Vol.205 Chen Qigang, the Musician, and The Hidden Mountains and Rivers: Talking Creative Work with Director Guo Xufeng

Summary

• The Hidden Mountains and Rivers shows that the box-office curve for niche documentaries does not necessarily follow the commercial-film logic that “the opening weekend decides everything.” Guo Xufeng initially thought $200K, $500K, or $1M were all possible outcomes, and that $2M-$3M would count as a good result; two days before the recording, the film had already passed $6M, and its highest single-day gross did not come until more than 20 days after release. The result points to a long-tail model built on low marketing spend, a slow climb, and word of mouth—but the film never disclosed its total cost, so outperforming at the box office does not prove profitability.
• This 7-year project sustained artistic work alongside commercial business. Guo Xufeng agrees with Chen Qigang’s advice to young creators: “Don’t make your art your livelihood.” Make a separate living, and keep the creative work as pure as possible; his own second line of work is producing documentaries for companies and brands. The pandemic forced clients to cut budgets and left his team without projects for a time, putting real pressure on that dual-track structure.
• The 7-year production was not a replicable standard timeline, but the compound result of a small team, a first theatrical release, and repeated trial and error. The shooting unit had only 5 or 6 people, while Guo handled the writing, directing, and editing himself. It was not until around 2022, when a rough cut had taken shape, that he asked people connected to the National Alliance of Arthouse Cinemas whether the film could enter theaters, after which he worked through filing, project approval, and technical procedures. Having learned through the “scramble and stumble” of making his first film, he believes the next one could ideally be compressed to 2 or 3 years.
• The film’s core product decision was to replace a hardship narrative and complete biographical record with an intellectual portrait about “being yourself.” From roughly 200 questions and a vast amount of source material, Guo let the theme “surface” on its own; he did not use Chen’s experience of losing a child as the main narrative hook to drive traffic, while acknowledging that this sacrificed story value and a mass-market entry point. His aim is for the film to remain valid 5 or 10 years from now, giving viewers room to “think as they watch and feel as they watch.”
• For a low-budget release, the most effective marketing move was not blanket media outreach but finding seed viewers who already knew Chen Qigang. Roundtable used clips from the film, introducing Chen to a broader audience; after release, those viewers became the first wave of sharers, pushing the box office to its peak in the third week rather than the first. Guo’s judgment is blunt: “In an information age like today’s,” ordinary publicity may simply reach nobody.
• Chen Qigang’s value lies not only in his achievements, but in the real cost he paid to make his actions align with his words. Guo stresses that Chen once turned down important academic posts and, in France, worked jobs such as watching over people’s tents and gardening; the story about canceling the premiere of Life Is a Play and selling his father’s calligraphy to pay compensation was relayed to him by Dai Jianjun of Gonggeng Academy. The film therefore places “do the work and keep moving forward with tenacity” and “being yourself means facing a great deal of difficulty” on the same causal chain.
• Guo Xufeng still wants to film a series of people with global influence, but the real expansion bottleneck is funding, not a shortage of subjects. He initially imagined Feiguan building a subscription loop through reasonable fees and no advertising, but now more readily accepts a rational structure of “small investment, small marketing, small returns.” He believes subjects’ willingness, team processes, and creative experience are all relatively solvable; funding determines whether production and marketing resources can be deployed. “If it can be done, do it. If it can’t, I won’t agonize over it.” The desire is strong, but the attachment is limited.

Deep dive

1. Box office above $6M breaks the director’s floor-case assumption for niche material

• Guo Xufeng was conservative about both the subject and the form: $200K, $500K, or $1M were all possible, while $2M-$3M would count as “pretty good”; two days before the recording, box office had already exceeded $6M.
• At first, he cared more about 2 things than the box office: finding answers for himself as a creator, and letting young people see “more ways to live and more ways to work,” gaining a little intellectual stimulation and spiritual nourishment.
• He summarized the broader project as “China’s moment of stars shining”: documenting people who have achieved enough in their respective fields, possess a perspective on human civilization, and exert influence around the world, so their accumulated experience can be passed on.

2. The project began with “information smog,” not an initial plan to make a theatrical film

• Guo founded his studio in 2016, primarily producing documentaries for companies and brands; before that, he worked at CCTV’s Finance channel, where he became accustomed to viewing the world through a commercial lens, and launched his own content experiments after generating a surplus.
• He believed the problem at the time was not merely fragmented information, but “information smog”: genuinely useful information had to pass through layers of haze, while quality content struggled to find the right audience in the feed.
• He therefore founded the Feiguan app, manually sourcing documentaries, interviews, and talks in culture, art, business, and philosophy. The ideal was to build a “spiritual home shared by 10M people,” financed through reasonable subscriptions rather than advertising.
• He studied MasterClass-style products, but felt master classes carried a preachy quality, while the prevailing mood in China was that people “didn’t really like being preached to.” Truly good content needed a better experience, which gradually led film language to replace the course format.

