Chinese artist Ai Weiwei lead ArtReview magazine's list of the 100 most powerful artists in the world last October. The Beijing-based artist, photographer, documentarian, architect, activist, dissident, avid-Tweeter and charismatic father made a splash on the international scene when he helped Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron create Beijing's National Stadium - more commonly known as the Bird's Nest due to its design - which gave a jubilant government both a cornerstone and bragging material for the Beijing Olympics. While immensely proud of the project, Mr. Ai denounced the regime and famously criticized officials for its treatment of dissidents and its human rights record in the lead-up to the event. Freelance journalist Alison Klayman met the artist through her roommate in 2008 by chance as he prepped an exhibition of photos he took while living in New York in the '80s and early '90s. Initially commissioned to do a short video on the fly, Klayman, who lived in China from 2006 - 2010 producing shows for PBS Frontline, National Public Radio and A.P. took on a larger doc about Ai Weiwei. In the film, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry which will be released this weekend via Sundance Selects, she captured him being assaulted by police, confronting police, promoting his view of human rights and traveling to acclaim overseas.
But it's his political activism that has brought him both fame and danger at home. Authorities have "minders" in unmarked cars outside his home and studio in the Chinese capital as well as cameras pointed at his compound, which is filled with his beloved cats where he lives with his wife. The film also delves into his personal life and reveals the backstory about his very young son and his passion for Twitter and the internet. The latter were surprises for Klayman as she edited the film, which debuted earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival - an event Ai Weiwei did not attend, likely due to restrictions he now lives under following an 81 day detention by authorities. ML spoke with Klayman last week about her film and spending time in the glare of Ai Weiwei's spotlight.
How did it work out that you came into contact with Ai Weiwei in Beijing and get him to work with you on this documentary?
Yeah. The the answer to that pretty much answers like a whole host of questions like, 'how did you hear of him and how did you get a chance and the access and all that stuff.' I was already living in China. I went there after school and I was there for two years already. My roommate was curating a show for him at a gallery...
Director Alison Klayman and Susan Sarandon at the New York gala for Sundance Selects' Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry screening hosted by the Peggy Siegal Company. Photo by Aaron Stern
So you speak Mandarin?
By 2008, I did. In 2006 I went with a few sentences that I could use upon arrival. I worked really hard. I had a lot of jobs, which I saw all as vehicles for adventure and also on the job language-learning.
By 2008 I was waiting to get a press credential which was coming through and my roommate was working on an exhibition of Ai Weiwei’s for a local gallery. It was his New York photographs - all the black and white. There were 10,000 of them and I would look through them at the kitchen table because she’d bring her work home and she’d tell me about it. So that’s really how I even first heard of him. I didn’t know about him before I went to China or anything like that. And she asked me if I wanted to do a video for the exhibition - just do one of those things that plays in the lobby on loop. I was really excited to try my hand. I wanted to do more video film documentary, and so the first time I met Ai Weiwei it was just like, “Here’s Alison. She’s here to do a video for the show.”
So I came with the gallery team and they introduced me. There was never a transition from like being a random person to being the person who films him. It was just 'this is Alison, she’s here to film you' and, you know, it really – even in those first few weeks—his personality totally won me over and made me curious. I wanted to know about him. I felt like he could absolutely carry a longer piece than this kind of 20-minute thing. I just felt like to do a character portrait of him would really not only be entertaining but also it would illuminate something about a side of contemporary China that I felt like I was just encountering for the first time through him.
Our conversations were already [developing] about his blog and censorship and the upcoming earthquake campaign. All stuff that just wasn’t going to fit in the video about New York photographs. So I was definitely feeling that at least I needed to follow up with this guy and he liked the video that I did for the exhibition. So that was also a good way to keep moving forward.
So when you decided to continue going forward, were there any boundaries that you had set as far as what areas of his life you could explore, because you’re following him in his home, not just when he’s out traveling and being the public persona of Ai Weiwei.
