Peter Chan Fulfills Father’s Shanghai Dreams With ‘She’s Got No Name,’ After Decade-Long Journey From Script to Screen: ‘It Got Personal’

Peter Chan Ho-sun‘s “She’s Got No Name,” which opened this year’s Shanghai International Film Festival, represents one of the most tortuous paths from page to screen in recent memory.

In an extensive interview with Variety, Chan reveals the decade-long journey that transformed a single screenplay into a two-part film, involving multiple format changes, extensive re-editing, and unprecedented collaboration with Shanghai’s municipal government.

The project began in 2015 when Chan received a complete screenplay (by Shi Ling, Jiang Feng, Shang Yang and Pan Yi-ran) based on a real 1945 murder case that spanned nearly six decades of Chinese history. “The script came to me, which is rare. I usually develop my own script, even though I don’t write myself, but I usually have an idea, and I have writers develop with me along the way,” Chan says. “And this is the first time that I actually got a complete script with a novella about the real case that happened in 1945.”

The script immediately captivated Chan. “It’s one of those scripts that you can’t just put down. I mean, it’s just, you pick up the script and you read it in one go, and you just fall in love with it. It’s mysterious, it’s charming. It’s horrific, in ways that of some of the accounts and it’s got a lot of elements that were very often in my movies, like a long time span,” he says.

Based on one of China’s most famous unsolved murder cases, the film centers on Zhan-Zhou (Zhang Ziyi), a wife charged with the bloody dismemberment of her husband during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai in the 1940s – a killing that seems impossible for her to have committed alone. The murder thrusts Zhan-Zhou into the spotlight and the court of public opinion, forcing her towards a fate intertwined with that of her own country. The story follows the case from Japanese-occupied Shanghai through the Kuomintang Nationalist government victory and into the People’s Republic, ending in 1993 though the accused murderer lived until 2006. “She outlived everyone in the film, all the people that helped her, trying to persecute her, trying to put her behind bars and trying to retrial for her,” Chan notes.

The cast also includes Wang Chuanjun, Jackson Yee, Zhao Liying, Lei Jiayin, Yang Mi, Da Peng, Li Xian, Fan Wei, Sha Yi, and Zhang Zifeng.

Within 15 pages of reading, Chan knew his lead actor. “I couldn’t think of anyone else in my mind when I was reading, I was visualizing it, and it was Zhang Ziyi. And I’ve tried, oftentimes, 10 years ago, to envision another actress, but I could never read forward. I just could never move past three pages whenever I thought about anyone else. So I called her and she read the script and she called back in a week and said, ‘I’m in,'” he says.

However, the original screenplay presented a fundamental challenge: it would have resulted in a three-and-a-half-hour film. “I was already scouting locations, and we just about two and a half months before shoot, I decided that this is not a practical idea, because even if I could raise the finance, which I haven’t at that time, it would be very expensive. It’s too long because the period is too long. The movie length, the screen time, is too long. And it’s not a completely commercial film for China for the kind of money that it needs to recoup,” he says.

Chan shelved the project and made two sports films – “Li Na: My Life” and “Leap” – before COVID-19 brought everything to a halt. “And then everything stopped. So I went back to what we had in the drawers, and the first script that pops up in my mind was this one.” When Chan announced his company Changin’ Pictures’ plans for international and pan-Asian co-productions for streamers, this became his intended first series. “Six to eight parts, probably depending on how we adapt the original screenplay. I think it was good for a six part to eight part series,” he says.

But when the Chinese film market heated up in 2022 and 2023, investors pushed for a return to theatrical release. “All the investors that I had to deal with proposed that I turn it back into a movie. Actually, the funny thing is, they did propose that I turn it back into two movies, which is what now it ends up,” he says.

Initially, Chan was tempted by the two-movie approach, but his team dissuaded him. “I started working with my writer and my team, and everybody talked to me out of it, and they said, ‘don’t do it.’ It’s a suicidal attempt. If you do two movies and where are you going to end the first film, because it’s one story,” he recalls.

Time pressure from a potential Cannes invitation forced a decision. “We were on a crunch of time, and then we, when we announced a film, very early on, we were invited by Cannes, and with the possibility of going to Cannes, and it was a very sensible move for me,” he says. The team began production while attempting to trim the material to under three hours.

The editing process proved as complex as the pre-production. “By the time we finished shooting, I remember we were editing while we’re making the film. The editor was on set every day, because we technically wrapped middle of March and Cannes in May, and we need to also pass through Chinese censorship.” The first assembly was over four hours. “I arrived very late at wrap dinner because we started watching the first cut, the first assembly at 3pm. I thought would be over by 5:30 or 6. The wrap dinner starts at six. I wasn’t there till 7:30 – so it’s a four hour movie.”

