Tsai Ming-liang (蔡明亮) was busy checking his schedule, making phone calls and setting up appointments to promote his new film, Face (臉), at Tsai Lee Lu (蔡李陸咖啡商號), a cafe in Yonghe (永和), Taipei County, he opened with actor friends Lee Kang-sheng (李康生) and Lu Yi-ching (陸奕靜), when I arrived for our interview in the morning on the day of the movie’s premiere. Though apparently suffering heartburn caused by the rice ball he had eaten earlier, Tsai spoke earnestly about his cinematic output and his life, which seem to merge in and out of one another.
In 2004, Tsai received an invitation from the Louvre to make the first film under an initiative in which the museum aims to create a collection open to international directors. He was given unfettered access to the museum’s premises, including spaces that had never opened to the public, but his mother was dying of cancer and Tsai felt anxious and lost and thought of giving up on the project.
Tsai finished the script after his mother passed away. The resulting work is Face, a tribute to Francois Truffaut and the spirit of New Wave cinema, featuring Truffaut’s alter-ego Jean-Pierre Leaud and muses Jeanne Moreau, Nathalie Baye and Fanny Ardant, as well as Tsai regulars Lee, Lu and Chen Shiang-chyi (陳湘琪).
Taipei Times: When you were the little boy Antoine in Kuching, what your relationship with the city like? [Tsai, who was born in Kuching, Malaysia, in 1957 once said that he felt like he was the boy Antoine in Truffaut’s The 400 Blows.]
Tsai Ming-liang: I was living with my grandparents. They took me to the movies every evening after my friends went home. There were seven, eight cinemas in town, and several of them were within walking distance from where we lived. It was a time when Hong Kong films were being made on a weekly basis, and there were all kinds of movies to see.
I have a very distinct memory of those days. Movie theaters were fun. You had Indians selling peanuts and Malays who gave me candy.
I entered a lonely phase when I moved back in with my parents in fifth grade. My father [who ran a noodle stall in the city] had a farm in the suburbs [where we lived]. I felt like an outsider among my brothers. If I had a fight with one of them, they would all give me the silent treatment afterwards. So I spent a lot of time alone in my own space.
I didn’t fit in with my classmates,
either. Some of them didn’t like me and forbade the whole class from speaking with me. But I didn’t think much of it. That’s how I am — I have my own world and don’t care so much about the rest. Even now I often have similar experiences or find myself in similar situations.
I started to submit articles to newspapers in high school and became friends with editors who were a lot older than me and took good care of me. I felt my relationship with the city was different than it was for other people. I was always alone, looking for someone to meet, riding my bike to see an old poet. I would stay at the newspaper’s office or at radio stations until late or sleep at my friends’ or grandparents’ homes. Life was free.
That’s why I felt close to Antoine, who is alone most of the time, engaging in a dialogue with the city by himself and realizing how important it is to him when he is forced to leave the place. I have very strong feelings about the film because it tells part of my story, too.
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