Your two features are similar in that they explore time and memory through a kind of dream logic. But they were made on two very different scales, in terms of both budget and technical daring. Long Day’s Journey feels special partly because it’s a rare Chinese art film that looks quite expensive, and I’m wondering if you felt that difference during the production.

Certainly on the technical side it was a big leap. I always think the biggest difference between poetry and film is that you need a lot of technical skill to pull off a movie. When I made my short The Poet and Singer, I had no sense of the technical aspects of filmmaking, and I only had a few hundred RMB. I had a very basic photo camera that could also take video, and I suddenly became interested in the technological side of things. So on the Internet I looked up a way to unlock it, and then I upgraded it so it would shoot at a higher resolution. By the time I made Kaili Blues I had realized that I could capture more of the details that I wanted with better technology, but because of the limited budget I wasn’t able to achieve everything. I spent a lot of time just trying to maintain my artistic sensibility throughout all the challenges. I knew technically I wasn’t capable of doing certain things, so sometimes I would be forced to sacrifice technical perfection in order to pursue what I was envisioning aesthetically.

By the time I was working on Long Day’s Journey I was hoping for a higher level of technique. You imagine that if you’ve done it a certain number of times, it will naturally just get better. But there were challenges that stemmed from the difference in scale. This was a different kind of production from anything I had done before, with a lot more restrictions, because all of a sudden I was working with a couple hundred people instead of just the small crew I’d used on the previous films. But the way I was thinking about filmmaking was the same as it had always been—my attitude on-set is very casual and flexible, and I want to be spontaneous. That created a lot of nuisances for the crew, a lot more than I had experienced before. You’re sitting there waiting for a scene to get set up, and it’s not just a few people waiting with you—it’s hundreds of crew members.