ZhangFeng yi, the actor of Duan Xiaolou, is still the same as he is now, while Leslie Cheung, the actor of Cheng Dieyi, has left. Looking back, things have changed. Farewell My Concubine still exists, and there is no Cheng Dieyi in the world.

Creation background

When Chen Kaige attended the film festival on 1988, Feng Hsu took the initiative to meet him and came to see him with Li Bihua's novels. He saw it and said it was necessary for Chen Kaige to make such a film. The ending of the old version of Li Bihua's original novel is that Cheng Dieyi and Duan Xiaolou met in the bathroom in Hongkong several years later, naked, honest and affectionate, and then went out and went their separate ways.

Chen Kaige told Li Bihua that the ending must change. Farewell My Concubine focuses on the theme of human nature-infatuation and betrayal. Before writing, Chen Kaige emphasized to the two screenwriters that they should never ideologize the characters and let them do what they should.