Rebirth of Chinese Entertainment from the Oscars

November 5, 2000, the first day of filming. In the morning, three scenes were shot of Juno at school. The pace was steady, and Emma's performance in front of the camera was more relaxed than during the audition. In the afternoon, we moved back to the main set to film the first major indoor scene—Juno sitting on the sofa in the living room, confessing her pregnancy to her parents. Her father, Mike, sat in an armchair opposite her, while her stepmother, Bren, stood in the kitchen doorway, holding a dishcloth. In this scene, Juno needed to simultaneously be funny, defensive, break down, and then regain her composure within a dialogue of less than two minutes.

Before filming began, Su Chen pulled Emma aside. She was wearing Juno's signature hoodie and jeans, her fingers unconsciously twisting the drawstring of the hoodie, the end of which had already formed a small ball of fuzz.

"Do you remember what you said during the audition for this scene—'I'm pregnant.' You said it to thin air that day, without any pressure. Are you under pressure now?"

Emma bit her lip: "A little."

"There's one good thing. But before filming starts, I want you to know something—when Juno said that line, what she wasn't actually thinking was 'Will Mom and Dad be angry?' Of course, she knew her parents would be shocked. But that wasn't the question she was most afraid to face." Su Chen placed the script on his lap and tapped it lightly with his fingers. "She's sixteen, not six. She knows her life will take a big turn because of this accident, but she doesn't know what scenery awaits her beyond that turn. The unknown is more frightening than the known. So this scene isn't about 'admitting fault,' it's about 'I need someone to help me face the future I don't know what to do about.' What she's looking for isn't forgiveness, but support."

Emma was silent for a few seconds. She picked off the little pom-poms from the drawstring of her hoodie one by one, and then said, "Director Su, don't you think you don't seem like someone who's only two years older than me? What you said reminds me of a teacher I had in high school—that teacher once stopped me in the hallway and said—Emma, ​​you're so smart. The hardest thing for smart people is to admit their vulnerability when they should."

"What did you say to him afterward?"

"I didn't say anything. Because he was right." She stood up from the sofa, walked to the center of the living room, and took a deep breath in front of her imagined parents. Then she turned to look at Su Chen. "I'm ready."

"Okay. Let's skip the rehearsal and start filming."

The entire set fell silent. Three cameras started up simultaneously—the main camera facing Juno, the secondary camera focused on the father's face, and the third was positioned at the kitchen doorway, watching the rag in the stepmother's hand. Instead of using the conventional panoramic shot to establish the scene, Su Chen let the three cameras move independently, choosing the rhythm later. This was a reverse lesson he learned from filming *Love*, where he observed fixed camera positions—Juno's world was dynamic, imperfect, and constantly changing; simultaneous multi-camera operation preserved that uncertain dynamism within her world.

Emma Watson, who plays Juno, sits on the edge of the sofa with her hands between her knees, her back hunched, like a hedgehog trying to shrink itself.

"Dad, Bren," she cleared her throat, her voice a little hoarser than during the audition, as if she had just spoken loudly at school, "there's something I need to tell you."

She paused. The pause was about 0.5 seconds longer than the timecode in the script, but Su Chen didn't yell "Cut." He saw on the monitor that her pupils contracted slightly for a moment—it was her brain giving itself a final pep talk.

"I am pregnant."

The father slowly put down the newspaper. The stepmother's rag stopped under the faucet. The only sound in the living room was the dripping of the kitchen faucet, each drop hitting the actor's breathing rhythm.

"It's that boy—no, not the one you're thinking of—okay, it is. But that's not the point." Her voice quickened, as if she were trying to get all the information out before her parents could react, because if she was interrupted, she wouldn't be able to finish. "The point is, I've made my decision. I'm not having an abortion. I'm going to have the baby and find a family willing to adopt. I know it sounds far-fetched, but I've looked it up online, and there's an open adoption program where you can give a child to a family that genuinely wants one. It sounds a bit strange, but it's legal."

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After she finished speaking, she closed her mouth and moved her eyes from one parent's face to another. Her chin was slightly raised, and her lips were pressed into a thin line—a defensive posture Juno used when nervous, using nonchalance to protect her composure that was about to crack.

