easternKicks talks Tsai Ming-liang about the retrospective of his work at the BFI Southbank, London and the release of his two most recent films around the UK…
Somehow I’ve gotten it into my head that Tsai Ming-liang might be a difficult subject to interview. I’ve read a couple of interviews that portrayed his as moody and then there’s that tendency he has for having little more than a line or two of dialogue in an entire film - I’m concerned that with my lack of experience as an interviewer I might not get the best out of him. I needn’t have worried…
Ming-Liang is ensconced in a café area just off the main foyer in the Soho hotel in which he is staying, with his translator and several members of the Taipei Representative Office in the UK. Animated and laughing, he could hardly be more different than the characters he portrays, and considering he arrived on a flight early that morning, it seems incredible he even has that much energy.
But then Ming-Liang is so obviously excited to be in London. It’s the first time he’s properly been able to visit the land that, born in East Malaysia with it’s colonial past, he’s considered himself a British subject - at least at a certain time. For him it’s already been quite a magical experience, driving through London early that morning in a taxi and seeing Westminster and Big Ben in real life. What’s really caught his attention, though, is the London Eye, something he’d never even seen a picture of.
It reminds him of a Ferris wheel, which have fascinated him all his life, and he used so powerfully in his film What Time Is It There? He wanted to stop and take a picture, but sadly his camera was packed away in the boot. (I almost wonder if he might be considering a location for a future project?)
So how does he feel about having a retrospective of his work held by the BFI? Having always felt such a special connection with this country, he seems sincerely floored to receive such an honour. If anything, he doesn’t actually feel he’s made enough films or is even old enough to deserve it, though he’s pleased his films are starting to make such an impact in Europe. For him it proves that stylised, thoughtful films can have a more lasting impact than those that are simply fashionable or mainstream.
His latest work, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, is the film he’s made in his native Malaysia, having based himself in Taiwan as a filmmaker. Why did he return and what did he want to say with the film?
For him the film is very much about freedom.
He’d never really thought about going back before. He’d grown up in a changing Malaysia, where the degree of openness he’d seen as a child on TV, and in the way that all ethnic groups had lived, worked and eat together - be they Indian, Malay or Chinese - had gradually changed. Following the race riots of the late sixties, between the Chinese Malay and the indigenous Malay majority, restrictions came in over property, religion, even the whole legal system was changed to positively discriminate against in favour of the indigenous Malay. The atmosphere changed greatly.
Having left Malaysia after high school to study in Taiwan, going back hardly seemed a career choice - he knew how badly his creative freedom would suffer under both Malay’s cultural policy and religious regulation. However, that changed in 1998, when he felt that the Taiwanese film industry held some sort of grudge against him. Upset, he felt like going home, and an offer of funding from an American independent film company gave him an opportunity to do just that.
Returning to Malaysia, he refamiliarised with his home country, then suffering a financial crisis that had brought a booming economy to an end, and found himself attracted to the issue of foreign labour - finding parallels in the faces of migrant workers brought in for construction to the mix of people he saw as a child, and how important that blending together was. When the money didn’t materialise, he abandoned the script he was working on, but never forgot about his core idea.
Later in 2003 a Vienna production company offered him a chance to complete the film that became I Don’t Want To Sleep Alone. For him the significance of the film is that it’s when you escape from something, you are free form the limitations and constraints that bound you, but when you return you actually end up feeling just you did before you left. You still want to talk about the same issues. It’s pretty clear he means himself.
Ironically he had to make substantial cuts to get the film released in his home country, losing five whole segments of the film. It was a high cost to pay for someone who takes his creative freedom so seriously, but ultimately one he was prepared to make just to get the film shown there. On it’s release the Malaysian media asked him just what had made him so rebellious, to which he replied he was simply a product of the 60s. How could he have watched the gradual change in Malaysia and not have been affected?
As a writer and director of his own work, how clear a vision does he have of how the finished film will look? And when that has to change, as it did when he cast a Muslim in the role of Rawang in I Don’t Want To Sleep Alone - meaning that the relationship on screen had to be much less explicit than he had at first imagined, what effect does that have?
Ming-Liang explains how lucky he feels he has been, that in this age of globalisation, particularly in the film industry, he’s always been in a position to be true to his creations, to do exactly what he wants and cast whomever he chooses to. If he couldn’t then he’d rather not make films, what would be the point.
That can be tricky, though. Only the day before he had met with the Government Information Office, who’ve helped fund many of his films before due to the fact they’re not exactly commercial. He was trying to convince them to fund his latest project, to be set around the Louvre. One of the panel members asked him, exactly what relevance would this have to Taiwan?
He reply was he didn’t know, but the Malaysian Ministry of Culture had asked him the exact same question. Accompanied by the head of the Louvre museum, they had tried to get funding from them too, only to be asked if there where any cultural characteristics that would be attractive to a Malaysian audience. The head of the Louvre replied ‘Nah, but the director is Malaysian’.
