Yesterday, the official poster of She’s Got No Name was featured on the Screen‘s dailies for the 2nd day of the Cannes Film Festival.

Recently, Peter Chan gave an interview to The Hollywood Reporter in which he shared some anecdotes about the film. Here are some excerpts from the article.

“It was one of the most celebrated cases of vilifying domestic violence and even of women’s power way back in the ’40s,” Chan said on a recent afternoon in the Hong Kong office of his We Pictures and Changin’ Pictures production houses. “We tried to find the reason [for the murder], and we gave it a very feudal reason of beliefs that if your body is not whole, you would not get into your next life because otherwise, in ancient Chinese feudal beliefs, you would meet again — it doesn’t matter whether or not you kill him. So to the woman, it was like ‘OK, I’ll kill him in his life. I’ll dismember him so that it doesn’t matter if I go to jail, or be executed, at least I won’t see him again. I’ll be free of him.’ ”

Chan was first presented with the Zhan-Zhou story as a film possibility in 2016. To tap into the project’s possibilities as a piece of film noir, Chan and his team first looked to shooting in the northern city of Tianjin, which retained parts of its old city that more closely resembled 1940s Shanghai. They even considered shooting in London.

Eventually, Chan landed on the Hongkou District of Shanghai, known as “Little Tokyo” during World War I and also part of the city’s International Settlement district, which was featured in Steven Spielberg’s 1987 World War II drama Empire of the Sun. Remarkably, the district has until recently been left relatively untouched by modernization, in terms of the foundations of its architecture, at least. Chan found he could rebuild and fit out certain sites to resemble recaptured Shanghai over the decades. 

“It’s been one of the last districts to be developed,” explains Chan. “It’s now called North Bund, but it’s pretty untouched. We were behind one of the oldest cinemas in town — the Victory Cinema — and that whole neighborhood was where the early Shanghai film business was [in the 1920s]. It was like old Hollywood, so the buildings were modernized, but we were able to dress it all up like it was 1945.”

But Chan discovered he could only shut out the modern world for so long: “The funny thing was, the minute we started building, there were literally 40,000-50,000 people turning up to take photos for their social media accounts on the weekends. So they ended up blocking it all off.”

“I always like to wander away from my comfort zone,” says Chan. “I told Jake I want to make a film that doesn’t look like my films at all. There were many visual reference points, from Hong Kong photographer Fan Ho to Edward Hopper, and it doesn’t look like anything I have done before.”