Q & A : Dark Matter
Chen Shi-Zheng's debut feature Dark Matter, about a brilliant young student of cosmology named Liu Xing who comes to the United States from China to study with the subject's leading scholar, is itself a bit of dark matter. The violent ending of the film leaves no doubt about the alienating cultural dissonance that can overwhelm a young foreigner coming to the U.S. for the first time. It does not help Xing's case that Jacob Reiser, the scholar played by Aidan Quinn, is out to squelch his groundbreaking discovery for purely petty and venal reasons, an event that entirely overwhelms the once-innocent student. Dark Matter boasts a stellar cast - including Meryl Streep and Blair Brown, as well as lead actor Liu Ye in his first English-language role; after a recent screening, the actors joined Chen and screenwriter Billy Shebar to answer the audience's questions.
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“Ancient Chinese physicists believe that cosmology, geography, and humans are three fundamental elements. In the Asian world, actually, the emperor would consult with scientists about how cosmology changes [affected] human behavior.”
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Chen Shi-Zheng dir. Dark Matter |
Q: What drove you to select Utah for the shoot?
Chen: Utah has this incredible landscape – vacant compared to working in China. When you're in Beijing, you get bumped by people. It's such a change of place. There's so much space and there aren't a lot of people walking on the street. Plus the school [the university the protagonist attends] is very modern not like an East Coast Ivy League school. I thought it's good for that kind of setting of being transported to a new place: There's no coziness, it's too big.
Q: Why did the protagonist turn to violence in the end?
Chen: I was quite inspired by a story that actually happened in 1991, which shocked me. I thought it was very telling. I thought, how could people negotiate between imagination and expectation and reality. Many of us have to deal with that. It's not just Chinese people or immigrants. That horror awakens a sense of importance. I thought it was important to tell this story.
Q: So it was inspired by a real event?
Chen: A killing happened in one of the universities. I believe it was the first killing of a North American by a Chinese student. I was here in university [in 1991] and I was shaken by it. I thought that it was very interesting how people couldn't find a balance to deal with what they expected in America and what they found, but what you see is not [really] based on that event.
Q: When will the movie be released in China and how?
Chen: Good question - the Chinese film bureau has watched the rough cut DVD and seems okay with it. I hope that maybe in the summer or fall a Chinese audience will come to see it.
Q: How long did it take you to get financing?
Mary Salter, producer: 4 or 5 years.
Q: Did you have to interview a lot of scientists for background research?
Shebar: Yes, I spoke to many cosmologists. There was a guy named David Weinberg who I found on the web... and he was very, very good at making modern cosmology accessible. It turns out that in 1991, which is when we set the movie, it was really a period of disarray for cosmology, there were all sorts of ideas that were up in the air and the dark matter problem, which had been around for decades, was there as well.
Q: Why focus on cosmology instead of other areas of science?
Chen: Ancient Chinese physicists believe that cosmology, geography, and humans are three fundamental elements. In the Asian world, actually, the emperor would consult with scientists about how cosmology changes [affected] human behavior. So they would coordinate human affairs with how the heavens behaved. In China, we believe that the most profound things are invisible, not tangible. We can look at it, but we don't really know what it is.
Q: Why did you structure the film around the five basic elements?
Shebar: As we organized how we wanted to tell the story structurally, Chen Shi-Zheng wanted to put some kind of chapter heading and I had come across the five elements theory in early Chinese scientific texts. In the cycle we chose, each element generates the next one: earth generates metal; metal generates water, because of condensation, interestingly; water generates wood; and then wood generates fire. That's one of many ways of ordering the five elements but we chose that and we wanted to end with fire, for obvious reasons.
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