Over the years he feels himself very lucky to have been supported by so many people, but he realises you can’t rely on that alone. And in the meeting with the Taiwanese panellists he tried to convince them that in this era of international co-operation, the idea of funding should be a flexible one, especially as the project already had French and Belgian funding. Instead of them asking how is the project relevant to them, he can do something for them. There are quite a lot of things you can do without losing the integrity of the film, he says.
In that respect his working process is rather freer. He has never begun filming from a finished script. Instead he fixes a general direction he wants the film to go in, and everyone follows that, allowing not only for improvisation, but for every sort of contingency - whether that be changes in actor or simply running out of money.
For instance, the big dance scene in The Wayward Cloud was originally meant to involve 60 people, however they didn’t have that much money left so changed it to 30, saving not only on actors but also there costumes.
For Ming-liang that is the enjoyable part of filmmaking. Being flexible enough to think of interesting ways around problems, whatever they are.
The most iconic scene in I Don’t Want To Sleep Alone, where the butterfly sits on the lead character’s shoulder, is another example of this flexibility in action. They bought hundreds of live butterflies to shoot the scene, taking all day to get the final shot. Everyone complained to him why didn’t he just use computer animation, to which he simply replied that he doesn’t trust computers.
The end result paid off, as the camera follows the butterfly up from his shoulder, then as it drops into the water only to struggle free and up into the air again. A beautiful scene and nothing that a computer could have every imagined. Of course, it’s so perfect now everyone thinks that it is CGI!
I ask him why so many of his characters lead such a solitary existence -why does that interest him so much?
For him being in the situation of being alone you are more true to yourself, and therefore the film itself is more truthful. When he first began making movies, he often wondered why it was considered to be such a negative thing to be alone. Actually it’s a very freeing situation, it allows you time to reconsider the relationships in your life like love or family. In his early films particularly he used the motif to break down the family or human relationship to the bare minimum and consider what its real significance was.
So did that minimalism affect his now very recognisable style, the long camera shots and little dialogue?
Well, he jokes, in reality when you are alone there aren’t many voices around you anyway!
But seriously Ming-liang has a good point about film going audiences now, we’re so used to being ‘told’ the plot, of listening to the story, that we don’t actually see anymore. He tries to go beyond that, as he feels the medium of film has so much more to offer. His focus is on the visual, using his characters movements and expressions, or surrounding environments and themes to express certain things. That ‘visual character’ is the most important part of each movie he makes, taking most of his time on each project studying it and deciding just what it should be before he starts filming.
More recently, no matter what the theme of the movie or subject is of his movie, he’s made sure there’s always a part that forces the audience to have their own ‘dialogue’ with his films. Using pace, lighting and sound, all aesthetic considerations, he forces them to decide in their own minds exactly what the film is about. The pleasure isn’t in the story itself, but the viewing.
He recalls how a British Journalist at the Vienna festival screening of Goodbye Dragon Inn asked him, ‘What does this film mean to you?’ His reply was to turn the question back on the journalist. He wants to force people to make up their own mind individually on the meaning of his work, not tell them what they should think or feel about it.
When I’m politely asked to wrap up my interview it comes as no surprise. I’ve watched the translator cover several backsides of A4 printouts, and then desperately try to find room on those same printout faces. (I think I’ve even caught a glint of envy in her eye for my notebook - hardly used save for my questions for that day!) I know I’ve overrun my interview slot, later finding out that I’ve had twice as much time as I was meant to, but the mention of Goodbye Dragon Inn gives me the opportunity to ask one last cheeky small question (though by this time I should have guessed that doesn’t exist with Ming-liang!): just why did he pick a King Hu film to base the film around?
‘I LOVE KING HU!’ he exclaims in English. No one can go beyond him, he was the best director of Wuxia movies.
He recounts how he saw thousands of hours watching thousands (the translator smiles, ‘maybe hundreds?’) of Wuxia films as a child in Malaysia, but when he first discovered King Hu at the age of 11, with the film Touch of Zen, he realised that director was different. It was just as exciting, but he found himself asking why did this film express something so different and special? What was the difference?
Goodbye Dragon Inn was really his homage to his relationship with old cinema, and by coincidence an actor who had appeared in many of Ming-liang’s own films including this one, the late Miao Tien, got his first starring role in Dragon Inn.
Ming-Liang sums it up rather philosophically, that no film exists in a vacuum, there are always some connections to other films along the way.
I think my time with Ming-liang is finally over as the party gets ready to move into the main restaurant area for the next interview, but he heads off to his hotel room to reappear moments later with a programme for the second film to be directed by his leading man and long-time collaborator Lee Kang-Sheng, Help Me Eros, and a CD of music by Grace Chang, the Taiwanese 50s and 60s pop whom he based The Hole around.
It seems to typify his nature: not only warm and generous to his interviewer, he’s keen to promote those individuals whose talent he has benefited from, not just himself. A kind and (very) talkative guy! Not what you might expect at all from his films - but all the better for it!
The Wayward Cloud and I Don’t Want To Sleep Alone are on release around the UK, and the Tsai Ming-Liang season continues at the BFI to the end of the month.
Kind thanks to Tsai Ming-Liang for his time, Tom Bell of Axiom Films and the Taipei Representative Office in the UK for helping to make this interview happen.