Despite extensive cuts, they struggled to meet commercial requirements. “No matter how much we tied it down, and we still threw quite a bit away, and it still ended up being three hours, and we were struggling in the last mile, which was that last month between in April, to make it two and a half hours.” They took a two-and-a-half-hour version to Cannes missing crucial scenes, which have since been reinstated.

Returning from Cannes, Chan found himself with a cut “too long for commercial release in China and too short for the vision of my film.” Multiple attempts to create viable two-hour versions failed. “There are four or five versions of two hour and eight minutes to two hours and 20 minutes, and they were all very choppy, and the pacing didn’t work, the storytelling didn’t work.”

The breakthrough came when Chan returned to his original vision, creating an almost four-hour version structured as a series. “I actually found ways to turn it into a quite perfect four-part series, because of the fact that it has multiple characters, then you could actually have different episodes with different characters, which you couldn’t do in a feature, because in the feature, you’ve got to follow the main line or the leading lady all the way.”

The Shanghai government’s intervention proved crucial. Having supported the production by helping locate filming sites, officials contacted Chan directly when the release stalled. “The Shanghai government and the Shanghai International Film Festival came calling. And when I was in LA in January, February, and say, ‘Well, what’s going on with your film? You know, we helped you make the movie, and you were gonna release the movie last summer.'”

The main location held profound personal significance for Chan. In Hongkou district, formerly the Japanese concession and birthplace of Chinese cinema, the team found Soy Sauce Alley,’ a maze-like neighborhood over 100 years old. “I would be standing in an intersection and looking right, would be 2024 and when you turn left, it’ll be 1945 because that whole block was basically completely like 100 years ago and was untouched.”

The location connected Chan to his late father’s dreams. “And then it got personal, because my dad is one of the biggest movie buffs. He wanted to be a filmmaker. He wanted to be a writer, a playwright and a stage director. And I became a director because of my dad and he would talk to me about Shanghai, about these alleys and about these Shanghai houses called shikumen,” Chan says. His father had come to China in the 1950s as a leftist intellectual, eventually moving to Hong Kong. “My dad had been telling me his whole life about his dream of Shanghai, and I never actually quite saw what he was describing. And in the middle of shooting this movie, I ended up sitting in the middle of his dream. And he just passed away a few months before I came back to China to make this film.”

When Shanghai officials saw Chan’s restructured two-part version, they embraced it enthusiastically. “I said, ‘You know what, I’ve a four-part series, and I could probably put it together into a two-part movie.’ And then I flew back from LA and then I showed them the two movies and the Shanghai International Film Festival, and also the Shanghai government loved it, because it’s all about Shanghai.”

The government helped negotiate an unprecedented format change with film authorities, converting a one-film permit to two permits.

Chan discovered that he may have prepared for this division during filming. “When I was shooting it, maybe subconsciously, I was preparing for the eventual possibility of cutting into two movies. I’m not sure. I don’t remember if I did it on purpose, but I did make that finale bigger than it should have been, because it’s the middle of a movie. It’s not the end of the movie. But that finale was a huge finale.”

The release strategy is equally unprecedented with almost 500 shows in three days across Shanghai and surrounding areas post the festival opening and a wider release across China this week. “When you open, if you have a critical mass big enough, then you could overwhelm the negative noises. If you open in a small area and only on a very limited release, you’re gonna get into a lot of trouble, because there will be people writing negative things.”

Part Two’s release depends on Part One’s performance, though Chan believes in maintaining separation between the films. “Personally, as a director, I think there should be a little bit of a break between one and two, because I don’t want people to see it as like, oh, the movie’s not finished. I need to watch the second one.”

Chan sees contemporary relevance in the 1940s story, particularly regarding public opinion’s influence on trials. “When I read the script, I wasn’t quite aware of what’s going on in the 40s in China with lawyers, with intellectuals writing, with public opinions. It’s more like internet today. If a woman, intellectual writer could write something and affect the result of a trial and to use public opinion to sway a trial – it really didn’t feel Chinese to me at all.”

The timing coincides with increased focus on women’s stories in Chinese cinema, though Chan notes his female-driven narratives predate current trends. “Most of my female characters in my movies in the past were all stronger females than men. My men are always weak men. So it’s not like I’m doing this now, but I’ve been doing this all my life.”