3. An email and a journey over the mountains established both trust and the film’s tone

• Guo chose music because he had wanted to become a composer for 3 or 5 years as a child; after moving to Beijing, his first job happened to involve producing stories about classical composers such as Bach, Haydn, and Schubert.
• He chose Chen Qigang not simply because of the Beijing Olympics, but because Chen’s music translated ancient Chinese culture into a modern language, while his ideas often diverged from school education and conventional values yet, “when you think them through, seem very reasonable.”
• The 2 men did not know each other. Guo reached out by email. Their first meeting took him from Beijing to Hangzhou, followed by a 4- or 5-hour drive and a boat across the river; dusk, mountains, insects, and a lone light on the hill gave him the dreamlike sensation of entering a Peach Blossom Spring.
• Chen walked out of an alley in a white shirt, “grinning” and “exceptionally clean.” That real-world encounter shaped the film’s later reputation as an “essay poem,” while making Guo more wary of manufacturing beauty through excessive embellishment.

4. The shared principle was not to monetize suffering, but to put ideas ahead of music

• At the first meeting, they had not settled on the final form, distribution channel, or a strict schedule; they spoke only roughly of 2 or 3 years. Chen asked so many questions that his assistant felt it resembled an interrogation, while Chen joked by explaining, “What if he’s a fraud?”
• Guo openly criticized his earlier work for using Chen’s loss of a child and similar experiences as traffic hooks, saying that Chen’s most valuable qualities were not the legend or the tragedy, but his thinking. That became a key basis for the collaboration.
• Chen wanted to share what he had thought and learned throughout his life “with those who are fated to encounter it,” even if it created only “the slightest possibility of change.” He also said that “thought must stay ahead of his music,” which aligned closely with the director’s goal.
• Chen subsequently provided substantial material, with the earliest footage used in the film dating back to 2014. Guo emphasized that his aim was honest expression, not promoting Chen or “consuming his halo.”

5. The 200 questions had no preset answer; “being yourself” surfaced on its own

• After absorbing the material, Guo designed roughly 200 questions and a preliminary structure, but he had not decided what the film should say before filing the project. The answer emerged gradually from the interviews and the mass of footage.
• His method was not to invent a theme subjectively, but to let what was already in the material “surface.” The first 1 or 2 versions solved the question of “what exactly to say”; later iterations focused on how to “say it well and say it cleverly.”
• The final answer was only 3 words: “Be yourself.” It was both the central question Chen had thought about and practiced throughout his life, and the reminder Chen received from his teacher Olivier Messiaen—to remain true to himself.
• The film did not package the idea as easy inspiration. Chen himself said it had already been overused and that few people truly lived by it; his own practice was “2 steps forward, 1 step back,” and even as Olympic music director he still had to understand the positioning of the entire project.

6. “Don’t make art your livelihood” became the director’s own operating principle

• The practical problem Guo wanted to solve through filmmaking was how a creator without family resources could support himself, build an independent career, and maintain balance between the 2.
• Chen’s advice to students at the Central Conservatory of Music struck him directly: “Don’t make your art your livelihood.” If you need to eat, find another way; making a living requires capability, while the actual creative work should remain as pure as possible and stay true to oneself.
• Guo therefore insisted on “walking on 2 legs”: his documentary company took on commercial projects, while The Hidden Mountains and Rivers carried his personal pursuit. A commercial perspective actually made the priority clearer: first solve the functional problem of “what to say,” then address artistic technique.
• During an early reporting trip to Israel, he was fascinated that a country with little market or resource depth could still possess advanced technology and military capabilities. He also recalled that, in his impression, Israel’s number of listed companies “seemed” to rank third at the time, behind the US and China. Behind education, competition, technology, and markets is first of all “how people see the world.”

7. The 7-year timeline was both a resource constraint and an inquiry into what documentaries can do

• The project ran from 2018 through 2025, with substantial time invested from 2019 to 2021. Guo handled writing, directing, and editing alone, without the parallel division of labor available to a mature production.
• After meeting Chen, he estimated that it took 2 or 3 months to digest the supplied material, design roughly 200 questions, and build the film’s structure. During production, the on-site unit had about 5 or 6 people—2 cinematographers, a director, an assistant, sound, and lighting—which he considered the smallest viable setup.
• Guo wanted to “get to the bottom of documentary logic”: how to make a film that had substance while also achieving artistic expression. He tried to make every version represent his highest level of aesthetic and intellectual understanding at that moment, and that “investigative” mindset extended the schedule.
• The pandemic then severed commercial income as corporate clients cut budgets, while he still had to support his team. Faced with anxiety over a transition, he repeatedly considered changing the business but hesitated to act, leaving him to first finish the film he could control.

