Entry for Golden Goblet Awards | DUST TO DUST: A One-of-a-kind Gangster Film

A crime movie with no suspenseful plots, and no explosion and car chase scenes, while still managed to be climactic and thrilling. How did the finalist for the main competition of Golden Goblet Awards of the 25th Shanghai International Film Festival (SIFF) - DUST TO DUST make it? On June 16, director Jonathan Li and screenwriter Zhou Wenru, as well as the three leading actors Da Peng, Ka Tung Lam, attended the meeting with the cast. They said that this is a “one-of-a-kind gangster film” and what they want to do is to “dig deep into human nature” through the tension of the story itself and the excellent acting skills of the actors.

Derived from a real case without suspense

The film DUST TO DUST is based on one of the most serious armed banknote robbery cases involving the largest amount of funds since the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

A group of bandits shot three people in just two minutes and robbed a huge sum of $15 million in a flash. The police, led by Wang Shouyue (Ka Tung Lam) and He Lan (Zhang Songwen), quickly launch a search for evidence and succeed in securing key clues and arresting the five robbers one by one, while He Lan unfortunately dies in the process of chasing the fugitives. However, the real masterminds behind this vicious case, Chen Xinwen (Da Peng) and his cousin Chen Xinnian (Sun Yang), disappear into obscurity. Twenty-one years later, Wang Shou Yue has retired from the Public Security Bureau, but he has never forgotten the sacrifice of He Lan and the main culprit who have not yet been caught. At this time a blurred figure in a news video comes into his sight, Wang Shouyue immediately sets out alone to this “stranger” in the border town, vowing to reveal his true face. A game of good versus evil is thus unfolded.

Director Jonathan Li said that when he and the screenwriter were talking about it, they hit it off immediately, “We both expect to make a different kind of gangster film that doesn’t rely on large scenes, but excavate humanity before the audience.” They even thought of naming the film SETTLED at first, “so, it would be more literary, but then they changed it to DUST TO DUST, which is more appropriate.”

The title of the film shows a strong contrast. The audience who came for a gangster film may get to know the plot immediately at the sight of it. “I started writing the story in my room, but it was by no means easy, and it was even harder to turn it into a movie afterwards, because it’s not a traditional commercial movie.” The screenwriter Zhou Wenru said, it seems has been deprived of all the elements of a typical commercial gangster film, “Since it is based on a real case, the direction of the whole script is actually roughly determined. However, the film needs to be processed in an artistic way to be more dramatic, but how to achieve this goal? I didn’t want to simply adapt the case into a tense chase with a shootout. That doesn’t work. I had to figure what this man would do, and what he had experienced to react in this way.”

Ultimately, he has profoundly analyzed and presented in the film the complex human nature where arrogance and ferocity are intertwined with cowardice and helplessness, as well as the desperation and struggle of the protagonists in the face of lies and truth. Such is the intrinsic brilliance that captivated the actor Sun Yang when he saw the first page of the script: “The description on the first page alone created a lot of scenes in my head, and it was a script I had never seen before. As expected, when I continued reading, it was really wonderful. It gave me a tragic and complicated life for this character, and I felt it was hard to have the opportunity to experience such a life. So, I did not hesitate to play such a role.”

The role established by Da Peng with breakthrough performance

In this film, the lead actor Da Peng gave a disruptive performance, presenting a completely different role from his previous ones for nobody. To restore the role more realistically, Da Peng from the northeast practiced hard Cantonese; to interpret the changes of the role across 21 years, he rapidly gained weight and then began to lose weight. Many viewers were in awe of his professionalism after watching the film.

“This movie spans a long period of time and requires all of our actors to present the changes in their characters over 21 years, and I was very excited with the script because it was challenging.” Da Peng said he originally thought he should be thin when he was young, and became fat when he got older, but after talking with the director and screenwriter, everyone thought that as he was a boss when he was young, thus “he should be white, fat and powerful”, while “21 years later, weathered by life, he should be black and thin.” For this reason, he began to binge eating two months in advance, “the result is there was too much fat on my belly, making it even difficult for me to breathe.”

Da Peng hopes that the audience can take care of their health and lose weight in a healthy and scientific way, but he himself lost 15 kg in one breath in 43 days, and his seriousness about shaping the role is evident. “You may have watched other movies that I’ve participated in before, but this one, I think, marks significant breakthroughs in my acting skills.” He said, actors, who have interactions with him, such as Ka Tung Lam and Sun Yang, and actress Qi Xi who played his wife, including Zhang Songwen who didn’t play in the same scene with him, “are all very excellent performers who give me a lot of stimulation so that I can immerse myself more fully into the role.”

Ka Tung Lam is a Chinese Hong Kong actor familiar to the mainland audience, who played a different image of a police officer this time. For this reason, he also went to the public security bureau in Foshan to experience in person, “In the previous gangster films, there were not so much inner workings, and this time the whole film is in Mandarin, it is really a great challenge for me too.” This also endows his image in the film, “not recognized at first” by many audiences, a “strong contrast”.