Totally true. I mean, in terms of my working style, I feel like I push, but I’m not pushy in the sense that he would sometimes chastise me. He'd be like, “Why do you always ask? You’re always so polite. Just do it." But filming in his home is a really good point. At one point, I [spoke to] his wife about the fact I was coming around a lot and asked her, “I recognize that this is your home and there really aren’t any separations here so please tell me if you ever like – if I’m doing something you don’t like, or if you ever want me to turn off the camera.” And she was really sweet. She was like, “Oh, it’s totally fine. You can film me doing anything, but I don’t want to do it a sit down interview. That really freaks me out.” She has a very different personality than him in terms of media savvy and kind of playing with it.
So actually much, much later I asked her for an interview, but on the whole I just felt like with him you certainly should never be embarrassed to ask. And through asking there were usually no boundaries, except his kind of private life in terms of his son. When he was first born, he said, “Oh, you should meet him. He’s the smartest baby in the world.” He was already the proudest dad ever. He said, “You know, so you want to come meet him?” I said, "Yeah, can I bring my camera?" And then he’s like, "Come on, no. That’s a baby." And really it wasn’t a complicated situation. I found some boundaries, so I guess he had to get a little older before he kind of felt comfortable [with shooting him]."
And it was interesting. I mean, we’ll get more into his activism side in a moment, but it was interesting though that the backstory behind his son actually came out while you were filming Ai Weiwei doing separate interviews with various press.
There were two. The first one was in Beijing with the New Yorker correspondent, and then the second one was the BBC guy at the Tate Modern.
For me to sit down and ask him about something that he knew I already knew the answer to was not really going to work. I feel like he does enough interviews a day that he doesn’t need to talk if he doesn’t want to talk. So I felt like [filming him doing a separate interview about his son] was probably going to be the only way for him to explain it and I think it’s really instructive to see how he deals with different people as well.
Ai Weiwei has been called "the most powerful artist in the world today," and certainly if not the most famous living artist, then definitely in the very top tier. After your time with him, what is your take on his approach to art, political activism and how he connects the two?
Well, if there's a question whether they are related, I would say yes. For me, the artist side is trying to be as relevant and engaged and fostering more conversations. To me, that’s definitely the most interesting. I think how you feel about his artwork and museum [exhibitions] is up to people’s taste. I personally really like so many of his works because I think that they actually don’t say something specific. I think they are kind of really hard to read and complicated and they leave a lot of room for you to say what the meaning possibly is.
When he gives an interview or posts a Tweet, he’s pretty direct about his criticisms and what he says he thinks. So it’s all about his artistic practice and it’s kind of in its entirety. And he does have all these different ways of speaking - whether it’s in a populous way or in a fine art way.
I think from the beginning I was definitely told that he was a very famous artist, and not being from the art world, I just had to take people’s word for that. When I went to his show in Munich I think that was really the first time when I really appreciated that this guy is really, really famous. He has a very big audience and following in Germany, but I mostly saw him in the context of Beijing. So that was my first exposure to how the art world treats him.
Then there’s also the news world. He was one of the few prominent people who would actually tell you what they thought on the record when you needed a more critical voice. In a way, I felt like I was doing something about someone who was kind of over exposed but still room to do something that had more quality and substance. I was so focused on that, that I didn’t know what the movie was like, but I just I needed to be filming as much as possible in all these different parts of his life and stay really open and not draw conclusions on a lot of questions until I was in post-production.
For example, I heard him for years talking about the internet, which was always the subject he would turn to in interviews. I feel sometimes I was like rolling my eyes in my head maybe a little bit. I didn’t think I was making a movie about the power of the internet because I hadn’t really examined it that much. When I went back and thought about the meaning of his life’s work and progress, and also what’s going on with the realities of contemporary China, and the world - and all this pre-dated the Arab Spring and WikiLeaks and all this stuff - suddenly I was like, “No, this is totally on point.” I don’t think I got it at first.
