So there’s this heist and it mimics in every detail the first-ever armed bank robbery in Taiwan 30 years ago by a taxi driver who fatally shot a policeman and was later executed for his crime with a bullet fired point blank through his heart.
Why repeat a crime 30 years later, and who was it?
It obviously wasn’t the cabbie, or his son, but director Tom Lee (李育丞) won’t divulge any more information about the script.
Photo: Jules Quartley
“You will have to see the film,” he says.
It’s movies like this — suspense and action genres, thrillers and light sci-fi — that will come to the rescue of Taiwan’s film industry, he believes. The “new-new wave” of Taiwan cinema will be character driven, he says, a direction in which we should be heading.
Certainly, the new-new wave will be a far cry from the saccharine love stories on the undercard at the local box office, livelier than the art house cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢) in the 1980s and a counterweight to all those “idol dramas” (台灣偶像劇列表) that the country is famed for — now surpassed by South Korea and even China’s relatively more polished versions.
At 27, Lee is refreshingly young for a director and, though born in Tainan, he landed in Vancouver on his ninth birthday and was privately educated there, apart from two years in the public school system. He knew from the age of 12 that he would be a director because “watching film was the only thing that made me really, really happy.”
No surprise then when he graduated from art college, migrated south to Los Angeles and started work. He did well enough working on mostly commercials and music videos to pick up a Young Director’s Award in Cannes, bronze CLIO Awards, College Emmy Awards, ADDY Awards, Silver Telly Commercial Awards and more. Not a bad start in a tough industry, you might think.
But while most Taiwanese film directors would start out here, dream of Hollywood, then retire to Canada, Lee wanted to move in another direction. It was 2008 and the financial crisis seemed to shadow the decline of North America and the rise of Asia. There were other practical, or “strategic,” reasons as he calls them.
“My dream was to make a Chinese-language movie in LA but all I could see was years of being a commercial film director, so there were opportunities to change my life and I took them.”
I first met Lee at a film event to watch the Martin Luther King vehicle, Selma. We’ve met a few times since for coffee and the last time he had pulled two all-nighters working on a new project. Clearly he’s motivated and ambitious, one of the “always-on generation,” thinking in two or more planes at the same time.
taiwan, the uk of the east
Not entirely convinced about why an obviously talented director would decamp from Hollywood to Taipei, I stir the pot a little and say, surely it would make more sense to develop his career in China, where there’s more money and opportunities. In response, he says, “I see Taiwan as the United Kingdom of the film industry in Asia.”
To Lee’s thinking, the UK is to the US, as Taiwan is to China. By this he means the UK is smaller but has a proportionately greater influence in the English-speaking and international market.
As for the Chinese-language screen sector, it is potentially worth more than the English-language market due to the number of native Mandarin speakers — hence, Lee’s strategic thinking and his move to Taiwan.
“The way I see it is we, not China, should be leading rather than following. It’s Taiwan, not China, that has 5,000 years of history and we should make the most of this. Also, Taiwanese investors have to see Taiwan film as a global product.”
To do this, Lee says, the local film industry has to upgrade. Sort out the lame dubbing, so-so production values, formulaic scripts and TV actors’ “generally overblown reactions, which are kinda off, because most of them aren’t real actors, they are celebrities.”
“We do have some of the best film professionals, crews and directors in the world, but they don’t work here... There are great actors and actresses here and I really respect them, but if you don’t put them in a professional environment, after a while they will lose their craft and touch,” he says.
Lee says that Taiwanese television fell behind China’s two years ago.
“Now people are watching Korean TV shows. Have a look on YouTube and there are far more Chinese productions, it’s a terrifying fact of which we should be aware,” he says.
Lee adds that Taiwan has lost its creative edge over the past two decades.
“About 80 to 85 percent of Chinese-language music used to be produced here in Taipei, but this is changing. The melodies, the way it’s produced, it hasn’t evolved, so it’s the next checkpoint for China,” he says.
Lee says that through the film and entertainment industry Taiwan can change for the better.
“It would raise Taiwanese identity, boost our confidence and our position in the world. People here ask the government to change things, but this just means they give the power to the government and become powerless themselves. Our greatest enemy isn’t China, it’s ourselves,” he says.
I have to say, Lee could run for office, if he wasn’t Canadian. He would probably do a better job than the current incumbent. But fortunately for Chinese-language movie audiences he’s going to be sticking to that. For him, “filmmaking is a religion, a calling, and we have to preach the gospel.”
And thus endeth the sermon.
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