In 2018, Wang Bing stayed in Ghent as an “Artist in Focus” in the context of the Courtisane film festival. In the margins of the festival, students and former students of the KASK School of Arts Ghent invited Wang Bing to talk about filmmaking and to cook noodle soup with dumplings together. The director kindly agreed. The conversation that followed was shaped and guided by film fragments shown in between the questions. (...) The following text is an edited transcription of a part of this conversation and deals with filmmaking from the position of the filmmaker.

In 2006, Michael Mann made his ninth film. Miami Vice, a dark fresco devoted to the lives of two undercover agents, depicts in violent detail the effects of the globalisation of crime and the collusion between politics and economics, indeed the absorption of one by the other. It is Mann at his artistic peak, occupying a privileged position in Hollywood: both respected by the “milieu” and a valued asset of the industry, he once again demonstrates his ability to bend the logic of the blockbuster (Miami Vice being puffed up as such) to a personal universe to the extent that we sometimes have the impression of a large-scale misappropriation of funds (the film cost more than $150 million) for the benefit of a radical work that does full justice to the formal and stylistic ambitions of its maker.