Made on a shoestring budget, with a cast of amateur actors picked out of the Yellow Pages, Ah Chung won a string of prizes at international film festivals and then sank without trace at the Taiwan box office. Is Chang Tso-chi's latest work a dud or a delight?
Many local critics say that 1996 was the year when Taiwan's film industry finally hit rock bottom. Against this "How can it get any worse?" background, director Chang Tso-chi (張作驥) somehow managed to complete Ah Chung, a film he had written himself, on a shoestring budget of US$290,000. The film has so far participated in fifteen international film festivals. It was awarded the Jury Prize at the 1996 Asia-Pacific Film Festival and took other awards at the Pusan International Film Festival, the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, and mainland China's Zhuhai Film Festival. It also took a Golden Horse Award at home, for Best Supporting Actress.
Some of Chang's worst moments in ten years of filmmaking preceded that triumph. He is one of nature's survivors.
The film is a slice-of-life movie, beautifully shot, but with a lot of violence and bad language. It is the bitter-sweet tale of a Taiwanese family at the lower end of the social scale. The father is a ne'er-do-well taxi driver. The mother earns money as a member of a small revue troupe that does skits and songs to enliven weddings and other occasions. Anxious to improve her family's bad luck, she agonizes over whether the traditional remedy of changing the family name would help. Her other strategy is to send their son, the eponymous Ah Chung, to study a violent, superstitious, gangster-dominated form of entertainment-cum-worship called pa chia chiang. This involves gory self-mutilation and going into trances, and is the source of some of the most vivid scenes in the movie.
Ah Chung's grandfather dies, his mentally-retarded little brother is nearly killed in a road accident, he witnesses a gang murder, and he suffers at the hands of his father, who raped his adopted sister. The message of this episodic film seems to be that you can rise above any amount of suffering, and it charmed festival juries everywhere.
Unfortunately, however, the critical acclaim did not make director Chang Tso-chi rich. Except for the prize money awarded by the Thessaloniki Film Festival, approximately US$7,000, the director's only income in 1996 was a US$3,600 bonus from his investor, Lin Tien-jung (林添榮).
Still, nobody starves to death in contemporary Taiwan and, despite limited earnings, Chang still manages to get by with the support of his many friends, who send him tea (which he loves) in vast quantities, along with other necessities. He and his girlfriend have been together for six years now, and last year she took a job to support them and their pets. For when Chang is not engaged in film production, his favorite activity is walking their two dogs, which he treats like his own children.
Impoverished directors seem to be a necessary by-product of the Taiwan movie scene. Most of them take part-time jobs shooting TV commercials or shorts and earn handsome cash rewards from them. But except for a series of documentaries focusing on juvenile delinquency, Chang had seldom gotten involved in work other than mainstream filmmaking during his ten years in the industry. When asked what motivates him to stay on, he just shrugs, saying: "Life is hard. Shooting films is only a little bit harder."
To describe Chang as happy in adversity does not seem too much of an exaggeration. After graduating from the Film and Drama Department of Chinese Culture University in 1987, he joined a film studio as a set-dresser. Yu Kan-ping (虞勘平), who had directed a famous award-winning Taiwan movie called Moonlight, then took him under his wing, and Chang soon found himself working as an assistant director on Both Sides of the Taiwan Straits. He then graduated to second director on two other movies, City of Sadness, regarded by many as legendary Taiwan filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien's masterpiece, and Two Billboard Painters.
When looking back on those days, the most impressive thing that Chang recalls is being asked to adapt the scripts of Wu Nien-chen (吳念真), possibly Taiwan's most famous screenwriter and playwright and the author of City of Sadness. Asked whether that is how he mastered the art of scriptwriting, Chang shakes his head. "That's impossible," he says. "Wu's screenplays are completely his own. He's a genius, totally spontaneous. Nobody can hope to emulate him."
Apart from that, the experience of working as an assistant director alongside Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢) on City of Sadness had a profound impact on him, particularly when it came to dealing with actors in subsequent movies. Although nearly all the members of the cast in Ah Chung were inexperienced amateurs, Chang chose many of them on the basis of their backgrounds, a carpenter in real life playing a carpenter in the movie, and so forth. Worried about their lack of acting experience, Chang had all the cast live together for a month before he began shooting so that they could get to know each other and "settle down."
That was an anxious month for the actors, however, because Chang would not tell them when shooting was going to start. It was not until one day he saw Chiu Hsiu-min (邱秀敏), who plays Ah Chung's mother, cooking downstairs, while "Ah Chung" was shouting to her from an upstairs room, that the director decided his cast was ready. Shooting began next day.
