between commercial and creative projects.Yes, now I do, but for the first few years it wasn't like this. I've learnt a lot along the way, I've improved and of course projects like this one can help get your name out there. There's no way I can just focus on creative stuff – this is the first time I've received any sort of sponsorship or outside help for a creative project – and I was very , very grateful for it.