Rebirth of Chinese Entertainment from the Oscars

May 11, 2001, New York.

When Su Chen woke up on the 42nd floor of a hotel in Midtown Manhattan, the New York sky outside his window was an unreal blue. He had just returned from Venice less than 24 hours earlier, and his jet lag hadn't worn off. He had woken up at four in the morning, tossed and turned in bed for half the night, and finally decided not to sleep anymore. He got up, made a cup of instant coffee, and opened his notebook to continue working on the storyboard drafts for "The Hunt." He had sent the first draft of the script to Liao Fan before boarding his flight in Venice, and received Liao Fan's reply just before takeoff: "Director, this script is keeping me up at night." Su Chen didn't reply. He knew what Liao Fan meant by "keeping me up at night"—it wasn't a complaint, it meant that the character had seeped into his very bones.

When Su Chen reached the third scene of his storyboard—the morning free play time in a kindergarten classroom—he stopped and stared at the half-finished window for a long time. He wanted an unreal, overly bright white morning light, streaming through the semi-transparent curtains, illuminating the entire room like a sterilized glass box. This kind of light was difficult to capture in reality, requiring precise shooting timing and the right filter. He wrote a note in the margin: "Curtain material: white semi-transparent cotton linen, light transmittance approximately 60%. Sufficiently strong natural light is needed outside the window; reflectors may be necessary for supplemental lighting." Then he tore off the page and taped it to the wall above the bedside table—he had already pasted seven or eight storyboard drafts, turning the blank wall in the hotel room into a makeshift command center.

The television was on, CNN broadcasting the morning news and weather forecast for New York, the volume turned down so low it was barely a faint background noise in the room. Su Chen, coffee cup in hand, walked to the window, intending to admire the Manhattan skyline—he hadn't had a proper look at the view since checking into this hotel. He drew back the curtains. The World Trade Center Twin Towers stood not far south on the Midtown skyline, their silver-gray aluminum facades reflecting a cool white light in the morning glow, their tops so high they seemed to be piercing a hole in the sky.

As he turned to refill his coffee, he heard a brief interference noise from the television—like the automatic switching sound of a live broadcast line suddenly dropping and returning to the studio. He didn't turn around. Then the presenter's voice changed. The change wasn't a change in wording, but something more fundamental—an unexpected event, something a professional announcer had never encountered in their career and had never been trained on how to handle, had struck his vocal cords, forcing him to struggle to maintain grammatical stability with every word he uttered, while his vocal cords themselves had lost control of pitch.

Su Chen turned around.

The screen showed the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Thick smoke billowed from a massive crack in the upper half of the tower, the column expanding against the blue sky, its edges swirling with grayish-white plumes of smoke. The announcer's voice said, "We have received unconfirmed reports that a plane may have crashed into the World Trade Center..." Su Chen placed his coffee cup on the table, the bottom making a softer tapping sound than usual. He stared at the screen for about three seconds—not in shock, but in confirmation. In his previous life, he had seen this footage in the news, in documentaries showing the impact from different angles, and in the hundreds-of-pages-long investigation reports that followed. He knew what would happen next—but he only knew "what would happen," not "how it would feel while it was happening."

Then the second plane crashed into the South Tower.

The image on the screen transformed into a massive, orange-red fireball, thick smoke billowing from the other side of the South Tower, and debris raining down from the sky, shimmering unreal, fragmented light in the sunlight. The CNN anchor fell silent. That silence may have lasted less than three seconds, but to Su Chen, it felt longer than any sound.

He reached for his phone on the bedside table—he needed to confirm the location of everyone on the crew, Jason's location, Eric's location—but the screen lit up the moment he held it. It was Eric calling. His voice was relatively calm, but his speech was much faster than usual, as if he were cramming a sentence that would normally take thirty seconds into ten: "Where are you? New York? Don't go out, don't go near the window, don't hang up—hey? Are you listening?"

"I'm listening," Su Chen said, his gaze still fixed on the screen—the thick smoke from the South Tower had merged with that of the North Tower, turning the sky at the southern tip of Manhattan gray-black. "I'm fine. Eric, do three things for me. First, confirm that the plans for the sequel to *Manchester by the Sea* to win awards are temporarily shelved; we'll discuss it with Warner Bros. after this week. Second, starting tomorrow, focus on the global film release schedule adjustments over the next one to two weeks—all films originally scheduled for release in the fourth quarter that involve New York landmarks, terrorist attacks, or sensitive geopolitical content will be affected. The release schedule for the sequel to *Night at the Museum* next year also needs to be reassessed. Third, re-screen all the genre scripts that Light & Shadow has recently received; any involving terrorist attacks, disasters, or urban explosions are temporarily shelved."

He hung up the phone and stood by the window. Thick smoke from the World Trade Center was billowing upwards, tearing a gray-black wound into the once flawless blue sky. The sirens of fire trucks began to echo through the streets of Manhattan, growing louder and more numerous until they became a continuous, cacophony of mournful cries.