It was interesting to learn he had lived in New York for ten years. And he had already at least participated in some protests against the regime in China while living here - of course with comparatively much less fanfare than his protests and criticisms since returning to China. But I nevertheless found it curious that he was still asked and participated in the design of the Bird’s Nest stadium for the Beijing Olympics.
The thing with the Olympics is it always gets short-handed that he was asked but that wasn’t actually how it happened. I tried as much as I could to make this clear in the film, because the film doesn’t say he was asked but maybe it’s not fully clear enough how it happened. The Swiss architectural firm Herzong & de Meuron wanted to do more projects in China and they were introduced to Weiwei by a former Swiss ambassador and a really big collector.
So they traveled around China with Weiwei and planned several projects together; some that got made, some that didn’t. The Bird’s Nest design was one of the ones that they worked on together, but it was an open design competition. Ai Weiwei was not invited to design the Bird’s Nest. Ai Weiwei helped and everyone acknowledges that, but I’m not even sure if his name is on the entry. That happened to be the design that got picked.
That is just my take on it. It’s a great news story for people to hear, 'Oh, there’s a Chinese artist who helped with this design and that’s why he had the platform to be interviewed by The Guardian and to speak out. He was already writing this stuff on his blog by then, but he’s really proud of the Olympic stadium design. He’s just didn't like the way that it's been used.
So the Chinese government didn’t try to suppress the fact that he at least did have some participation in it?
I guess not. I mean, it's interesting to look at the Beijing Olympic Committee materials and see how they describe it. It’s funny because I worked on the Olympic website, but I never was too keyed into Ai Weiwei so I wasn’t looking for that. I wonder if there’s a description? I bet you it just says Herzog & de Meuron but I don’t know.
And you know, it didn’t end up being useful for the film but one day I did do a "Man on the street" thing in front of the Bird’s Nest stadium asking mostly Chinese tourists from outside of Beijing if they knew who designed the Olympic stadium. Most people just said, "European architects, right?" Then, I’d ask if they knew there was a Chinese participant as well and they'd say 'no' and then I would show him his picture. I’d say, “Have you heard of Ai Weiwei? He’s a famous Chinese artist.” “Oh, I’ve never heard of him.” And then I'd say, “Have you heard of Ai Qi?” And they would say, “Oh, the poet? Yeah. He was in our textbooks when we were in school.” And I’d say, “Oh, that’s his son.” "Oh, OK," was the usual response. That was pretty much scripted how every conversation went.
I think that is a pretty clear indication that he was not touted in the Chinese press. If he had been another person, they would have probably downplayed the Swiss role.
Did you ever run afoul of the authorities while making this film? There were moments when he was confronting the police who had injured him and other very tense moments caught on film...
I was with him on a trip to Chengdu [where he was assaulted by police] and the follow up where he was going to the police stations and the courthouses. It’s not in the film because it doesn’t need to be, but at some point I was forced to stop filming on each of those trips. It’s amazing what I had and it’s amazing what I was able to keep because I did have tapes taken or forced to delete material. But, when you’re in the field it’s really good to keep changing tapes very frequently. So I never really lost any footage basically, and nothing ever came out of someone taking down my visa and passport information.
Obviously, I was filmed when I was with Weiwei and and there were surveillance cameras at his door every day. I think when those cameras were first installed I would try to obscure my face from the camera. But at some point it was like, whose even watching this and what is the consequence, you know? I also felt like I was an accredited journalist and I was totally within my right to be reporting. Obviously, taking all the tapes out had a little bit of a strategy and also splitting them up between people and backing them up on hard drives.
But in general, though, also I wasn’t just dropped into China and had to start working on this. I had been living there for a while and I think behaved in the best way possible to try and avoid problems. Maybe I was also lucky that I wasn’t that important to anybody. Essentially, it’s really good to not be important to anybody [laughs]. There’s this kind of big brother thing in China and clearly you can see in this film how they can do whatever they want to anyone, but you really have to rise to the level where they don't care to do anything to you.
