Hou Hsiao-hsien
BY
Michel Ciment and Hubert Niogret
A new restoration of Millenium Mambo, released by Metrograph Pictures, premieres December 23 exclusively in theater at 7 Ludlow and streaming on Metrograph At Home.
This interview with the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien took place at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, where his then-new film Millennium Mambo had just premiered. The conversation was conducted by Michel Ciment and Hubert Niogret for the French magazine Positif. On the occasion of the film’s stunning 4K restoration and re-release this December, their coversation has been translated into English for the first time, for Metrograph, by Mélanie Scheiner.
MICHEL CIMENT & HUBERT NIOGRET: Like Flowers of Shanghai (1998), and unlike your earlier films, Millennium Mambo (2001) is shot in confined spaces where you are in very close proximity to your characters. Does this reflect a new phase in your work?
HOU HSIAO-HSIEN: I did, as a matter of fact, want to change the distance that I establish in relation to my characters. It’s a new way of working that I will hold on to for a while. Another reason is undoubtedly linked to the choice of subject. To film today’s youth with its sudden outbursts of feelings before it calms back down, with the rapid evolution of affects and the repetitive nature of tension and release, it seemed to me that I had to work as if with a magnifying glass, to maximize everything. I had to be closer to them to try to tease out the details of their emotions, to seize the expressions of their faces. I’m in a period where I am fumbling in search of an “ideal” form to render what young people are today. It was only at the moment of editing that I realized how different this work was from what I had known until now, that it was very complex and that it would take me time to figure it out on every level.
MC & HN: You’ve already depicted the subject of adolescence in a contemporary framework in the 1980s, with films like The Boys from Fengkuei (1983) or Dust in the Wind (1986), or even more recently with Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996) which takes place in the country, as opposed to Millennium Mambo.
HHH: In these past few years, Taiwan has undergone significant and rapid changes, with a tendency toward the reorganization and simplification of everything. The countryside is quickly urbanizing, and the development of the means of communication has modified every aspect of Taiwanese society. It is also necessary to take into account a political structure where an old nationalist party has been succeeded by a party which seeks to renew itself. We’ve seen the implementation of local forces who seek to turn the page on Kuomintang. The emergence of personal interests at a local level has resulted in the current economic situation in Taiwan, which is very precarious. Faced with all of this, the youth react instinctively, in a very direct manner. Those films are at a greater and greater distance from a traditional Chinese education. Fifteen years ago, when I was making the films you’ve mentioned, I was inspired by my personal experience and those of the people from my generation. I’ve gotten to know the youth that I film today over the past three years by immersing myself in their milieu. Today it’s common to see young people kill their parents for a yes or a no, or undertake actions that would seem inexplicable to other generations who grew up on Confucianism. The former government itself used to reflect traditional forms stemming from religion, whereas today, politicians more closely resemble television show hosts. Older people are conscious of what they’re seeing, but political spectacle has great influence on these young people, and they all want to become stars of the small screen. And, unfortunately, those who are the most successful are, from our point of view, the dullest.
Millennium Mambo (2001)
In these past few years, Taiwan has undergone significant and rapid changes, with a tendency toward the reorganization and simplification of everything. The countryside is quickly urbanizing, and the development of the means of communication has modified every aspect of Taiwanese society.
MC & HN: In Millennium Mambo, there are basically only two locations, the nightclub and the couple’s apartment, which is a big shift for you. Furthermore, it’s a nocturnal and closed universe.
HHH: With Flowers of Shanghai I had already explored confined spaces. When I would visit these young people, I realized that they only began living after midnight and that they slept all day. I often compared them to bats that emerge from their holes at nightfall. When we started writing the script we thought of Flowers of Shanghai, although the time and space are different, because of this confinement and compartmentalization, as well as the desperation of the characters. We even had an image to translate our feelings: a tunnel in absolute darkness with a ring of light at the end of it.
MC & HN: How did you work with your regular cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-bing concerning both the choice of lenses and the lighting difficulties imposed by your new approach?
HHH: Since we were filming, particularly in this discotheque during opening hours, we were forced to work according to the space. Everything was in its original setting, and we didn’t want to recreate a disco ambiance. So there was a lot of neon, black light, and the contribution we made, from an artistic point of view, was to use a lot of plastic since this gave really interesting reflections and a certain richness in terms of the color. Because of this particularity, we chose long lenses, a 135, an 85, so that we could film close-ups in front of very direct lighting that would have otherwise created spots of light. We were able to normally shoot our film as the activity of the nightclub unfolded thanks to the particularity of Taiwanese people: when I’d start shooting a scene, the people at the neighboring table continued their conversations with the utmost indifference, they kept living their life as if nothing was happening at all! The actors were able to immerse themselves faster in this natural ambiance find the right tone. In a studio, I sometimes have to do endless takes for them to get into character and into their universe [of the film]. I noticed this especially while shooting Flowers of Shanghai where I had to restart certain shots three or four times to get a satisfying take.
