Making Films Just Like an Insider

Outsiders often illuminate the worlds they observe in ways that elude insiders. It’s a perspective that can serve filmmakers well, and that has proved true for Tsai Ming-Liang, who over the past decade has emerged as one of Taiwan’s most gifted directors.

“I grew up in Malaysia, and I went to Taiwan for college,” explained Tsai, whose first film to receive regular release in the U.S., “What Time Is It There?,” opens Friday at the Nuart and the University 6 in Irvine.

“At the time I did not imagine myself becoming a filmmaker,” Tsai said. “I just liked movies. So, when I went to college, I selected what was closest to film, Western theater. After I got out of college, I started writing for a living, writing for TV. I wrote a lot of kids’ programs, a lot of weird things. And I also worked in theater for a long time.

“After writing for a couple of years, someone approached me about directing a TV movie called ‘All Corners of the World.’ That was my first film. It was highly acclaimed by the film and TV industry in Taiwan. It won a lot of awards.”

Tsai’s next work for television, “The Kid,” marked the beginning of his ongoing collaboration with Lee Kang-Sheng, whose boyish looks belie his impressive acting range.

When Tsai got his chance to direct features he was determined not to make the kind of commercial fare he had worked on during his TV apprenticeship and instead drew inspiration from his experiences working in the theater and in recalling the short stories he wrote for himself in his childhood.

“All my movies are about me and what I feel about the world around me,” said Tsai, a slender, low-key man with a sure sense of humor, who sat down for an interview in his West Hollywood hotel room last year when he was passing through Los Angeles.

Tsai has a fair command of English but relies on an interpreter in discussing his work, showing the same concern for preciseness that he brings to the films that have won him international renown.

He solidified his reputation with a trilogy of films--”Rebels of the Neon Gods,” “Vive l’Amour” and “The River”--that revealed that life in sleek, modern Taipei can be as lonely and isolating as in any Western metropolis. With “The Hole” (1998) Tsai added a darkly bizarre and surreal twist to his abiding theme.

As austere as “What Time Is It There?” is, it is relieved by a bleak absurdist humor and holds up a ray of hope.

The demanding yet delightful film is set in motion when a lovely young woman, Shiang-Chyi (Chen Shiang-Chyi), set to leave for Paris the next day, buys a watch from a young street vendor, Hsiao Kang (Lee). Hsiao Kang yearns to see her again but in the meantime she is coping with being on her own in Paris and the vendor’s mother is becoming obsessed with communicating with the spirit of her recently deceased husband.

The film is not as stark as Tsai’s masterpiece “The River,” in which its young hero (again Lee), an older woman and an older man--parents and grown son--live together in a small Taipei apartment. This is surprising because at the film’s outset their lives are separate. (Happily, “The River,” which like all of Tsai’s previous films, has been seen only at festivals and in institutional settings, now has an American distributor.)

Tsai agrees that not coming to Taiwan until age 20 gave him an outsider’s perspective. A screenwriter friend of Tsai’s was upset to discover that “All the World’s Children,” while outstanding, had actually been made by someone who had not spent his entire life in the country, especially because Tsai dared to be critical.

“It’s about two kids--a sister, a high school student, and her younger brother, who’s in elementary school,” he said. “It’s set in Taipei, which is rapidly changing. They see a lot of the ways of the adults around them, making money any way they can, and these kids are coping with lots of temptations and confusion.”

After 20 years, half his lifetime, Tsai no longer thinks of himself as an outsider but says that returning home to Malaysia for occasional visits has helped him keep his perspective.

Tsai considers himself very fortunate that he arrived in Taiwan when he did.

“In the past 20 years Taipei, and Taiwan itself, have gone through a lot of changes, both economically and politically,” Tsai says.

“Twenty years ago there was still martial law. Also, economic developments have basically changed Taiwan from a Third World country to what it is now, and I’ve been there to observe it all.”

Tsai says the combination of the changing economy and growing political freedom coincided with his realization that the Taiwanese cinema prior to the emergence of master Taiwanese filmmaker Hsiou Hsao-Hsien had been very commercial.

Tsai says it’s a plus that Taiwan has had little serious cinema in its history, allowing it to flower unburdened by the past. Taiwanese cinema (and that of Iran) has been some of the most challenging national cinema to emerge in the past decade--at a time when the Southeast Asian commercial motion picture industry has been losing ground to Hollywood.

Tsai’s films, however, are not shown in China, because of Taiwan’s uneasy relations with the mainland. Tsai also reports that his and Hsiou’s films do poorly at home because they are not properly distributed. As for Taiwanese audiences who do see his films, he said, “Some moviegoers and some critics really love them and others absolutely hate them, but I think the situation will improve. Maybe my films are too far ahead of the average audience.

“Their inspiration usually comes from one very strong incident in my life. When the accumulated emotions come back to me, some time after the incident took place, some emotions remain, and I just feel compelled to make a film out of them.”

For example, in “The River,” Lee plays a young man, hoping to pick up some pocket money, who jumps into a polluted river for a scene being staged by a film director; he subsequently develops a paralysis in his neck that determines the course of the film.

Its inspiration came from Tsai’s memory of a hard-to-treat pain in his neck combined with a scene edited out of “All the Corners of the World” in which he had one boy push into a river by another boy, who as a result of the polluted water became ill for several days.

Before Tsai went to college, his favorite films were from Hollywood because they were the only ones he was able to see while growing up. He loved Tarzan movies, James Bond, “King Kong” and “some movie about tarantula spiders.”

In college and afterward he was able to discover and admire the work of the great Japanese filmmakers and also the films of Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, R.W. Fassbinder and Luchino Visconti.

Now, with “What Time Is It There?,” Tsai Ming-Liang has been able to move beyond Taipei to Paris, where he pays homage to Truffaut. The character Hsaio Kang looks at a video of “The 400 Blows” and has a chance meeting in a cemetery with its star, Jean-Pierre Leaud.

It’s a brief, charming moment, yet anyone who’s ever seen a Tsai film would suspect that among French filmmakers it would be the spiritual Robert Bresson who has had the greatest impact upon him.

“That’s the one,” Tsai admits, laughing. “That’s the one I think is the big influence.”