8. Editing was both creative labor and a mental refuge under pandemic pressure

• When he could not find the right way to express a piece of music or an idea, Guo would work through it repeatedly while sleeping, showering, or walking. Once a solution appeared, he became “especially excited.”
• Harder still were the lack of money, the absence of projects, and the team’s uncertain future. He felt many possible transitions “didn’t fit me,” sometimes sensing immediately that they would fail, yet he had no new answer he could trust.
• Entering the edit room and hearing Chen’s music pulled the anxiety into “another time and space.” The music’s stimulation of his brain calmed him down and allowed him to keep working through the concrete problems in front of him.
• At one point, after hearing nothing for a long time, Chen texted to ask whether the project was still moving forward. Guo replied that he would make it a documentary film and complete it to theatrical standards. Chen answered with a single line: “It’s in your hands.”

9. On its first theatrical run, authenticity ultimately beat technical perfection

• Around 2022, after the first rough cut was complete, Guo asked people connected to the National Alliance of Arthouse Cinemas to assess whether the film could enter theaters. Only after receiving a strong evaluation did he begin working through filing, project approval, content review, and technical review.
• A more experienced team could have handled the administrative work in parallel, but Guo was learning the process only after the film was finished. That blind spot around a first film’s release process was one reason the timeline stretched from 2 or 3 years to 7.
• The theatrical release required higher-end color grading and other technical work, but after the image became “too beautiful,” he asked to return to something real and natural. The voices of several professional voice actors also sounded “perfectly inauthentic.”
• The final narration came from a young director at the studio who had never done voice work, while Guo wrote the text. Professional polish was not the only standard; whether it matched the film’s honest texture mattered more.

10. Music carried the structure and emotion; an unfinished take became the most accurate ending

• Roughly 90% of the ideas for the film’s music came from Guo. One of Chen’s few effective suggestions was to avoid the most frequently used climax from The Passing of Time; after switching to another passage, the director felt the result was clearly better.
• Some suggestions were tried and did not work. The film did not allow the composer’s opinion to override the director’s judgment. What they preserved was an experimental relationship, not a hierarchy over who held the final interpretation.
• The humming of “Shui Diao Ge Tou” near the end was recorded in 2021. Dissatisfied with existing singers’ versions, Chen wanted to record it himself, but ran out of strength halfway through; his physical condition later made a retake impossible, leaving an “unfinished version.”
• When Guo received the recording, an image immediately came to him, and he later found footage that matched it. He believes the incomplete voice, the mood of Su Shi’s lyrics, and the images together carry Chen’s spirit and emotion.

11. Giving up a strong plot kept the director’s images from limiting the audience’s imagination

• Friends felt the film’s narrative arc was already fairly coherent, though some passages were too loose. Guo explained that the looseness was deliberate: he wanted viewers to be able to stay, feel, and think without having to work hard to follow the film.
• He once paired The Passing of Time with more specific images, then concluded that this imposed his own imagination on the music: “You can’t use the director’s images to limit everyone’s imagination.” The final cut therefore became more abstract.
• The earliest opening concept used “Butterfly Loves Flowers” with a camera simulating a butterfly flying through the mountains and forests. The technical result fell short of what he imagined, so the entire idea was abandoned. The sole remaining aim was to bring viewers from a busy age into another time and space.
• The first cut did not even have narration. It was added later so people unfamiliar with Chen could quickly absorb the necessary information, not to “prove that he was impressive.”

12. Prioritizing ideas over story created distinctiveness while sacrificing a mass-market entry point

• Guo was certain from the beginning that ideas had to outweigh story: the more story there was, the greater the risk of weakening the thinking. He did not want viewers to finish the film happily “without having to use their brains,” but to “think as they watch and feel as they watch.”
• Li Xiang’s challenge is worth preserving: humans are naturally drawn to stories, and giving up story means giving up a broader popular base. Guo accepts that cost, hoping the film will still hold up and offer insight 5 or 10 years later.
• Li gave the example that if a blogger shared The Hidden Mountains and Rivers, it could quickly reach “100K-plus.” He also believed that this kind of retelling might already have departed from the facts themselves. That captures both the efficiency of traffic narratives and why the film insists on a sense of reality.
• Both men acknowledged that inspirational, motivational, and legendary stories can be endlessly repackaged while users continue to consume them. The choice made by The Hidden Mountains and Rivers was not to deny that demand, but to refuse to replace the person with dramatization.