Did either you or Ai Weiwei have any concern about how China would be portrayed? I mean, obviously he wants a change in the system and so forth, but more broadly speaking about Chinese culture and its people, were either of you concerned how the broader China could be portrayed to the outside world?
Yeah. I mean, I guess my attitude was this...What I see is that China wrote its own role into the film. There was no intention coming out to frame it in any particular way. What I think this is, is a window into a subculture, but not sure if that's the right word. But it’s a movie not just about Ai Weiwei. You kind of see how there is a lot of diversity of opinion. It’s not like Ai Weiwei going against the party line. It’s also about people who are trying to accomplish things, to question things who want to push for more freedom of expression or just have fun on the internet or whatever…
To see that on a more ground level way is pretty cool. The fact that China chooses to react the way that it does - I mean, I just kind of feel like I was really excited about this movie before Weiwei was detained and I was not expecting that to happen. I did not think I was making a movie that was leading up to that, and so when they did, besides it being a horrifying and really scary period of time, my reaction was honestly: China you just went and really simplified the story. A lot of what we’d been working on in the edit was a challenge but a fun challenge to find the reality of the story. He had been running into difficulties but he’s also traveling freely. He’s an internationally acclaimed artist. Maybe this is modern China, so let’s explore all these contradictions and the tension of him doing what they don't want him to do, but they’re letting him. I would have been happy to make that film. I honestly don’t feel like I’m glad that he was detained.
And frankly the last few years since this project began has seen a downward trend in terms of openness and people being able to report and speak out; foreigners, Chinese, everybody in China. And that’s not – I mean, I’m not rooting for that to be the case.
But the truth is it happened and so that’s how the story is. That’s kind of how I see it. Otherwise, there wasn’t really any discussion about how it was going to come out. It was just like this is the cards we were all dealt; this is the story.
But of course Ai Weiwei is not the only prominent political dissenter, but he had long escaped formal detention while others had been, including Nobel Peace Prize-winner Liu Xiaobo. Did he ever give off a sense that maybe he felt guilt or embarrassment that his fame had shielded him from authorities up until the time they finally took him in?
When I would ask him how is it that other people have things happen and somehow you’re still continuing as usual. I would ask that and a lot and other people would too. His answer was basically that they can "do whatever they want to me whenever they want. Do you really think I’m safe?" He would say, "I don’t think I’m like safe." He’d also say that yes, maybe because you’re famous there's some protection, but you don’t start out as famous. "Maybe this is what I’m choosing to do with my fame."
When did you feel the film and the story you wanted to tell had been completed?
I did see Weiwei afterwards and I went back to Beijing in September and we had also shown him the film. I did say to him, 'can we do more interviews in case later something happens and you may want to say something in addition to all this?" That was the only moment about the creation of this film that he ever weighed in on it and it was obviously after the fact, but he said, "If I thought the movie wasn’t done, maybe I would think about doing more interviews with you, but I think this is the place to end. " I kind of agreed, to be honest. I felt like I just had to ask… I feel like we don’t know yet what to make of this and what’s going to happen.
Forgive me if this was ever brought up in the film because I don’t readily recall at the moment, but was it ever brought up to him by anyone that he can still Tweet from New York and just say "fuck it. Go be a rich, famous artist in New York and you can say whatever you want without all this hassle?"
It’s true. Yeah, it’s really true. I feel like a lot of his peers feel like if he chose to pick up and move to Berlin or move to New York - I mean, nobody can ask someone to be a martyr. I really did get that – it’s not in the film, but yes, I got that from a lot of people that was sort of like it’s unfair [to say] he has to stay or to feel like it would be wrong if he left… If they told him, "Okay, Weiwei now you can leave but you can never come back..."
Right now, I think the answer is still - no. I think he wants to be able to be in China, but he wants to be able to freely travel because that’s what his life and work entails. But I do wonder that there may be a set of circumstances where the answer is going to be different down the road. I don’t think it’s impossible, which is sad.