By Brian Hu
Golden Horse-winning director Tom Lin Shu-yu talks to Asia Pacific Arts about turning high school memories into his acclaimed first feature Winds of September.
When Tom Lin Shu-yu made his way to the front of the auditorium after a screening of Winds of September at the 2008 Pusan International Film Festival, the audience had two things in mind: one, that they'd seen a fantastic film, and two, that it was directed by somebody so young. Actually, Lin wasn't as young as the audience may have thought (he's 33), but with his youthful features and jovial grin, you couldn't blame the Pusan crowd for being especially impressed. That's because the festival circuit has its share of jaded artists beat-up by the system, the commitments, or their own fixations. Lin gives off none of that, revealing only an energy and optimism about his work.
The content of Winds of September could surely lead with a more narcissistic, anguished direction for its makers. The film is about the oft-harsh realities of growing up in Taiwan in the 1990s, an era Lin bookends with images of baseball: initially the source of ecstatic joy, and finally the setting of a series of scandals which marks a generation's coming-of-age.
Lin is among a number of new directors heralded in 2008 as being one of the "future of Taiwanese cinema." (I did a bit of this in my year-end recap here.) But Lin differs from his peers in terms of his vision: Winds of September has a scope and a depth that other new films are not so interested in creating. The film has nine main characters while others have three of four. It reflects gently on the passing of time, whereas most indulge in the excesses of now.
But then Lin is no ordinary Taiwanese filmmaker. He grew up in Minnesota, then moved to Taiwan for junior and senior high at an experimental bilingual school in the northern city of Hsinchu. After college in Taiwan, he returned to the States to get an MFA from CalArts in Southern California. His thesis film, The Pain of Others, was nominated for a Golden Horse Award in Taiwan in 2005.
Lin is bicultural, yes, but as with the mixed-race characters in Winds of September, it doesn't make him any less Taiwanese in the eyes of the local audiences which embraced his feature debut as a chronicle of Taiwan in the late 1990s. Lin epitomizes the new transnational Taiwanese: his English sounds exactly like any American's, yet he often finds himself scrambling to find the right words to express himself because he thinks as much in Chinese as in English. He provides a perspective to Taiwanese cinema that it hasn't seen in some time: open-minded yet personal, honest yet flexible. And of course, experienced yet youthful.
Interview with Tom Lin Shu-yu
April 28, 2009
Taipei, Taiwan
Asia Pacific Arts: Did CalArts affect the way you conceive of film?
Tom Lin Shu-yu: It did. It didn't affect your work per se, in that it would affect how your work would look. But it affects how you think about a certain project and what you bring into it. I remember very vividly, walking into Thom Andersen's office, giving him my graduate thesis film proposal. I asked him what he thought about it. Thom told me to go somewhere else as he read it for about half an hour. The only comment that he gave when giving my script back was, "Your script is not honest." And that's all he said. It took me a while to figure out what he was talking about when he said that I wasn't honest with myself as a filmmaker. "You're not being honest to yourself as a creator, and you're not being honest to your characters -- their dialogue and their speech." What he was saying was that my script was too gimmicky, and it didn't fit what I wanted to say. Not that gimmick is not good; that's not where Thom Andersen is coming from. For what I'm trying to do, it was not the way to go.
APA: Did you think about this advice while making Winds of September?
TL: Yeah, it still affects me to the day: why I'm writing something, what's in it for me. Why do I feel the need to tell this story, and if I don't feel the need to tell the story, then why I am still working on it? A lot of these things come into play when I'm working, even when I'm doing music videos. Even when I'm working for money, it affects me.
APA: So what were your motivations and your personal investment in making Winds of September?
TL: Well, when I started writing, it started out not as a script, but as a diary. I wasn't planning on making it a film at first. You have lots of different projects and ideas. For this one, I wasn't sure if I really wanted to tell it, but I wanted to write it down before I forgot all about it. So it started out as a diary -- what happened in those years of high school. Bits and pieces of scenes: the swimming pool scene, the motorcycle incident, the stolen motorcycle, the girls -- snippets of real life.
And then I started to have the desire to go back home and shoot a movie -- any movie. So it was these two things combined that made me want to make a coming-of-age movie in my hometown, since nobody shoots anything in Hsinchu anyway. A lot of it was very rational thinking too. Since nobody shoots in the city, it might be easier for me to get help in the city, location-wise, since I still have a lot of relatives there who can help me. Taipei is so overexposed. Nobody really welcomes a film crew. If there are big stars, they'll look at the stars. Otherwise, they look at film people as reporters or journalists: "Get away from us!" I figure if I went to my hometown, I could get the support of my city to make this movie. So financially, we were thinking in those terms too. But the main reason was that I wanted to go to Hsinchu and make a movie, and the subject would be my coming-of-age story.
