Filmmaker Andreas Johnsen discusses the making of the film, Ai Weiwei: The Fake Case.
Andreas Johnsen: My film Ai Weiwei: The Fake Case is about the internationally renowned artist Ai Weiwei. I follow him after he has been released of three months detention and is kept in house arrest for a year.And I try to examine in the film his struggle as a human being coming back to his family, his struggle as an artist coming back, creating art. Is he able to take up the struggle that he had before his detention for freedom of expression and for human rights in his country?
I had been searching for a way to make a film in China because I was very occupied with China. I was very interested in China. And I didn't know how to get an interesting angle on the society. But when I read about Ai Weiwei, I thought, well this is the perfect protagonist for a film.
There was a lot of controversy around him because he was doing a lot of research into the earthquake in Sichuan in China in 2008. And in connection with that earthquake the authorities in China didn't want to release the names or the numbers of the people who had died in the earthquake and Weiwei was doing a private investigation into it and found out that a lot of public schools had collapsed because of corruption. He was exposing the authorities and fighting them in court. Through his art and also through the regular means of the media so there was a lot of controversy around him at the time. I got a hold of his personal mobile number through a journalist friend and I just called him up. We had a very polite, short conversation I would say and he totally denied that I could make a film with him. And I was like, well uh, I mean I still felt it was a first step in the right direction, yes. He said, no, but still we had a nice conversation. So I kind of kept going and had communication for probably six months with his studio and different assistants of his. And finally when he saw a brief part of my film from Nicaragua, which is a very political film also, he said I could come whenever I wanted to and start shooting basically.
There was this kind of threatening silence, like a simmering silence in his home studio and in the surroundings. Weiwei does not listen to the radio. He doesn't watch TV. He doesn't play music. And I think what I was trying to tell with putting this atmosphere in the film is the threatening non-communication from the authorities that Weiwei is experiencing. Because you never know when they were coming to your door. The Chinese authorities make up this fake charge of tax evasion against Ai Weiwei as an excuse for keeping him in detention and researching his case or whatever. They confiscated all his computers, all the paperwork, everything they could find that's in his home and in his studio. And they say it's because of tax evasion. It's totally fake. His lawyers are being threatened. All his employees are being threatened. Some of his lawyers are jailed. Many of his employees were all taken to the police station and interrogated. Some of them were even kept three months like him. And basically there is nothing he can do to win the case. He is following all the rules, following the law completely. And giving them all the papers, everything to see and they still rule against him, that he has to pay a huge fine of several million dollars, which of course he has to do, he has no choice. And people starting sending money to him.
Ai Weiwei would not have been treated the way he was if he had not been a famous, internationally known, respected artist. I'm afraid I believe if he was not a famous person, he might have disappeared. Unfortunately it happens to many critics of the system in China and activists in China that they simply disappear. People that we never hear about in the west. People who do the same work, the same kind of activism as Weiwei is doing. During all my seven visits to Beijing and staying with Ai Weiwei, there was constantly the risk of the footage and my equipment being confiscated by the police or the authorities. I was always making backups and keeping them in two different places, being very discreet how I was carrying my equipment in a regular shopping bag for example. And when I was filming Ai Weiwei for example confronting the police, I was trying to keep a distance.
It was quite amazing that during the shooting of this film after Weiwei came out of detention and he slowly started to work on some art pieces again to experience how the piece came alive. It came from an idea in his head. He didn't talk to anybody about the idea really, he just kind of asked some of his sculptors can you make this please?
And little by little the idea developed and he started building these huge dioramas of six situations that he experienced during his detention and it was clearly that it was kind of a cleansing for him, both mentally and I think also in a way physically. To get it out of his body. The experience that he had had during the three months of isolation in that cell.
For me this film is a universal story. It's about a man in this case that is struggling for something that is so deep in him, so important for him that he's willing to risk his life for it, for the struggle, and he has to do it. But he also at the same time knows that it's a fight that he can never win. I mean Weiwei knows that he's never going to be able to win over the Chinese Communist Party but he has to do it. And it's a fight that has been put in him through generations. Through his parents, through his upbringing and for him it has become even more important now because he has a son himself. So it's a story that is something we can all learn from, it's a story that maybe on a different level we experience that in our every day life, even though we don't live in China, we might not even live in a country where the population is oppressed or where human rights are not respected, we can still relate to it, just maybe on a different scale.