Chinese director Bi Gan‘s ultimate mic drop in his 2019 “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” was a triple-hitter: 70 minutes into the movie, the title card drops. Then, the audience is told to put on 3D glasses. Then, an extraordinary hour-long, one-take sequence kicks off in which a man goes looking for his lost love in a fragmented dream world.

Fragmentation is as much a part of “Resurrection,” the filmmaker’s Cannes-winning third feature, as it was his debut “Kaili Blues,” also about a man searching, this time, for a lost nephew in a dreamscape of a rapidly changing China. At 160 minutes, “Resurrection” imagines a world in which people have sacrificed the ability to dream for a chance at eternal life. Those who still dream, though, are called Deliriants, and one here is played by Jackson Yee. A woman, played by Taiwanese superstar Shu Qi, encounters him and enables what dreams he has to play out across five chapters that all take the form of significant moments in cinematic time: The silent era, the Wellesian noir, the buddy movie, war picture, and a vampire millennial romance among them. That Deliriant, call it a movie monster, is deprived of a different sense and played by Yee throughout each chapter.

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The mic-drop sequence here, in which a raincoat mafia descends upon a red-tinged rave and a pair of bloodthirsty lovers, is the apotheosis of director Bi’s career, and one of the most dazzling movie moments of the year. “Resurrection” is a challenging movie to parse and almost impossible to fully grasp upon a first viewing, but its hallucinatory world will be a comforting one to fans of David Lynch and specifically “Twin Peaks: The Return”; the director, here co-writing with Zhai Xiaohui, uses hand-crafted technique and mesmerizing, reality-distorting visuals by cinematographer Dong Jingsong to make the case for cinema as the ultimate dying art form. And that seemingly uninterrupted one-take is its own argument for the necessity of the medium to transport and astound us out of a banal world, one as banal as the one the Deliriant inhabits as civilization comes to its last gasp.

“Resurrection” is now in select theaters from Janus Films, but IndieWire sat down with Bi Gan back at the New York Film Festival, where the film had its U.S. premiere, to unpack his sci-fi, dream-logic masterwork.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity and was conducted via translator Vincent Chang.

IndieWire: The title of the film, translated into Chinese as “A Wild Time,” is obviously different than the English-language “Resurrection.” How did you land on that?

**Bi Gan: **In terms of the duality of the Chinese and English titles, it is sort of my hallmark starting with “Kaili Blues,” similar to “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” For “Resurrection,” I did the same thing with the duality of the English and Chinese title. Maybe it has something to do with my Zodiac sign [Gemini]. So it’s this duality that informed the way I think about the film titles. “Resurrection” as a Chinese title might not work as well as “A Wild Time,” which is to capture a wild era, to capture what happened within these 100 years of this particular century. The English title “Resurrection” is a good way to talk about how we resurrect and bring back [something] to come alive again in terms of films, in terms of consciousness, in terms of human emotions. The Chinese title really captures this particular century that I wanted to focus on.

Bi GanGetty Images

Your work is synonymous with these hour-long one-take sequences. Did you have anxiety about outdoing or repeating yourself this time?

No pressure, no anxiety! [Laughs] The reason why I say no to your question is because, as a director, as an artist, making films, it’s very different than athletes, for example, to keep yourself in physical prime and you have the pressure to somehow deliver physically every single season, and that’s what they need to do. For me, as a director, it’s not so much in terms of how to outdo myself with my filmic language and my forms. Each film, to me, the most important thing to me is what it is at its core, its philosophy. Those are the two things I somehow feel the pressures and feel anxious about, and that’s what I need to deliver as an artist and filmmaker.

For example, for “Kaili Blues,” it’s very much about how you can use visual language to make time concrete so that the audience can feel, can grasp, the concept of time. Whereas for “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” it’s very much about memories and how you can utilize the 3D technology with that long take to somehow bring the audience to experience the memories together collectively. For [“Resurrection”], because it’s about a story within the timespan of one century through this particular movie monster [the Deliriant], it’s really to tease out the philosophy and this core idea and values of something that you have lost that you can never get back. These things that are pure, something that is dark, something that is conflicting, something is divisive, whatever that is that you experience in life [where] there are things that, when you lose them, you can never get them back. That’s something I wanted to capture, and the philosophy for the film. Those are the things that will make me nervous and anxious.