APA: So this diary was made of things that actually happened to you?
TL: Yes, they all happened to me. There were some scenes we cut out because they simply cost too much. It was a series of different little events. After I had all the events, I tried to piece them together into a narrative. And so I had to start creating characters. Not all of the characters were 100% my friends, but they were all based on certain people. But say, for the role of Ah Hsin -- he was two of my friends combined.
APA: Was it difficult to recreate the years 1996 and 1997?
TL: Yes it was. It wasn't, as far as props go, because most of our crew were people my age -- the art director is my age, the DP is only two years older than me, the other screenwriter is only a couple of years younger than me. We all sort of grew up in the same phase. So all we had to do was go home and find all of the props: the comic books, the baseball stuff. It was the streets that were hard. It wasn't Lust, Caution -- I couldn't build a set. And I didn't have computers that could wipe out billboards. It was hard to actually shoot on streets. But we were aware of that while writing the scripts, so we made sure that when we were outside, it would be for night scenes. In a way, it fits, because when you're a student, your days are spent at school. And in the streets, we wouldn't use deep focus so the back would be a little blurry. At first I was thinking that Hsinchu isn't like Taipei, in that things change a lot every couple of years. There must be places that look the same. But once we started doing location scouting, I found that I couldn't shoot in many of the locations I wanted.
APA: Was the film shot in your old high school?
TL: No it wasn't. We wanted to. At first, we called the school, and the school welcomed us to go back. But after I took my DP and art director to the school, they started having second thoughts because it just doesn't look like a Taiwanese high school. It's a high school that was built in the Hsinchu Science Park, and it was built as part of the Science Park project. The school is called the National Experimental High School (Shiyan Zhongxue). The actual campus looks like a college, and the rooms don't look like high school homerooms or anything like that. It was a really bizarre campus structure, and my art director and cinematographer said to reconsider shooting there. It just wouldn't look like a high school, and Taiwanese audiences can't really get into the story. "Where is this place? Is it a high school?"
APA: Was it difficult for you to lose these personal details?
TL: At first it was, yeah. I struggled for about two to three weeks before I made the decision to use another high school, because when I wrote the script, I wasn't thinking of any high school except my own. Location-wise, and with certain scenes, it would work in my high school, but not in other high schools. The high school that we actually picked didn't even have a pool so I had to find another pool. So it took me quite a while to be able to let go and face the fact that this is actually going to be shown in theaters and there's going to be pressure on the financiers.
APA: Are there other things like that you wanted from your memory, but were difficult to let go?
TL: It was mostly locations. With the story, I knew that it was going to have to become something else. Because when I was writing, I knew things would be altered, not only because of the narrative, but also because of the actors that were going to be playing the characters. I made an effort not to let the actors meet my actual friends [who they were based on]. I didn't want them to meet, because I didn't want the actors to start mimicking actual people, because they're not that great of actors. They're not actors; they're amateurs who never acted before. And I didn't want them to start thinking about the director's friends and being this or that. So once rehearsal started, we really focused on this group of kids. When the film was finished, it was not just about my growing up, it became a part of these kids' lives. They really became friends during the shoot and even before, during rehearsals.
APA: Did you find that it was difficult for high school-aged actors today to depict high school students from ten years ago? Obviously people dress differently and have different hairstyles, but are there also temperamental differences in the generations that they had to adjust to, or that you had to direct?
TL: From what I saw, there weren't that many differences in their attitude. For me, teenagers and teenagers. When I saw these kids, it reminded me of my high school. But language was a difference. There is a lot of slang and slurs and ways people talk now that we didn't before, and we were very careful about that. Throughout the three months of acting training, there were certain words that I didn't let them use, even in real life. When we were training, if you used those words, you would get fined money. So little by little, they started throwing those words out of their vocabulary.
But the one thing that was very different was the pace: the pace of their reactions, the pace of people's interactions. It was slower back then. So we actually had to slow them down. And it wasn't that hard because we got them to go to Hsinchu a week prior to the shoot and they started living there. Before, we'd go take trips, where they had to really become the characters from that day and age, at that school and that town. Even locations that aren't in the script, we'd take them there. I took them on a three-day tour of Hsinchu because they would be portraying kids from Hsinchu, and if you're from there you'd know these places. These are the places you'd hang out all the time: the places that were popular, the places people went to make out -- stuff like that.
I would take the kids and actually get them into the reality of the school itself. After we found our ideal homeroom and the actual seats they would sit in, I had them sit there for half an hour doing nothing. That's the seat that takes up three years of your high school. This is where your character sits. This is the angle from which he sees the world and the classroom for three years. So it's not too much to ask for them to sit there for half an hour. I did that with all of the characters. They're not actors, so we had to find other ways to get them to be the characters.
