Wu Mi-sen (吳米森) stumbled into the world of filmmaking as an escape. Having given up painting as a child because he didn't enjoy its competitive aspect, the filmmaker - one of Taiwan's most avant-garde - grew into an angry young man. Six years of studying at the School of Visual Arts in New York and City University of New York opened him to new perspectives and sources of inspiration, including classmates exiled from South America and roommates who were poor but happy artists content with their work.
A party hosted by Beat poet Allen Ginsberg inspired the director's award-winning graduation film Van Gogh's Ear, an experimental short featuring the maestro talking about his creations, death and immortality.
After that early success, he returned to Taiwan in 1995 and took a job making TV commercials and music videos. Languishing in artistic frustration, a wake-up call came in 1997 when Wu reached 30 and thought his life would end. Anxiety prompted him to visit Japan, the director's spiritual motherland.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF SPOT
Wu used images and sounds taken from the trip to create the experimental piece Ko-raku-en (後樂園). "It is so simple and pure. ... It's just that when you don't care that much, it's purity," said Wu, who feels that any form of art is an expression of thinking and an extension of liberty and freedom.
Fluffy Rhapsody (起毛球了) was the director's first feature to capture the attention of art-house moviegoers and film critics with archetypes of what were to become his signature elements: insomnious brooders wandering through a fragmented reality and poetic images and sounds that delve beneath the crusts of reality and identity.
Starring Japanese actor Shinji Takeda and Taiwanese model-actress Kuan Ying (關穎), Wu's second feature, Drop Me a Cat (給我一隻貓), is a resonant story about a group of young people idling their lives away with their improbable left-wing study group.
"The film starts with just a simple question: Where does the rebellious spirit go?" said the 40-year-old director. "During the course of life, we are trampled, denied and have to ask what youth, spiritually not corporally, means."
Between features, Wu has expanded his repertoire of documentary films, most commissioned by the Public Television Service. Seeing no difference in essence between the fictional and the nonfictional, Wu breaks the format of local documentary-making by capturing the reality of life through fiction. His most documentary-like work Experimental Taiwanese (月球學園) is an exploration of nostalgia that vacillates between the imagined and the real through the stories of two Chinese Nationalist Party veterans, one of whom claims that he was China's number one spy, the other determined to learn Taiwanese to sing pop ballads.
Wu's recurrent motifs of reality and identity are the philosophical derivations of the director's constant questioning of the self.
"I've always been confused … about who I am. I look at myself in the mirror and talk to him, but where is the self? I can't say it doesn't exist, but it's elusive, … defined by one's consuming behaviors and social status," Wu said.
Amour-Legende (松鼠自殺事件), his newest film, is an elusive love story that stars Japanese pop idol Yowusuke Kubozuka and takes a more commercial approach to filmmaking.
Formerly noted for his mesmerizing use of music and sound, Wu chose to keep the film's musical elements to a minimum to concentrate on the characters' emotions.
Ironically, the reason for Wu's choice lies in the film's attempt to reach a wider audience. The director believes artists should take a more discreet approach to their work if they want to appeal to the mainstream, which means not using music to indicate how moviegoers should feel, not exploiting their feelings nor underestimating their intelligence.
"Whoever says that the audience can't understand is a liar ... . It's the capitalistic division of labor that tells us to leave the thinking to artists ... . The elite echelons of society control and format our ways of thinking. They have a better grasp of abstract language than ordinary people, and that's all," Wu said.
Because Wu insists in having complete control over his work, he had a hard time finding backing from investors and distributors for this project. What Wu thought would be an easy film turned into a four-year endeavor that left him in debt and served as a hard-learned lesson, which he feels affirmed his belief that although people think they are free, the opposite is true.
Except for a few film festivals in the US and Hong Kong, both international and national film festivals haven't embraced Amour-Legende as it's a mainstream film mixed with art-house elements. This unfamiliar combination confuses and alienates the average cinemagoer, Wu said.
"A couple of European curators told me that they like the film a lot but just don't know where to put it since it doesn't look like a Taiwanese movie. It's alarmingly frightening to learn that the look of Taiwan and its cinema is predetermined," Wu said.
For his next project, The End of the War (戰爭終了), a story adapted from a sci-fi novel by Taiwanese author Chih Ta-wei (紀大偉) that has been ready for shooting since 1999, Wu said he has come up with a new approach to filming.
The plan is simple: He will start shooting when there is money, time and a crew, and take a break when resources dry up.
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