IEC

This is a Chinese name; the family name is Zhao.

Born: 1961, Xi'an, Shaanxi, China, as son of an architect.

Education: Department of Cinematography of the Beijing Film Academy [1978-82].

Career: Ph commercials dir by Woody Allen, a.o.

Awards: LAFCA Award [1992] & NSFC Award [1993] for 'Da hong deng long gao gao gua'; Association of Chinese Filmmakers 'Golden Rooster Award' for Best Cinematographer [1999] for 'Jing ke ci qin wang'; Association of Chinese Filmmakers 'Golden Rooster Award' nom [2004] for 'Shou ji'; Association of Chinese Filmmakers 'Golden Rooster Award' nom [2009] for 'Tie ren'.

Zhao Fei: 'Whether I'm actually shooting a large scale epic film or a smaller scale film like Woody's work, what I have to focus on is the lighting. It's not so much how many people or props are involved. How do you get the lights? Where should the camera be placed? All those are the main issues whether it's an epic scale film or a smaller film. For me, shooting both films is quite similar, because it requires me to use my imagination. For 'The Emperor and the Assassin', it's a historical film of a period with not much recorded history. We read from history books and we had to imagine what the past looked like, so the lighting had to create, as you say, a very stylized look in order to capture this spirit of this pre-Ching period, which is like 3 AD. And Woody's film is also not a contemporary film. It's set in the 1920's and 1930's in the jazz age, in Chicago and New York. So not only did I need to see movies about that period, read books, understand larger issues of what America was at that time, I had to imagine and create that as well. The one I'm shooting at the moment for Woody, which is the Summer '99 project, is actually a contemporary film. It required much more realistic lighting, much more realistic than the other two, because they were set in the past.' [From interview with Anthony Kaufman in 'indieWIRE'.]