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Hao Wu is a documentary filmmaker. Over the course of his career, he has made a series of compelling and insightful films about China, including People’s Republic of Desire (2018), about China’s live-streaming communities, and All in My Family (2019), a Netflix Original Documentary about the process of Wu’s Chinese family accepting his gay identity. Born and raised in China, Wu now lives in New York. From 2008–2011, he was a fellow at New America, the D.C.-based think tank. His most recent film, 76 Days (2020), premiered this fall and provides a raw depiction of both patients and healthcare workers in Wuhan hospitals during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. Wu worked with two co-directors who were on the ground in Wuhan, Weixi Chen, a video reporter for Esquire China, and Anonymous, a local reporter who remained unidentified due to political sensitivities. In this lightly edited interview, we discussed the process of making 76 Days, the trajectory of the pandemic from Wuhan to New York, and the challenges of being a documentary filmmaker in China.

Q: How did you decide to make this film?

A: It’s a long story. In my previous work, I have focused on character. As a storyteller, I tend to shy away from newsy topics. But with Covid-19, it was different because it’s personal for two reasons. First, both my parents have late-stage cancer and had cancer surgery last year. So this past Chinese New Year, I was really looking forward to bringing my kids from New York to Shanghai to spend two weeks with them. Our flight was supposed to depart on January 23rd, and 24 hours before our departure, we heard about the Wuhan lockdown. So it was really an agonizing 24 hours — we were really confused. My partner and I debated the lockdown. Does the decisive action to lock down an entire city mean the government knows what it is dealing with or does it mean the government has no idea what’s going on? Maybe the lockdown was a very irrational and frantic response? In the end, we decided not to take the kids back. I flew back by myself to Shanghai. And in the entire 10 days I was in Shanghai, I was heartbroken. I didn’t know when my parents would be able to see my kids again, and I did not know how long the pandemic outbreak would last. And also just to be in Shanghai during Chinese New Year with the entire country shut down was very strange. Nobody was visiting each other, all of us were on our phones scrolling through social media trying to understand what was happening. All of us were confused and angry and wondering how this could have happened. That left a very strong impression, especially with the entire city of Shanghai deserted — the visual image of that. 

Second, my grandpa was diagnosed with late-stage liver cancer right after Chinese New Year, and he passed away a month later. So I wasn’t able to go say goodbye because I thought I had more time. By the time I really wanted to go, there were travel restrictions and quarantine rules. They just happened so fast that I never got to say goodbye to him. So those were the two things that made Covid really personal. In early February, once I came back to the U.S., an American network approached me asking if I wanted to make a film about the coronavirus outbreak. I jumped at the opportunity. I really wanted to find out what happened in the early days. 

At the beginning, I wanted to do more of an investigative piece. I reached out to filmmakers who started filming on the ground in Wuhan. I also reached out to reporters who work for Chinese publications like Caixin and Sanlian. I tried to get in touch with those on the ground doing groundbreaking investigative work at The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. I talked to retired officials from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention trying to get more information about how the infectious disease reporting system broke down. But then I really quickly understood that it was going to be hard to do an investigative piece. Despite the extensive coverage about what happened, there were still a lot of gaps in knowledge. Even today it remains hard to know what happened other than guesses. Who was patient zero? Did it start in October, November or December? And so I just gave up on the investigative approach, because the pandemic was still evolving. As a filmmaker, it would have been hard for me to come out and say, ‘I think this is what happened.’ And I couldn’t find any smoking gun. 

I pivoted to trying to tell a story of what happened in Wuhan in the early days of the lockdown. I worked with my co-directors in parallel to try to understand footage. And then what struck me at that time was how raw and personal and sensitive their footage was, because they were on the front line filming. When I was watching their footage, I felt like I had a very intimate connection to what was happening. Throughout February and March, there was still very little visual representation of what was really happening. I asked them to upload their footage onto the cloud, and I downloaded it in New York. I fell in love with their footage.

How did your co-directors get access to film inside the Wuhan hospitals? 

