If Hu had been a salesman or an electrician, his death wouldn't have caused much of a stir.
But Hu happened to be a film director. He was different: aged just 29, slim and tall, casually dressed, and his eyes lit up when he talked about movies.
The death of a young director was not just news, it sparks off discussions and imaginations. A director can only become a legend through his or her work. One year after his passing, his four-hour-long feature An Elephant Sitting Still won the top prize at the Golden Horse Awards. Journalist K wrote an article titled "The Legend of a Suicide".
For me, art has always been about doing what one knows cannot be done—my heroes in literature are figures like Shi Xiu and Sanada Yukimura, and in real life, my role models are like Hu. When I first heard about him, the buzz of the Golden Horse Awards had already subsided. After contacting K, I immediately had the idea to make a documentary film. Hu's colleague, G, immediately stepped in to stop me, saying I hadn't made a documentary before and wasn't qualified. After some struggles, I dropped the idea and forgot about it.
In 2021, more than three years since Hu's passing, people had forgotten about Hu. That year, I saw An Elephant Sitting Still in Hong Kong and read his novels. I realised that I couldn't let him go. Unable to help myself, I remained true to my heart and rekindled the idea of making a documentary. And I would give the documentary a title I had thought of long ago: A Director Sitting Still.
In An Elephant Sitting Still, the elephant is in a distant town, and the act of "sitting still" carries a sense of absurdity and helplessness. In A Director Sitting Still, "sitting still" became the way that one artist remained true to himself.
While making the documentary, Singaporean director Liu Xiaoyi and I started planning a documentary theatre piece, A Director Sitting Still 2.0. We invited two of Hu's friends to take part. Actor Zhang Yu was struggling with the death of his friend; could a shamanistic ritual on the Inner Mongolian grasslands allow him to connect with Hu again? Artist Yu Yaoyao had kept the clapperboard from An Elephant Sitting Still all these years. What secrets did it hold?
If the documentary is about Hu, the documentary theatre piece is about us. To borrow Raymond Carver's words, what do we talk about when we talk about Hu Bo?