The father remained silent for a long time. The stepmother draped a rag over the faucet, turned away, her expression somewhere between wanting to yell and wanting to cry. On the monitor, Su Chen saw the actor playing the father clench and unclench his fists repeatedly on his knees—a gesture not in the script, nor taught to him by Su Chen. In that moment, the actor simply became a father whose daughter had told him she was pregnant, and who didn't know how to accept the fact.

"You have no idea how difficult this is," the father finally spoke, his voice low and his throat dry, as if it had been scraped from a piece of sandpaper.

"I know," Juno said.

"No, you don't know. You think you know now, but you really don't." Her father stood up, took a few steps in the living room, turned to face her, and said, "You think the hardest part is these months of pregnancy? The hardest part is what comes later—the day you hand the child over to someone else, the day you see a strange child in the supermarket with eyes exactly like yours, and you can't talk to him, can't tell him who you are. You don't know any of this now."

Emma's lips began to tremble. Not a theatrical tremor, but a genuine tremor from being struck by something. Her eyes reddened, but she didn't cry—Juno couldn't cry here, because Juno wouldn't allow herself to cry in front of her parents, because crying would be admitting she was terrified, and the last thing she needed right now was to be treated like a frightened child.

Then she did something Su Chen hadn't expected. She laughed. Not a happy laugh, but the laugh of someone struck by the truth, realizing they had no choice but to accept it. She looked at her father with her reddened eyes and spoke in the exact same voice as during the audition—lazy, with a hint of absurd self-mockery—

"I know. But I want to try."

Su Chen held his breath behind the monitor. He saw something in the actor playing the father's eyes on the screen—not acting tears, but a genuine reaction to his heart being shaken after his daughter had so sincerely confessed her worst tragedy. A long-silent corner of his heart had been stirred. He swallowed back the line he was about to say, simply sitting back in his armchair, picking up the newspaper again, and turning a page. The newspaper trembled slightly in his hand, as if he were turning something heavier than a newspaper. He didn't look at Juno, but his hand made a very subtle movement on his knee—reaching towards his daughter, then withdrawing. This movement wasn't in the script; Su Chen would never know if it was improvised or if he was truly driven by emotion to forget he was acting, but the moment he saw it on the monitor, his breath caught in his throat.

After filming was completed, Su Chen replayed this scene in the editing room and replaced the planned positive reaction from Juno with this shot. He didn't use a close-up; instead, he used a side camera angle originally set up for the father, a distance just enough to capture the father's loss of composure and also just enough to give the living room enough dignity.

"Cut." Su Chen stood up. "This take is good. Emma, ​​you added that laugh yourself. Why?"

Emma wiped her eyes haphazardly with the back of her hand, removing the wetness from the corners of her eyes, and looked up at him: "Because Juno doesn't need anyone to pity her. What she fears most is being pitied."

Su Chen looked at her for two seconds. Then he nodded. "You'll be a great actress in the future. No, you've already come a long way." He didn't finish his sentence because someone called him from the corridor.

The most stressful day on set was filming the scene where Juno goes to the maternity clinic for an ultrasound. The clinic was actually filmed in an abandoned community hospital—the leather on the chairs in the waiting room was cracked, the corners of the maternal and child health posters on the wall were peeling up, and there was a crack in the window glass of the ultrasound room. The assistant producer spent an entire afternoon finding a location that could be rented for two whole days at a low enough price without needing to buy extra insurance.

The actor playing the ultrasound doctor was a guest star who had filmed dozens of medical dramas in Los Angeles, possessing the standard "friendly doctor" face. Before filming began, Su Chen pulled him aside and gave him a private hint: "You're not playing a bad guy. You're just someone who faces a sixteen-year-old pregnant girl every day and has learned to use a professional smile to mask complex emotions." The actor thought for a moment, changed the way he wore the prop stethoscope, and adjusted his smile to be slightly more professional. When he told Juno, "Congratulations, it's a boy," the perfectly timed over-the-top smile added a touch of awkwardness and a hint of genuine human warmth to the scene.

