The film is still seeking distribution in China. The story follows Zha, who works at a dilapidated film studio in northern China and falls for a female player he meets in a virtual game. She invites him on a trip to the moon, but when Zha pays for it with money earned from extra work, the ticket turns out to be invalid.
As I was thinking of telling the story in-depth, I thought, why not combining with the film studio that I’m familiar with? The film studio’s environment is very game-like, as film itself is a kind of game,” Xu tells Variety. Xu says the film also drew on a real-life source: telecom scams run by teenagers, which have become a widespread crime.
A self-described cinephile, Xu nods to several films, including Stephen Chow’s action comedy “Kung Fu Hustle,” Jiang Wen’s “Let the Bullets Fly” and the Chinese classic “Journey to the West.” He also worked some bad films into “Light Pillar,” since a studio lot would never host only great movies. The fading studio carries a note of melancholy about the state of the film industry as AI advances. What matters is that [the movie] will be something that everyone likes.” He adds that he doesn’t “really see today’s technologies or environmental factors as driving the decay” of the industry.
It doesn’t represent everything.” “I’m too lazy to learn how to train it,” Xu says of using AI in production. But now I have to learn how to use it well, waiting for it to generate something that eventually I may find unsatisfying. I’d rather draw myself, and I really enjoy drawing.” “Light Pillar” flips the usual logic of real and virtual.
The game world is played by live-action actors, led by Da Peng and Qing Yi, while the real world is entirely 2D animation. If I shot human actors, I could save my time thinking about how to design and draw the two different worlds,” Xu says. The live-action shoot for the virtual world took only five days, which sped up production considerably.
Actor Da Peng, who plays and voices Zha, also co-produced the film. The two met at the CFDG Young Shoots Project in 2023, where Da Peng sat on the jury, and Xu approached him with one goal: to cast him as the lead. I simply sent him the script, and he invited me to talk more about it.
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