Stars fall to earth in local films

Taiwan's film industry should start all over again, Hong Kong producer and president of the Federation of Hong Kong Film Workers Ng See-yuen (吳思遠) said in his opening speech to the International Forum on Creative Production and Global Marketing for Chinese Film (全球華人電影創作人暨製片論壇), which was held in Taipei last week.

The three-day conference was packed with local and international film professionals, as well as enthusiastic film students and movie fans. Together, they discussed the all-too familiar topic of how to save the Taiwanese film industry.

This time around, the country's young generation of filmmakers seemed to agree with Ng.

"Taiwan has too many film directors. But we don't have enough scriptwriters," said filmmaker Su Choa-pin (蘇照彬), the scriptwriter of the 2002 thriller Double Vision (雙瞳) and the director of the comedy Better Than Sex (愛情靈藥).

It took Su and his team two years to write the text for Double Vision, all the while sending the script back and forth to various Hollywood producers and writers. It was the first Taiwanese movie made under the Hollywood working model, co-produced with Columbia Asia. "It was hard work, but very rewarding for me," said Su.

"In the past we always wrote our own scripts and made director's movies. But maybe it's time for a change," said Cheng Wen-tang (鄭文堂), director of Somewhere Over the Dreamland(夢幻部落).

Both Su and Cheng said this was a different approach to movie-making, a path distinct from predecessors such as Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢), Edward Yang (楊德昌) or Tsai Ming-liang (蔡明亮). Not just Taiwanese audiences, but also filmmakers, it seems, have tired of the auteur directors, or art-house movies.

As further proof of this theory, there are no Taiwanese films selected for the recently announced line-up at this year's Cannes Film Festival. South Korea and Thailand, however, are well represented. Two Korean films Hong San-soo's Woman is the Future of Man and Park Chan-wook's Old Boy have been selected for the competition section. A Thai film, Apichatpong Weerasethaku's Tropical Malady has been selected for the first time.

Hou Hsiao-Hsien has finished his latest work Coffee Time (咖啡時光), but surprisingly withdrew his Cannes submission. Edward Yang has not made any new films since his acclaimed YiYi (一一) in 2000. Tsai Ming-liang still makes one film a year, but after Goodbye, Dragon Inn (不散) his films have not sold that well.

Discarding the tradition of looking at the world with a humanistic perspective, younger generation filmmakers are now moving toward a more innocent and less intellectual way of making films, concentrating on pure entertainment and marketable movies.

Formula 17 (十七歲的天空) is an example of a movie entirely produced with cost-effective calculations in mind. "Right from the beginning we did not want this to be art, we just hoped it would recoup our investment," said Michelle Yeh (葉育華), producer of Formula 17, a first movie from newly established Three Dots Entertainment (三和娛樂).

Fortunately for Yeh, the gay romantic comedy became one of the few local movies that made a profit in the past five years. The budget of the movie was just NT$4 million but it grossed NT$5 million at the box office, a small sales figure, but enough to make it the No.1 movie in terms of ticket sales this year.

This was a boost not only for Three Dots Entertainment, set up by a group of 30-somethings, but also for 23 year-old first-time director Chen Ying-jung (陳映蓉) and lead actor Tony Yang (楊佑寧), formerly a TV drama idol.