13. Chen Qigang’s persuasive power comes from having paid a real price to be himself

• The spiritual support Guo drew from Chen was: “Do the work and keep moving forward with tenacity.” Without being a genius, no one completes important work happily and effortlessly; being yourself usually means pushing against universal values and material interests.
• He especially values Chen’s consistency between words and actions. More than 20 years ago, Chen could have accepted invitations to important posts at the Central Conservatory of Music and the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, but chose to refuse; that decision was not made without financial pressure, as he had worked in France watching over tents and as a gardener.
• On the story of canceling the premiere of Life Is a Play and selling his father’s calligraphy to pay compensation, Guo explicitly said he heard it from Dai Jianjun of Gonggeng Academy. He concluded that Chen had paid a substantial price.
• Guo summarized Chen’s understanding of the world through the phrase “sorrow and joy share the same source,” referring to his lost child, the brevity of life, and his creative experience. But he did not directly ask about life and death, and therefore did not supply a more definite answer on Chen’s behalf.

14. There is no simple causal chain between collectivism, market freedom, and the individual hero

• Li Xiang observed that people of Chen Qigang’s “post-1950s generation” received highly collectivist education, yet may more readily display a sense of self and heroism. Later generations with better material and family conditions are not necessarily more pronounced as individual heroes.
• He cited Chen Kexin’s work on Li Na and Lang Ping: he initially wanted to film “being yourself” through Li Na, but found a stronger individual and heroic image in Lang Ping, who had been shaped by highly collectivist training.
• Another paradox comes from artistic patronage. Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and others accepted commissions from aristocrats yet left behind unmistakable selves; after artists became more marketized and seemingly freer, Chen said he had not actually seen them create much as a result.
• Guo relayed Chen’s sharp formulation: serious music is a spiritual need for people who are “stuffed with food and have nothing else to do,” while “our century has become frivolous.” The question may not simply be who pays, but what has happened to the aspirations of modern people.

15. An anxious age needs spiritual space; a low-budget release needs seed viewers

• Guo believes that when short-video feeds are full of “people telling you how you should live,” and comparison and anxiety have reached an extreme, a musician who honestly confronts his limitations and vulnerability may resonate precisely because of the tension with the times.
• Li described his own surreal switch: on the road he was still watching Musk discuss the next 3 to 6 years, AGI, humanoid robots, and the evolution of intelligence, then suddenly entered the slow time of The Hidden Mountains and Rivers. The coexistence of those 2 scales is itself a portrait of the world’s plurality.
• With no marketing budget, the team abandoned broad media outreach and first looked for people who already knew Chen Qigang. After Roundtable used film clips and expanded awareness of Chen, those seed viewers watched the movie and then shared it with people around them.
• Commercial films often bet on the opening weekend, but The Hidden Mountains and Rivers reached its highest single-day box office more than 20 days after release, in the third week. Guo attributed that to a word-of-mouth climb that needed time to accumulate.

16. The value of filmed preservation is becoming clear, but the series remains constrained by funding

• Because of his health, Chen could not attend activities such as the premiere; when the Central Conservatory of Music invited him to record a video, he could provide only audio. During the final reshoot in 2023, Guo could clearly feel that Chen was in worse physical condition than in previous years and at one point was “having a hard time holding it together.”
• What saddened him was not only aging, but the possibility that after an elder had patiently “given everything he had” in sharing, all of it could disappear over the following decades. The film preserves Chen’s condition, voice, and ideas, giving it archival value beyond its theatrical run.
• Guo still hopes to film roughly 10 people with global influence, and believes many would be willing to leave behind a spiritual legacy. Under ideal conditions, he believes the next film could be shortened from 7 years to 2 or 3.
• The real bottleneck remains money: both production and marketing require funding to allocate resources. He accepts the rational model of “small investment, small marketing, small returns,” while retaining the boundary that “if it can be done, do it; if it can’t, I won’t agonize over it.”

17. Behind the 8.3 rating, the criticism exposes the expressive limits of an intellectual biography

• One line of criticism is that the documentary is incomplete: if it says Chen experienced struggle, why not explain how he made money or cover concrete facts such as his work as a brand agent? Guo’s response is that this is not a realistic biography, but a poetic expression of character, ideas, and spirit.
• He also acknowledges that focusing too intensely on thought may have caused him to “turn a blind eye” to other details. Adding more of everyday life might have improved the film, or might have damaged its character; this remains an issue for his next project to explore.
• On some of the criticism on Douban, he felt the critics had not understood why he made the film this way. But he also clearly acknowledged that it is an art film carrying the director’s personal expression.
• The film opened on Douban with an 8.3 rating and remained at 8.3 during the conversation. Li Xiang felt that the distinctiveness itself had power: people who liked it would like it intensely, while those who did not might simply ignore it. Guo then closed by expressing his thanks.