Interview With "Caught By The Tides" Filmmaker Jia Zhangke

The Next Best Picture Podcast

Tv & Film

4.2 • 542 Ratings

🗓️ 9 May 2025

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Over the past several decades, Jia Zhangke has emerged as China's foremost cinematic chronicler, capturing the nation's rapid 21st-century transformation and its impact on everyday lives with a uniquely expressive, ethnographic lens. His first fiction film in six years, "Caught by the Tides" (which premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival to positive reviews), is the purest distillation of his work, a grand, impressionistic mosaic blending two decades of footage, behind-the-scenes reels, and fictionalized elements to reflect on cultural and emotional shifts. Though narratively abstract and best appreciated by those familiar with his oeuvre, the film's patient, almost hypnotic structure, culminating in a poignant love story centered on longtime collaborator Zhao Tao, offers a moving, cosmic meditation on time, place, and the digital age's effect on human experience. Zhangke was kind enough to spend some time speaking with us over Zoom about his work and experience making the film, which you can listen to below. Be sure to check out the film, which is now playing in New York theaters and will expand next week from Janus Films and Sideshow. Thank you, and enjoy! Check out more on NextBestPicture.com Please subscribe on... Apple Podcasts - https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/negs-best-film-podcast/id1087678387?mt=2 Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/7IMIzpYehTqeUa1d9EC4jT YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWA7KiotcWmHiYYy6wJqwOw And be sure to help support us on Patreon for as little as $1 a month at https://www.patreon.com/NextBestPicture and listen to this podcast ad-free Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	You are listening to The Next Best Picture podcast, and this is Brendan Hodges's interview with the director and writer of the film called by the Tides, Gia Janka.
0:09.0	In the world.
0:11.0	I'm going to be dead and discus. Thank you so much for joining us this morning. I wanted to start by talking about the way that
0:35.0	Cod by the Tides is made out of mostly behind-the-scenes footage,
0:40.1	along with various of your film productions, you know, blended with new material,
0:45.4	and then you're sort of merging or, you know, testing the boundary between documentary and fiction.
0:52.1	What was the process in realizing this approach was right for the story
0:58.2	that you wanted to tell here?
0:59.5	Yeah. So the project started in 2001, around the turn of the century. I had a working
1:08.5	title at a time called Man with a Digital Camera.
1:11.6	And the reason why I want to start this project is because observing and witnessing this kind of energetic,
1:17.6	turn of century energy and seeing people start to move around to look for their new lives,
1:22.6	to transform themselves for this sort of new millennium.
1:26.6	All I wanted to do is to sort of coincide with the introduction of the digital camera.
1:31.3	I just want to take this digital camera to a space or to a location that really moved me and touch me,
1:38.3	and then operating on this sense of, it's a film unknown, And then it's a free porn way of capturing images
1:47.2	that will move in and touch me.
1:48.9	And then sometimes I would do it as a documentary
1:51.9	just documenting what I observed.
1:54.2	Sometimes I will also have this particular small crew
1:57.5	to sort of create certain type of fictional lines, scenarios or characters.
2:02.5	And again, everything is just very spontaneous, very improvisational.
	...

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