During the lockdown, the government definitely tried to control access to the hospitals. But this kind of control was not uniformly applied across all the hospitals. And a lot of times, decision making was left to the individual hospitals. So for example, some of the key hospitals, like Wuhan Central Hospital, nobody could get access to unless you were a government TV crew or state broadcaster. But with the other hospitals, especially at the beginning of the outbreak, there was a PPE shortage in the hospitals. During the early stage chaos, some of the hospitals actually welcomed reporters and TV crews to come film because they wanted people outside to know what was happening and so they could get more help. Weixi Chen embedded himself with a medical team from elsewhere in China that came to Wuhan to help. That’s how he got access to film inside. My other co-director, Anonymous, actually works for a local state-owned publication. He is a photojournalist, but then he started doing video, because he felt like photos alone really couldn’t capture the intensity of what was happening on the ground.

How did the process of collaboration with Weixi Chen and Anonymous work?

I started talking to them about potentially collaborating together, and they were okay with it verbally. But in late March, as the geopolitical tensions with the U.S. and China ratcheted up and President Trump was calling coronavirus the ‘China virus,’ China was tightening control over any narrative. Both of them declined further collaboration. But I had already downloaded the footage. So I edited the film and worked really furiously trying to get a rough cut out to them to show them my creative intuition. I was in New York and they were in China, so they didn’t know what my intention was and where I wanted to take this film. They wanted to avoid potentially getting into trouble. But in the end, I showed it to them, and they agreed.

MTV is distributing Wu’s latest film, 76 Days, which shows patients and healthcare workers in Wuhan as Covid-19 spread.

The film begins with a scene of a young woman watching her father die. In scenes like that, how did you balance depicting the horror of the front lines while also respecting the private grief of the characters?

In the film, there are certain shots we definitely got rid of — like, there were many more body-bag shots, of wrapping up dead bodies. We had more of that, but we got rid of them because it felt gratuitous and did not pay enough respect to the dead. But we did feel like we needed to showcase the horror of Covid, especially in the early days when little was known. We really wanted the audience to get the emotional impact. So we tried to be as respectful as possible to the situation, but we also wanted to take our viewers there and to be with my co-directors behind the camera.

How did your plans for the film evolve over time?

My idea about how to tell this pandemic story definitely shifted. I even made plans to smuggle myself back into Wuhan in mid-February. I made a plan to fly back to Shanghai. I really wanted to be on the ground, to be with my collaborators, to see what’s happening. I made a plan to smuggle myself in via truck — a delivery truck that was shipping PPE into Wuhan. But in early March, as soon as I understood that the virus was definitely coming to the U.S., I changed my mind. If I smuggled myself into Wuhan, it would be almost impossible to come out. So I decided to stay, and I wanted to film what was happening in New York. In the early days, I was thinking about it as a tale of two cities, just comparing and contrasting Wuhan’s response and New York’s response. So when the pandemic hit New York, I started going out every day to film and try to get access to the New York hospitals as well. 

I just tried to find out what was common across all the different communities, different cultures, and human experiences in a pandemic. So that guided me in my editing choices to highlight the personal rather than the political.

But then I had a major transformation in my thinking about Covid and how a community or government responds to it. Before it hit New York, I was so angry about the Chinese government response. But once it hit New York, I became more unsure about how I felt about any government’s response. I was shocked by how underprepared the United States was. That pushed me naturally away from political commentary about what was happening. And I just tried to find out what was common across all the different communities, different cultures, and human experiences in a pandemic. So that guided me in my editing choices to highlight the personal rather than the political. And that led me to focus on Wuhan instead of New York.

Obviously, we all get so annoyed with our politicians, especially with the political divide in this country. But I get so annoyed with the blame game that people want to play, which based on my reading on past pandemics, happens every single time a pandemic occurs. During the Black Death, people were blaming the Jews. We always blame some other group. But you can also see human kindness, which is a glimmer of hope, that we exhibit during these times. Hopefully that can guide us through this pandemic as well. So in the end, I decided to focus on the latter, not the former.

This movie couldn’t really be as character driven as your previous films, given that the hospital workers are covered in PPE. How did you navigate that? 

