Tina Kakadelis
We can’t plan when special people come into our lives. It’s usually when we least expect it, and that’s certainly the case in Shan Jiang’s OutfestNEXT-playing feature film, Ephemera.
In Shanghai sometime after the pandemic, two people decide to spend the night together. Asher (Yvonne Shuyu Zhang) is torn between two worlds: Los Angeles and Shanghai. Tori (Shu-Yi) has found a home in the big city after leaving her small hometown. Their paths cross in the dance class Tori teaches. On a whim, Asher asks Tori out for coffee, which leads to dinner, which leads to an entire night together. Ahead of the OutfestNEXT screening, writer/director Shan Jiang sat down with Film Obsessive News Editor Tina Kakadelis to discuss her first feature, the importance of locations, and what it means to play OutfestNEXT.
I was reading some interviews you’ve been doing about Ephemera, and you said you had just finished film school as you were developing this. What made you settle on the walking- talking romance as your introduction as a debut filmmaker?
Shan Jiang: As an aspiring filmmaker, I was always thinking about how to make a first feature feasible for a filmmaker like me who doesn’t really have a ton of resources. It’s obviously a tried-and-true concept that people are not unfamiliar with.
I keep seeing the Before Sunrise comparisons. You even make a great joke at the end of the movie about it. Why do you think this style of film remains captivating and enduring?
In my mind, whether or not the story would ring true was completely dependent on the two actors. I wasn’t the biggest believer in chemistry before going into the casting process of this film. It was very long and difficult, and it was during that time that I learned the hard way about chemistry. It is real. When the story is so zeroed in on how these two people interact, it becomes very evident if there’s chemistry or not.
Maybe the concept is a little bit of a mystery, but I think there’s a truthfulness that comes through their interactions that contributes to the chemistry. That’s my takeaway.
What was the moment in the casting process when you realized chemistry is real?
I think it was the first time I brought the two lead actors into the same room. Yvonne [Shuyu Zhang], who plays Asher, was the last one cast in the production. We were three weeks out from the shoot, and I was ready to pull the plug and say, let’s not do this because we don’t have an Asher.
Yvonne’s this person we found online. By the time I cast her, I hadn’t even met with her in person because she was traveling abroad. I called her, asked her to fly back right away and start rehearsals. That was the first time I met her in person.
Shu-Yi, who plays Tori, we had cast from pretty early on, but it was the moment of seeing Shu-Yi and Yvonne in the same room when it made sense. It kind of goes parallel with the movie where they don’t really know each other, but they’re trying to strike [up] a conversation. Getting to know each other with such different personalities. That was a moment I was like, okay, there’s something very interesting to this.
Something I always think about when I’m watching a film like Before Sunset or Ephemera is how do you decide which places they’re going to stop at? How much thought is going into which conversations are happening in which locations? How many of these decisions have to be kind of on the fly based on which locations are available?
That’s a great question, because I think it was the thing I struggled with before flying back to Shanghai. There were locations I had to discover in person. The shopping mall and the overpass were two examples of that. I had them as ideas in the script. I know for the shopping mall, I wanted something that was very commercial, very consumerist, but also empty after a certain time. That way, it could feel like they’re the only two people awake at the moment in the world to make it more romantic.
I had no idea which mall, per se. That was something I had to discover. I had the chance to fly back three months prior to the shoot, and we had an amazing local crew. The line producer was basically taking me everywhere possible to really scout out all options we could afford or we could use.
For the overpass, I didn’t know it was going to be an overpass, honestly. In my mind while writing the script, I wasn’t thinking too much about the location. I was visualizing a place that would set them really far apart so they have all the space in between to do the silent reconciliation. That was the idea. Decisions were more based on how to solve the emotions at the moment.
The overpass was something I came across while I was riding in a cab. I looked up, and I was like, this could be perfect, and we don’t need a permit!
There was a lot of reverse engineering going on while we were scouting because it went on for a while. We were rehearsing and changing the script constantly. The script was evolving up to two days before we started shooting because of all the moving pieces.
Some people, when they watch Before Sunset, get mad because the path they walk in the movie doesn’t logically make sense if you’re actually in Paris. Does your path make sense?
Oh, I didn’t realize that about Before Sunrise, but it was a thought that was definitely in my mind because we had some locations that were farther out. There’s this river in Shanghai, and there’s a different district across the river. In my mind, I refused the options across the river because I wanted them to be walking. It wouldn’t make sense if they walked all the way there.
If they were to take a cab or something, I’d better show it because that’s an enclosed space. We didn’t have too many resources, and when you have a moving vehicle involved, that’s more money and more time.
I definitely tried my best to limit the script to walking to make it sensible for these two people to walk to these places. I think the farthest location was probably the mall. It was a long walk, but it’s still a walk.
Another of my favorite parts of the movie is when you play with the frame rate as they talk about Spatiotemporal cubes. Could you talk a little bit about actually playing with the framing of the shot?
The spatiotemporal cubes were a real concept that was coined by the government at the time. I thought it was just something that sounded very romantic, but obviously there’s a different layer to it. Especially when two queer characters take this concept and make an inside joke for themselves.
That was always in the script, but the change of the frames came way later. It didn’t come to me until then for some reason. I realized in the editing process that there was something lacking without the actual visualization of forming a cube.
What you’re seeing now is a rudimentary trick. It’s one of the most basic tricks, but I think it works to see these two people, each with their own cube, and how the cubes converge. That also gives me a chance to change it to our native aspect ratio.
I’m always fascinated when movies have different titles in different languages. Maybe Google Translate is leading me astray, but the Chinese title (浮浮游游) is slightly different than the English one.
You’re absolutely right. The Chinese title is more like a sonic representation of floating in a way. To kind of illustrate that state of mind.
My last question for you. You’ve played at other festivals, but Outfest has a storied legacy, and it’s a huge part of queer film culture. As a filmmaker, what’s it like playing at OutfestNEXT and what makes it different from other festivals?
It’s something of a dream because I did my college at UC Irvine. I was close to LA and I had always been an audience member. Being invited to this festival after my time in New York, it’s important to me. Being able to participate in a festival I used to dream of being a part of is incredibly special.