Of course, there’s certain pressure for me as a creator, an internal pressure rather than external such as the expectations of the audience. People expect that to happen for every film that I make, but I do think I understand now why it is there. Sometimes, I also think I don’t want to disappoint my audience, but it seems I think that the most important thing is still, for each and every film I make, to somehow deconstruct myself and put myself in the film and make something to the best of my ability. Whether or not I appease or satisfy my audience, I hope it will. If that happens, that’s just icing on the cake.

How did you decide on what periods and moments of film history you wanted to represent in each chapter of the movie? For example, there’s silent film you homage in the first section. Later, there’s a historical war film, and then there’s sci-fi, and a vampire party movie almost.

When we’re trying to conceptualize this film, we did a lot of mapping trying to figure out how to get to where we wanted to go structurally speaking, storytelling speaking. We thought that this is a film very much about filmic language, about film history. We were trying to create all these different vignettes, and the biggest challenge for us is not actually trying to make sure each vignette will feel very different from the rest of the vignettes to come. It is actually to create some kind of cohesion, a continuity, from one to the next. My biggest challenge was to somehow find a way to make the story move forward and also make sense at the same time.

‘Resurrection’Janus Films

It was not until we had this idea of a movie monster and also the lead character playing all different roles, that has a way to inform us how to link all these different vignettes and chapters together. Myself, along with my production and creative teams, we’re trying to figure out how tightly connected we want these five different chapters of the film to be, whether or not they should have a very direct, complex connection … or should these parts be somehow, you can sense they are connected but not in such an on-your-nose way. We have shot many different details in such a way to connect each part very directly and explicitly. Then later, we [asked], is that the best approach? Is that the film I want to have at the end? If every step of the way for this particular movie monster, to lose one of the five senses throughout the chapter, is a good approach to somehow make everything so connected.

The first part of the silent film, the little kid feeding the poppy flowers to the monster, in the beginning we thought about the possibility of this kid to turn out to be the general for the second part of the war film. We were trying to see whether or not this kind of device would make the connection more explicit, but then we later realized that might not be the best approach.

Talk about that one-take sequence and why that was a necessary expression, and how you built it.

We went through different ways of approaching this. When I was writing the script, since this is the finale of the different chapters that this particular movie monster has gone through, timewise this was at the point where it was at its prime for the movie monster to re-experience time. We thought we were going to shoot this particular part in three different scenes rather than one uninterrupted take. But when we got to the location, when we started making the film, along with my DP, we thought about the fact that, instead of having three different scenes for this chapter, it might work better, since this is about going from the last night of 1999 to the year 2000… what better way to recapture this than emulating “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” into one single take for the entire night. That was the evolution from the script to the actual production.

Shu Qi in ‘Resurrection’Courtesy Janus Films

We spent about a month to set up, to do the rehearsal, but that’s not the most challenging part. The most challenging part is the actual mise-en-scène of that 30 minutes because what you saw onscreen, in 30 minutes, is about four hours or five hours for each take for us to do because, right before the time-lapse mode we put in, we actually have to keep the camera running for every take, for every night. It’s about five hours, from the beginning of the night all the way to sunrise. We somehow need to do a lot of maneuvering to make this particular blocking work.

[For the time lapse], we might have to have all the extras move around in such a way that will work for the story and at the same time, the lead actors will be doing special makeup for the next shot. That will be about one minute translated to two hours of actual filming for just 10 minutes onscreen. It really captured a sense of this young couple trying to elope within this one night, and really captured the essence of elopement, that sense of passion and pure love. At the end, to have something so real happen with the sunrise, even though that they will die because of the sunrise [because they are vampires], everything worked so well together, almost like divine intervention that the sunrise was there for us for our last take.

“Resurrection” is now in select theaters from Janus Films.