That’s interesting feedback. After a lot of festivals, many people messaged me to say, even though I cannot see their faces, I can totally tell them apart, which is a great relief because during the editing, I wasn’t thinking too much. I was in a rush. I wasn’t thinking too much intellectually about whether there’s some challenge here or there. I was just going after the most emotional moments. 

Throughout the whole time putting the film together, I felt guilty about being unable to say goodbye to my grandpa. I was guilty and sad. So I was just looking for those moments to show the human connection. I think I needed that myself, too. My partner and kids drove down to Atlanta to see my in-laws while I was filming in New York, and then I joined them in early April. I quarantined in the basement for 14 days without seeing them even though I could hear them. It was a really lonely isolated experience being so close to my kids and not being able to see them.The most I could do was when they went out for walks, I could walk 20 meters behind them, because that was the time when we had no idea how long the virus was going to stay in the air. I would be looking at them from afar, not able to touch them, and that was really agonizing. This does not compare to what people suffered on the front line, but I feel like that’s the emotional resonance. So, that experience and my guilt about my grandfather guided a lot of my emotional instinct responding to the footage. 

At the same time, I was trying to remember for each character, I wanted to stay with one emotional beat. For the female nurse Yang Li, it’s about her obsession to return the personal effects of the dead to their families. With the male nurse, it’s all about him trying to connect with all his patients, by holding hands, going to talk to different patients, saying goodbye to the patients when they are released. And then with the couple, it’s all about trying to reunite with their newborn baby. With the old grandpa, it’s about trying to go home and being confused. Those emotional beats helped anchor the viewers even though they couldn’t see their faces clearly. But you remember their story. You remember their struggle trying to get what they want.

Will people in Wuhan get to see the film, and how do you hope they react?

I don’t think so right now. Even though this film doesn’t touch on politics, for a long time, we were not sure whether the government would view this as too much of a negative portrayal of the response. You just never know with the censors in China. Also, our co-director Anonymous insisted on not bringing him any trouble, so we were really careful. When we premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, we refused any Chinese language media interviews. We didn’t want the news to travel that fast back to China. But right now, we feel more and more confident because gradually people in China are aware of this film existing overseas and there hasn’t been much negative backlash. Also once you release a film in China, you never know whether the film bureau is going to dictate any cuts. I just wanted to avoid all that.

You have made many other films about China, including People’s Republic of Desire and All in My Family. How was this film different?

There are two obvious differences. One is the process of shooting the footage. This time, I was at the mercy of my co-directors. There was a lot of uncertainty about whether we would be able to really release this film after having worked so long. Another major difference was the way the film was put together. My past films all have very strong narratives with main characters and really strong story arcs. But with this one, there’s none, because of the way the chaotic filmmaking process worked out. My co-directors couldn’t figure out who would be the main character, and were thrown into the chaos of the hospital, and they were just trying to capture as much as possible. So in the end, very few main characters really emerged. 

When I started editing, I was at a loss. I was able to find all those really strong emotional scenes, but I didn’t know how to put them together to make a film. That was a big challenge for me, but in the end, I went back to other observational films about a group of people rather than main characters. It took a while to reach that creative position of not trying to build a film around some main characters, where we understand their motivations and their backstories. And instead just focus on observing what’s happening, including the chaos. So that’s a big departure from my past films. But now looking back after the film has already premiered, I feel like my sensibilities still remain the same. My films always focus on human emotions, not just for the characters, but also provoking an emotional response from viewers. 

The story ends on a high note, with Wuhan coming out of lockdown and getting over the worst. But as this film is released in the rest of the world, we are still struggling to contain the virus. What do you hope viewers get from that juxtaposition?

That was definitely not my intention when I was making a film. 76 days is just a natural container. Every narrative needs an ending. So in early April, when I watched the social media videos of the national mourning day in Wuhan, with the air sirens blaring, I was bawling in front of my computer. Once I finished crying, I knew that would be the ending. The whole story was so depressing, I wanted the viewer to have an emotional release. I wasn’t thinking about this as the closure of China’s Covid response. But definitely a lot of people came up to me and said, “I can’t believe China controlled that within 76 days.” I’m still uncertain about how I feel about that. 