For the next few days, Su Chen was stranded in New York. All flights were grounded, traffic in Lower Manhattan was completely blocked, and the hotel lobby televisions broadcast rescue updates and official press conferences 24 hours a day. He didn't sit in front of the television for long. On the first night, he cleared out his hotel desk, put the storyboard for "The Hunt" into a folder, and laid out a new stack of blank manuscript paper.

"The Hunt" needs to be postponed. It's not a problem with the script, it's a problem with timing. The core of this film is about how lies destroy the life of an innocent person, how trust is torn apart in panic. In post-9/11 America, or any country psychologically impacted by terrorist attacks, this theme of collective panic and social trust is no longer an abstract allegory, but a raw and visceral reality. Audiences will connect it to reality, and film critics will dissect its every metaphor using the terminology of trauma psychology. A film about lies and trust, at a time when lies and trust are being redefined globally, must be examined calmly within a social context that maintains sufficient distance from the present. It needs more time to complete its localization adaptation, to find the roots it should take in Chinese soil.

But he didn't want to be idle. He needed to make something, in the simplest way—a film that could be shot in a very short time, with a very low budget, without any special effects or grand scenes. A film suitable for the Blumhouse model. He sat down at the hotel desk, opened the brown-covered notebook, flipped through the character sketches for *Amour*, the storyboard drafts for *Night at the Museum*, the casting notes for *Juno*, and the director's statement for *Manchester by the Sea*, and turned to a blank page. He held the pen and closed his eyes.

He thought of someone. A person trapped in a coffin.

An American truck driver working in Iraq is buried in a wooden coffin deep in the desert after an attack, with only a nearly dead cell phone, a lighter, and a small knife by his side. The entire film is shot inside the coffin, featuring only one actor, one scene, and ninety minutes of real-time struggle. He had seen this film in his previous life—"Buried," directed by Spanish director Rodrigo Cortés in 2010, starring Ryan Reynolds. That film, with a budget of less than two million dollars, created a suffocating tension in a confined space the size of a coffin, more so than any large-scale disaster movie.

Now he's moved the story forward by almost nine years, starting to sketch the first set of panels in a hotel room in Midtown Manhattan, three days after 9/11. Not because he wanted to film a disaster—quite the opposite, he wanted to film a person trapped in a confined space, not someone crashed into a building by a plane, but someone whose chances of rescue are stripped away layer by layer by flawed intelligence and an irresponsible bureaucracy. The audience will understand what he's saying.

The film required extremely simple elements—a wooden coffin, a lighter, a cell phone, a knife, a snake, some sand, and an actor who could carry a ninety-minute monologue. Ryan Reynolds is currently making low-budget comedies in Hollywood, and few people have yet noticed his ability to handle more complex performances. Su Chen wrote Reynolds's name in his notebook, drew a question mark next to it, and then picked up his phone to dial Jason's number.

"Jason, I have a new project. The tentative title is 'Buried Alive.' One actor, one coffin, ninety minutes. All on location—no, all indoors. Just one enclosed space. The budget can be kept very low. I need to find the actor within two weeks, finish filming within four weeks, complete post-production by early January, and take it to Berlin."

Jason was silent for a few seconds. In the background, the landline in the Light & Shadow Studios office could be heard ringing—due to the suspension of air travel these past few days, a large number of Hollywood projects had been put on hold, but a group of independent directors and screenwriters had begun to look for a way out in the direction of low-budget genre films, and Light & Shadow Studios' landline was being bombarded with calls from producers and agents almost every day.

"This project—you mean a person buried alive in a coffin, and the whole movie is filmed inside that coffin?"

"Yes. The entire story is told in a closed space, in real-time. There are no flashbacks, no exterior shots, and no rescue team perspectives. What the audience knows is what the person in the coffin knows."

"What's your budget?"

"Within two million."

  

Jason fell silent again. This silence was even shorter, but Su Chen could hear him rapidly flipping through something on the other end of the phone—probably a budget and project schedule. "What else do you have on hand?" Jason asked. "What about 'The Hunt'?"

"Postponed. The script needs to be translated into Chinese, and I'll discuss Liao Fan's schedule with him. After I finish filming 'Buried' here, I'll go back to China to prepare for 'The Hunt'."

"Have you cast the actors yet?" Jason didn't ask any questions about "why shoot this now." He understood Su Chen's creative intuition and knew that the Blumhouse model excelled at responding to contemporary sentiments with low-budget genre films. He was already looking through the actors' profiles.

"Ryan Reynolds. Canadian, has acted in several low-budget comedies, has good looks but has never played a leading role in a serious drama. His facial features are very expressive in low light conditions—in a coffin, where most of the time there is only the light from a lighter, you need a face that can withstand extreme close-ups."

"I'll contact his agent right now."