Thu, May 23, 2019 page4

• ‘Nina Wu’ star says film reflects abuse

  LASTING DAMAGE: Patty Wu said she was bullied on set early on in her career, which made her wonder what people who have experienced really terrible things go through

  • AFP, CANNES, France
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  Actress Patty Wu (吳可熙) has never been raped by an all-powerful movie mogul — as happens in her striking new movie at the Cannes Film Festival — but the Taiwanese star knows what it is to be humiliated by a director drunk on his own power.

  She said she would never forget being repeatedly slapped in the face during the shoot for an advertisement for a mahjong video game early in her career.

  Wu was publicly punished for having the temerity to ask the director a question.

  

  Actress Patty Wu, right, meets her idol, British actress Tilda Swinton, at the Cannes Film Festival in France on Wednesday last week.

  Photo courtesy of Seashore Image Productions

  “I just wanted to know whether a shot would be a closeup or in long shot so I could prepare myself,” the actress said in Cannes, France, where Nina Wu (灼人祕密) — which she wrote and stars in — is in the official section.

  “The director asked the whole crew to collect all the banknotes they were using in the advert and to bring to him. He made a fan out of them. Then he asked another actor to slap me in the face with them about 30 times,” she said. “It went on and on, him shooting it all in closeup. Everyone was shocked. This wasn’t in the script.”

  It was a punishment for speaking out of turn, Wu said.

  Hers was only a bit part and “someone who is so low-class didn’t have the right to ask a question,” she said. “For the rest of the shoot everyone was stunned.”

  Then an odd thing happened. Wu, 36, noticed that the crew began shunning her.

  “They had to choose which side they were going to be on I guess, and nobody wants to get fired,” she said.

  “So they started bullying me too. After that experience I went home and for two weeks I had flashbacks of being slapped in the face,” Wu said.

  “I had nightmares and the director’s voice was in my head all the time. I would experience this humiliation over and over again. I would open the fridge to get something, but I wasn’t there. I was on the set getting slapped. I wanted to cry all the time,” she said.

  “She had a kind of PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder],” said the film’s Myanmar-born director Chao Te-yin (趙德胤), better known as Midi Z, with whom Wu has worked on the acclaimed Ice Poison and The Road to Mandalay.

  “What happened to me was not very serious,” the actress added, but it got her thinking: “What would women or men who suffer really bad things go through?”

  The specter of Harvey Weinstein hangs heavily over the film, the story of a failing actress so desperate to grab her one chance of fame that she is prepared to put herself through anything.

  Wu, who began as a hip-hop dancer and endured “some crazy years” before her own career took off, started writing the film after the Hollywood mogul’s fall.

  As scandal after scandal broke in Hollywood, South Korea and Japan, “I kept wondering what happened in those rooms. I was so shocked and curious,” she said.

  One of Taiwan’s most acclaimed directors, Chang Tso-chi (張作驥), was already behind bars for raping a scriptwriter, and in February, another major industry player, actor-director Doze Niu (鈕承澤), was charged with sexual assault.

  However, it was the appalling cases of a series of South Korean actress that really haunted Wu. In particular that of Jang Ja-yeon, whose suicide in 2009 after she was abused by the head of her studio was initially covered up.

  What chilled Wu was that some actresses were attempting suicide 10 years or more after being abused.

  “You would think that surely when the thing is finished that would be it, but no, it went on tormenting them for all those years — that’s the thing with PTSD — and that’s what made them decide to kill themselves such a long time after,” she said.

  Chao said Asia’s film industry is probably no better or worse in terms of abuse than anywhere else.

  “People tend to be polite,” yet if something did happen, there is not much of a culture of speaking out, he said.

  “This is not based on anybody — it is a fiction, a drama — but the feelings are real,” he said. “I wanted the audience to be right in the character’s head and to feel what she does, all the subtle sounds like the [film producer’s] boiling kettle that stick in people’s heads.”

  “If that freaks people out, then I’m happy,” he added.
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