After filming ended that day, Emma sat alone by the prop ultrasound bed for a long time without moving. Su Chen didn't urge her; he simply sat on an old chair not far from her, flipping through the next few pages of the script. After a while, she came over and sat down next to him.

"Director Su, I was just thinking," she said, looking down at her fingers, her nails bitten short, "What was Juno thinking as she lay on that bed, looking at the outline of the baby on the screen? Did she really want the child? Or was she just treating 'giving birth and then giving the child away' as a project to be completed? Because once she stopped thinking, she would realize that she was doing something a hundred times worse than breaking up. She was only sixteen years old. If she didn't stop thinking, maybe one day she really wouldn't be able to stop."

Su Chen closed the script: "What do you think?"

"I think she never dared to stop and think. From beginning to end. She used humor to protect herself. She was the smartest person in the whole film, and also the one who was least willing to admit that she was afraid."

Do you think she should admit it?

Emma remained silent for a long time. Then she looked up at the crack in the examination room window, light filtering through and casting a thin, elongated shadow on her knee. "She confessed at the end of the film. She was in the delivery room, holding her baby, and only glanced at it—just once—before letting the nurse take the baby away. She couldn't bear to look a second time. But in that one glance, she had already confessed. It wasn't that she didn't want the child; she just knew she wasn't good enough to be a mother. Admitting you're not good enough takes more courage than admitting you want it."

Su Chen remained silent. He looked at Emma's slightly reddened nose, and in the reflection of the monitor screen, he saw someone transforming from a "girl who could act" into a "real actress." He made this memory etched in his mind—if a more suitable role came along, he would approach her again.

On December 12, 2000, filming for *Juno* wrapped in Los Angeles. The entire shoot took thirty-three days, two days ahead of schedule, and the total cost remained within budget—almost a small miracle for a Hollywood independent film. At the wrap party, Su Chen took a sip of cola from a disposable cup and said to the entire crew of over forty people, "This is the first film of the cinematic era. Thank you for proving to me—a good story doesn't have to be expensive."

After the wrap party, Su Chen returned to the hotel and neatly stacked the two reels of film next to his suitcase. Post-production starts tomorrow. Next month, *Night at the Museum* will be released. The following month, the Berlin Film Festival. And then the month after that—he took out the brown-covered notebook, turned to the page with the bookmark—on which was written the name of his next film, as well as the names of two actors whose storyboards he had already drawn countless times in his mind.

He leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, and let his mind go blank. Something was glittering in the Los Angeles night outside the window—perhaps the headlights of cars on the distant highway, or perhaps the Hollywood sign on the mountain that had just lit up. He had been in this world for over four years. From a boy writing novels at a desk in the Beijing Film Studio compound, to a seventeen-year-old winner of the Cannes Palme d'Or, and then to a young director directing a crew of hundreds in the Warner Bros. studio in Hollywood. He had made crime films, films about old age, fantasy comedies, and now, teen independent films. Each genre was a leap from zero, and he hadn't fallen with each one. Not because of talent, but because he knew that a director's most valuable ability wasn't to create good visuals, but to know when to empty himself technically and speak with a completely new grammar. Just like the new page in this notebook now, with only two words written—"Deep Sea." Nothing more, but enough.

He opened his eyes, picked up his notebook, and walked to the window. The lights of Los Angeles stretched out in the distance like a shimmering ocean, unlike the Mediterranean night or the nights filled with the fragrance of locust blossoms in Beijing. But no matter the night sky, he knew what he was about to do.

He picked up the phone and dialed You Benchang's number. The phone rang a few times before being answered. The old man's voice was still hoarse but full of energy.

"Director Su?"

"Mr. You, about the next movie. I'm in Los Angeles, and I'd like to talk to you about it when I get back."

There was a few seconds of silence on the other end of the phone. Then You Benchang's voice came through again, carrying an unspoken understanding: "I'll wait."

Su Chen hung up the phone and closed his laptop. Outside the window, a very bright star lit up the Los Angeles night sky—not Polaris, but he knew which direction it pointed.