I remember when I was in Shanghai, my parents wanted me to stay inside all the time. But I was almost an anti-masker. At that time, I wanted to go out. I felt like this couldn’t be that bad, right? I felt like everybody was overreacting. I’m a biologist by training, and I wanted to understand the numbers, but there weren’t many good data points at that time. I felt if I washed my hands I would be ok. But then, once it hit New York and I saw what happened, I realized I was wrong.

When I talk to my friends and family in China now, their lives have gone back to normal, other than some sporadic outbreaks here and there. It’s a huge contrast with what’s happening here. So I don’t know now. I used to think the Chinese government’s measures were too draconian. I felt like they just wanted to shut this down, like they shut everything down. But now looking back, I’m constantly thinking, maybe the Chinese government did a great job of controlling the virus, maybe their decisive steps to stop it were correct. But we’re still living through this, and it’s too early to draw any type of conclusion. And that’s part of the reason I didn’t want to discuss any of that in my film. 

But I do want people here to be able to watch this as soon as possible to take the virus seriously. Because the political divide we’re having here in America is ridiculous; in many cases, it is a complete disregard of science. I hope my film can bear witness to how horrible the pandemic truly is and how it can destroy individuals and families. My secret personal mission is that maybe we can all remind each other that we have to be nice to each other. Because this is not about individual survival. It’s about our community, and about the human race, surviving a pandemic.

Will there be other Wuhan documentaries coming out?

There are many other Wuhan-focused documentaries coming out in the next three to six months. So it’s interesting to compare my film with the others. It’s obviously a big event, and there are so many different ways of telling the story. For example, Ai Weiwei did Coronation. There is some overlap in terms of the character focus between his film and 76 Days, but there are also major differences as well. Next year is going to be interesting. We’re going to have so many different filmmakers trying to tell the Covid experience not just from China, but from all over the world.

What is the most challenging thing about being a documentary filmmaker in China more broadly?

That’s really interesting. Obviously, there are certain topics that you cannot do in China. But more than that, it is frustrating sometimes as a storyteller, because you want to tell a story that can resonate with your audience. And as a Chinese filmmaker, who still cares a lot about China, I cannot find an audience in China. For example, People’s Republic of Desire, which is about livestreaming and is not overtly political, still did not get past the censors to get released in China, even though there was a strong appetite for it in the industry and interest from distributors in China. So that was extremely frustrating. Also, for All in My Family, a lot of members of the LGBTQ community have been able to watch it in pirated form. But if I could officially release it, I could help stimulate more discussion about LGBTQ rights and alternative types of families in China. As a filmmaker, I definitely want my work to be part of the dialogue or conversation in society. When you cannot use your work to be part of the conversation, it’s very frustrating. 

How do you view your responsibility as a filmmaker focusing on China, especially given the escalating tension between the U.S. and China?

Oh, that’s a big question. I have lived in the U.S. for over 20 years of my life, and I have spent half of my life in China and half in the United States. China is almost like my own parents, and America is like my partner or spouse. They get into fights, and I can see both sides. I’m stuck in the middle. But I still love both countries, and I want the two countries — or my parents and my spouse — to get along and understand each other better rather than pointing fingers. So, as futile as it sometimes feels, my personal motivation is to tell the less obvious side of the story and challenge people a little bit more. That is my personal desire as a storyteller.

What’s your next project?

I’m trying to jump into another project because only when I’m working do I feel like I’m alive. There’s still a lot of work to be done on distribution of 76 Days. But since MTV Documentaries is distributing the film in North America, I don’t have to spend as much time on this anymore. So I’m researching a couple of documentary films as well as narrative scripted films. I’m trying to do a narrative remake of All in My Family, and I’m working on writing the screenplay. On the documentary side, I’m researching the Asian American lawsuit against Harvard for discrimination. There is also a filmmaker in China who I am trying to get footage from on a non-Covid related topic. He tried to ship the harddrive to me but it got stopped by customs. As much as I get frustrated though, I still enjoy the creative process.

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