Still images from Zhang Yimou's latest movie One Second, in which actor Fan Wei  stars as a projectionist, who tries to repair a roll of film, actor Zhang Yi portrays a fleeing criminal attempting to see a film containing footage of his daughter, and actress Liu Haocun acts as a troubled teen. [Photo provided to China Daily]

"After the celluloid era ended, we have all stepped into this new digital epoch. Memories about physical film are shrouded in the mists of time. I'm afraid many young directors have barely used or even seen a physical film," the director said during an interview with Chinese journalists after the Beijing premiere at the China Film Archive last week.

Driven by nostalgia, Zhang Yimou invited the award-winning writer Zou Jingzhi-known for epic blockbusters like Wong Karwai's The Grandmaster-to pen the script in 2018.

The story was finished in a short time, with the photography, mainly in the Gobi Desert in Dunhuang, taking the crew just 46 days. But the casting of the lead female character, a teenager with a tough life struggling to take care of her younger brother-took much longer.

Scenes from One Second, in which director Zhang returns to memories of his youth and re-creates the cinema of yesteryear, when watching movies was a treat for the community. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Zhang Yimou recalls the casting began around three years ago, when his team was selecting a fresh face to play a young princess in his 2018 martial arts film Shadow. This was a significant milestone to help the director recover from the Sino-US flop The Great Wall.

With the original script adjusted, the princess role finally went to A-list actress Guan Xiaotong, but the large-scale casting procedure helped Zhang Yimou to discover Liu Haocun, then a high-school student in her final year preparing for art college entrance exams.

Liu was selected for the fittingly named One Second after Zhang Yimou's casting team audited around 3,000 candidates, with the director impressed by Liu's big eyes that seemed to talk and her inner strength that matches the role of a wild, yet pure-hearted countryside girl.

"She hasn't acted before, not even in a short film or an advertisement," explains the director.

In the film, Liu's character bumps into the Zhang Yi's criminal character when the teenager is attempting to steal a reel of film to make a table lamp cover, after her young brother accidentally burns a cover borrowed from a neighbor. Coincidently, the reel contains the one-second footage of the criminal's daughter.

With a line indicating that the criminal's daughter has died, making the footage her last image left in the world, the two lonely people come to understand each other's miserable lives, generating a father-daughter bond.