A Creative Art Designer Makes China’s First

Tu Juhua can be very proud of his achievement as a film art designer. He is the only Chinese artist who ever won a best art prize at an international film festival. He has done it twice， one when he was 59 at Cannes and one again when he was 69 in Berlin. He has received art awards as a film designer than anyone else in China.

In the autumn of 2009， Tu Juhua came back to Huzhou， his hometown in northern Zhejiang， to attend a get-together for the alumni who graduated from Huzhou Middle School in 1959. Tu’s hometown revisit after a hiatus of nearly 50 years gave me a chance to interview him. He is nearly 70， but age has not yet added deep wrinkles onto his face. The top-class art designer is a tall man. He looks serene and judicious. When asked about his hometown and his film career， Tu smiles and says what he has done is attributed to his school days in Huzhou.

He was born in 1940 into a family of silk designers and makers. His talent as a creative artist showed when he was in the primary school. A teacher gave him a tube of red pigment and a piece of paper and asked him to create a painting of a red flag for a wall newspaper. The young artist tried to avoid the monotony of the red color by adding some ink to the pigment. He created different reds on the red flag. His creativity was highly appreciated. In the middle school， he was a very active artist in a school-level art group.

Tu’s signature creativity as an art and set designer showed its first sign in a small seal box he made when he was in the middle school. He processed a Mahjong piece into a small box， large enough to contain two tiny seals which he carved in seal character， an ancient calligraphic style popular since more than 2，000 years ago. The tiny box contained the two seals and a miniature inkpad. He even created a lock device for the box. In the summer of 1959， he was smart enough to show this ingenious gadget to his interviewers in the last-round audition for Beijing Film Academy. The interviewers were deeply impressed and Tu was among the first batch of students of the art department at the academy.

His creativity made him a go-to guy for ideas and solutions. In 1963 which was his last year in the academy， he joined the shooting crew of “Zhang Ga the Soldier Boy” as a trainee. He was appointed assistant designer. In one site shooting， the camera was to move on a rail from a lane for a long shot. It would be very difficult to prevent the rail from appearing in the shot. The art director turned to Tu for a solution. Tu built the rail and covered it with a shallow layer of soil so that the lane did not look like a film set. He then armed the wheeled platform with two brushes just above the rail. As the camera moved， the protruding brushes would clear the soil layer and expose the rail and thus enable the dolly to move forward on the rail without getting the rail in the shot.

After graduation， Tu was assigned to Beijing Film Studio where he bloomed as an art designer. In 1983， he recommended himself to Director Xie Tieli who was going to make a film set in the river area typical of the Yangtze River Delta. Tu recommended himself because he wished to make a film reflecting his hometown scenery. Most of the outdoor scenes were shot in a river town near Suzhou， a city near Shanghai. But a kitchen was created in the studio in Beijing because many scenes were to take place in this kitchen. Familiar with river town residences where a kitchen usually opens to a river so that people could wash things in the river， Tu ran into the problem of building a river in the studio. Instead， he built the kitchen on a one-meter-tall platform. He built a rail on the ground outside the kitchen where boats could come and go. With the background of houses on the other side of river painted vividly， the river scene looked real enough through the kitchen windows as boats passed to and fro with boat people. The director was delighted and satisfied with the design， saying that Tu Juhua was an outstanding art designer of the second generation designers in the Beijing Film Studio.

Tu Juhua’s biggest challenge and achievement was the Palace of the Qin Dynasty. He once dreamed of building sets for a film about the First Emperor of the Qin Dynasty (221-207BC) that unified China for the first time. In May， 1994， the 54-year-old Tu Juhua received a telephone call from Chen Huakai， the father of then fledgling director Chen Kaige. The Senior Chen explained that Chen Kaige， a scholar-type director， wanted a scholar-type art designer for “The Emperor and the Assassin”， his next blockbuster movie. Tu was thrilled.

The story is about Jing Ke the Assassin. The prince of Yan Kingdom sent the assassin to kill the emperor of the Qin in the hope that this move could stop the Qin from overwhelming the country and save the Yan Kingdom. Chen Kaige wanted an architectural style that highlighted the ambition， might， arrogance of the Qin. Tu considered alternatives and decided against building a palace inside a studio. He wanted a real palace which must show all the splendor and ambition.

Tu designed the palace， a 70-meter-wide and 90-meter-deep structure with all other additional buildings around it. Tu did thorough researches and considered all possibilities and needs. Jing Ke came with his assistant Qin Wuyang， also an experienced assassin who at 13 of age had killed a man. Qin Wuyang turned out to be a coward in the last minute. Tu wanted the great architecture to help explain why the assistant assassin cowered and failed to perform. He designed a 90-meter-long imperial way that leads across a large square and a 99-step 14-meter tall staircase that leads to the palace itself. Also in the design was a pontoon bridge in the square.

As a matter of fact， Tu Juhua designed a complete set of things for the film. The total design took him 3 years and 9 months. He did thorough researches and drew sketches. He said later that he felt as if he had been back to the Warring States period.

The palace was built in Hengdian in central Zhejiang. Hengdian Worlds Studios is now China’s Hollywood with large palace compounds and other large-scale simulation locations. The Qin Palace is a key part of the locations in Hengdian. The construction started in Hengdian in the spring of 1997. Tu was also the chief designer of the street scenes built in Hebei Province. The construction for the street scenes started in the winter of 1996. Tu Juhua spent more than a year at the two sites， overseeing construction and all the other details.

His painstaking work won him the Technical Grand Prize at 1999 Cannes Film Festival for his work in “The Emperor and the Assassin”， making him the first Chinese designer to win such a glory.

2007 gave the 67-year-old Tu Juhua another big opportunity to show his talent. John Rabe was a cinematic joint venture between Chinese and German filmmakers. The $20-million film was based on the diary of the German who managed to have 200，000 Chinese protected while the Japanese soldiers massacred about 300，000 Chinese soldiers and civilians in Nanjing after the fall of the Chinese capital in the winter of 1937. The director wanted a realist touch to all the sets which were to be set up in Shanghai. Tu walked around Shanghai to find right places. At that time， a large-scale relocation project was under way to make room for the upcoming 2010 Shanghai World Expo. Tu decided to make use of the old town scenes before old houses were demolished. Constructing scenes from scratch in the studio could be more expensive and not so realistic. The Longhua Airplane Works in Shanghai was turned into the Siemens compound in the war-time Nanjing in the 1930s. Tu also transported all the old-time furniture and devices from Germany to China in order to create a real situation.

The film was nominated for seven of German Film Awards (colloquially known as the Lolas) and won four on April 29， 2009. Tu Juhua was the winner of the Best Art Direction. □