Chang realized he would have to be flexible. He relied on portable lighting, to give his actors maximum freedom of movement. He made frequent use of improvisation. Sometimes when the actors thought they were just chatting together, their words and actions were covertly being recorded for use in the film, which helps explain why one of the film's most notable features is its astonishing realism. Chang claims that he learned respect for actors and production crew from Hou Hsiao-hsien.
Shortly after City of Sadness hit the island's screens, the local advertising industry went into a dramatic upswing, luring many high-caliber directors with the promise of rich pickings. Chang once earned about US$1,500 for seven days' work directing such a film, and then gave it up for good, saying "It's too easy to make that kind of money."
A long string of bad luck followed. After overcoming numerous obstacles, Chang was given a government seed grant of US$145,000 to make a film called Shooting in the Dark. But then the principal backer dropped out, leaving the director with no alternative but to give up the government grant. Later, with the help of a Hong Kong film company, Chang was able to direct the film, although he was not allowed to do the final editing. Chang refused to acknowledge the movie as his, but the Hong Kong company still put his name on it as the director. The film was never shown in Taiwan.
In 1994, however, Chang again obtained US$145,000 from the government, this time to make Ah Chung. For a long time afterward he teetered on the brink of abandoning the project because of insufficient additional funding. Fortunately, film producer Lin Tien-jung chipped in another US$145,000 in the form of cameras and other equipment, and the film finally got under way.
Initially, Taiwan's Central Motion Picture Corp. (CMPC) had shown interest in putting money into the project. But the company did not like the plot, particularly a scene where a father rapes his adopted daughter. Chang stood his ground, saying he believed the kind of family shown in Ah Chung was actually not uncommon in Taiwan. The picture was designed to be a realistic portrayal of life and he was not prepared to compromise his ideals just to suit the CMPC.
More bad luck was to follow. Once the film was completed in 1995, Chang could not find an agent to distribute the film, owing to the extreme sluggishness of the Taiwan and Hong Kong film industries. It was not until last year that Ah Chung finally made it onto the international film festival circuit, with the help of the Taiwan Film Center. Finally, after long-drawn-out negotiations, the film obtained a screening schedule in Taiwan, starting the last week of January. But that is a very competitive period in the Taiwan movie market, as it coincides with the start of the schools' winter vacation. A number of big-budget movies with box-office stars like Jackie Chan (Mr. Nice Guy), and Disney's 101 Dalmatians all started showing in local cinemas around that time.
Chang thus found himself up against some tough competition when bringing his first very own film to the domestic market. But his backer, Lin Tien-jung, felt confident and decided to go ahead, proclaiming that a fortuneteller in mainland China had once predicted that he would make a mint of money one January.
Unfortunately, it was not to be January 1996. Chang had waited so long for a domestic screening that he felt he had no choice but to accept the challenge. He said he was not afraid of Jackie Chan, anyway. But when he thought of all the kindness and assistance he had received from friends, he worried about his future ability to repay them. That was the biggest thing on his mind when Ah Chung opened at the end of January 1996--and closed ten days later.
Chang is not the kind of man to blame the gods or other people for the ups and downs of his ten-year career in movies, however. On the contrary, he was fond of quoting a famous saying by the Chinese philosopher Mencius: "When Heaven is about to confer a great office on any man, it first exercises his mind with suffering and his sinews and bones with toil."
As far as the making of the film Ah Chung was concerned, Chang thinks that his biggest reward was the precious opportunity to participate in a production from start to finish, including writing and revising the screenplay, shooting, and post-production, even right down to printing posters and folding handbills. He witnessed the entire Taiwan filmmaking process. Many people thought it was enough for him just to do a good job as a director, but for Chang, that was only part of it.
In recent years, many critics have denigrated contemporary Taiwan films as boring. But Chang says with great confidence that as long as audiences can be lured into theaters, he at least will never let them fall asleep. Ah Chung bears him out. The movie was screened at last year's Golden Horse Chinese Film Festival. Chang was astonished--and delighted--to find that the audience loved it. There was a surprising amount of laughter, and afterward, no fewer than seven people came up to him and said they would take their own mothers to see the movie. Chang knew then that the audience had been impressed and touched by the film, perceiving in it a reflection of at least part of their own lives. And as far as he was concerned, that was compensation enough for a decade of hardship.
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Adapted with permission from the China Times
January 25, 1997.