APA: Watching the film, you'd never guess that they weren't actors. Where did you find your principal cast?
TL: Some of them I found through casting agencies. Some had done commercials before because they're pretty faces people found on the streets. Only one had acting experience -- [Chang Chieh], the actor who played Hsiao Tang. I met him when Tsai Ming-liang and Lee Kang-sheng did My Stinking Kid for public television. He was the stinking kid. I used to AD for Tsai Ming-liang, and after, I'd still go visit him on the set, so that's where I met him. Everybody else was from commercials or nothing.
APA: So what were you looking for when casting these non-professional actors?
TL: I was looking for their own charisma. Of course I was typecasting a little bit, because I wanted them to be close to the characters that I wrote, and for them to be able to say these lines or take out a bat and beat up another kid. But mostly I was looking for: 1) chemistry, and 2) charisma. Charisma in that I'd be able to keep looking at this person and this face on the screen. Chemistry in that I wanted a group of kids, not just individual kids. We had a very very tough time trying to find the ensembles. Finding the individual kids wasn't that hard because there were several actors who fit each character. There was another actor who was very good for Hsiao Tang, but putting him with Ah Yen just didn't feel right. They could never be friends, and you feel that. We were at National Taiwan University, and we spent two entire days doing this. We had about 80-100 candidates and we spent two days fitting them in different groups. We had them line up in groups of nine kids and one person would sit down, another go up, while we tried to find the right chemistry.
APA: You mentioned that you want to be able to look at these characters. They're all very attractive actors. Was that a case of realism in that cool kids tend to be good-looking and hang out together, or was it mostly to give audiences something pleasurable to look at?
TL: It was mainly for the audience. I also was aware that I couldn't have everybody look good. Some people had to be character actors. Chao Ren and even Hsiao Tang aren't that good looking; they're more like next-door-neighbor kids. But for the girls, there were only two roles, so figured why not get nice looking girls. [laughs]
APA: At what point in the process did you know you wanted to have a mixed-race character?
TL: The mixed race character was based off the actor. The script was written for a very Taiwanese tai-ke. Rhydian Vaughn, the actor who ultimately played Ah Yen, just has this weird kind of attractiveness. Not just good looks, but him being an actor or him just being a person gives off a weird vibe. A weird vibe that makes me believe that everybody else looks up to him. He had this thing that other people didn't have. And then we did interviews and started to learn about his past, and you can start to see where that came from. His dad's a musician; his mom's in theater. They didn't have a TV, so he didn't grow up watching television like the other kids. When he was four or five years old, he told his mom he wanted to learn Shaolin Kung Fu, so she sent him over to the Shaolin Temple for two years. He's this very odd kid.
It was because he was such a charismatic person that I was willing to change the script for him. In my original script, the Ah Yen character just had to be a charismatic, good-looking kid, so it doesn't hurt that he's Eurasian. At the same time, it works because back in the 80s, people looked up to Eurasians and Americans and Western influences. We grew up with Western influences all over, so I figured why not. But the other screenwriter really fought hard for me not to.
APA: Aside from the fact that the character has a white mother and a Cantonese-accented father (played by Eric Tseng), what other kinds of modifications did you make in light of his mixed race?
TL: We started making modifications in his speech and his mannerisms in taking care of the gang. The Ah Yen that we originally wrote was more of a bully who was in control all of the time. But with Rhydian, we didn't see that. But he had his own charisma. It wouldn't be him to force himself to be the leader. The kids would just naturally follow him. I think we added a certain bit of narcissism that wasn't there before in the script. He loves himself so much, and everyone else loves him too. He became more gentle, but he also became more reflexive. He would actually think about the bad shit that he'd been doing, which wasn't originally in the script.
APA: He has a great way of smiling all the time that lets you know he's up to no good, but at the same time makes everything okay. Was that the actor's smile, or was that your direction?
TL: That was Rhydian's thing, which we really liked. And which was why I wanted to change the script for him.
APA: There's another mixed race actor, the actress who plays Pei Pei. But you chose to not let her race become an issue in the film.
TL: Yeah that never becomes an issue in the film. The other screenwriter, Henry, really liked this actress. She did some acting in a television thing that Henry worked on as a screenwriter, so he knew her as an amateur actress. So he actually wrote the character with her in mind. He didn't tell me. So he told me I had to use this actress, but I thought "I already have a Eurasian in the film! How could I use two?" And I didn't want to go into her whole family background and stuff like that. Of course, Henry was fighting to get Rhydian off because Rhydian wasn't how we originally wrote the character. So it was sort of a compromise for me and the writer -- to allow me to change the script for Rhydian. But the Pei Pei actress' actual characteristics fit the role of the character. She looks a bit Eurasian, but still a little bit not, so I figured it might not be a problem, and we decided to use her.
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Published: Friday, May 1, 2009