Millennium Mambo (2001)
MC & HN: It seems like you don’t have any written dialogue. How was your collaboration with your screenwriter Chu Tʻien-wen, and what were the stages of the script’s development?
HHH: I had many discussions with Chu Tʻien-wen, as I normally do. Usually, I have an idea in mind, and I discuss it with her. We put a scenario down on paper where the scenes were structured like paragraphs in a novel. There was information on the atmosphere, the environment, and certain actions to guide the actors. It was sufficient for them to read these indications, but indeed, no lines of dialogue were written, and it was the actors who invented their text on set. In my previous films, I also didn’t write any dialogue ahead of time, but there would be indications toward the content that I would provide the actors with. This time, they didn’t even get that. They knew the what the situation was for each scene and improvised from there.
MC & HN: At what point in the film’s development did the idea arise that the story would be told in 2011 but have taken place in 2001?
HHH: We had this idea from the start. I had planned for the film to begin with a shot of Vicky standing in a convertible that was moving through the night with a huge moon in the sky as if it was following the car. I wanted to simultaneously film close-ups of the moon and the interior of the car where seven of eight young girls would be smoking hash or marijuana. But that turned out to be too difficult to film and I ultimately chose what you see today: she’s in the port of Nee-long, her native city that comprises a lot of little passages and bridges connecting one place to another. Vicky walks along a slope that resembles a tunnel.
MC & HN: Voiceover is used in a very special way, since it’s often in the commentary that the film’s dramatic moments take place, whereas the images more or less present “empty” situations.
HHH: This story about Vicky was told to me by the real Vicky since she actually exists. I was taking notes while listening to her and I always wrote in the third person because that’s how she spoke. Then I realized that it would be more interesting to keep the presence of the narrator to create a form of distance. So I filmed everything as I had written it, without unnecessarily complicating things… The form of the film determined itself and that was confirmed at the moment of editing. This allowed me to hone all the dramatic aspects of the story since the information was given by the narrator, which then allowed me to show something else. Likewise, the rhythm no longer needed to be linear or dramatic, since I was talking in past tense.
MC & HN: Why did you choose a very well-known actress from Hong Kong, Shu Qi, to play the role of Vicky?
Millennium Mambo (2001)
HHH: Shu Qi is actually Taiwanese, but she left her country for Hong Kong at 18, 19 years old. She adapted herself to my method of working: no rehearsal, no written dialogue. I think that for actors it’s a way of immersing themselves more directly in their roles; it produces a much more natural style of acting. Granted, for certain professional actors, it’s difficult to work this way since they have their habits, but most of the time, they manage. For amateurs, I think this method is much simpler since they often struggle to memorize a script by heart. Shu Qi has a certain degree of experience; Jack Kao didn’t have any before working with me. He became a professional by acting in my films. But on the other hand, when he’s working with other directors and needs to memorize his text, it often doesn’t yield great results. As for Tuan Chun-hao, this film was his debut.
MC & HN: Has your relationship with actors changed since you began working?
HHH: I don’t think I’ve changed the ways I work with them. It’s different according to each actor. With some, it’s better to put them in situations and make them react instinctively; for others, they need more information to understand the character that they need to play. I realized while shooting Flowers of Shanghai, where the actors were all professional, that it’s difficult to make them abandon their working routines. I had to spend a lot of time getting them to adopt my method, for them to be tired enough to renounce their habits and find themselves faced with themselves, as close to their emotions and feelings as possible.
MC & HN: With your method of shooting, what is the ratio between the amount of film you shoot and the amount you keep in the edit?
HHH: I used 50,000 meters of film, whereas my cinematographer, Lee Ping-bing, had shot 160,000 for In the Mood for Love. For Flowers of Shanghai, I needed 70,000, but I was doing at least three takes per shot. With the discotheque scenes in Millennium Mambo there was a lot of waste—which explains the amount of used film—since we couldn’t capture the same atmosphere from one night to another and we had to discard a lot of filmed material.
We even had an image to translate our feelings: a tunnel in absolute darkness with a ring of light at the end.
MC & HN: The Japanese part, which is also the end of the film, is very beautiful. What prompted you to choose Yubari on the island of Okinawa?
HHH: My project began by meeting two Japanese boys from the film who had Japanese and Taiwanese parents. Incidentally, seven years prior, I was part of the jury at the Yubari Festival and the city left a deep impression on me. It’s an old mining town, and when the mines closed, they became a museum. The city went from one-hundred thousand to 10,000 inhabitants. To spur activity, the mayor, among others, decided to create a film festival. There was an old restaurant kept by elderly people whose children would come to help them during the festival period. There were also tons of posters in the streets like we see in Millennium Mambo. For me, it was a bit like a city of memories, linked to the duration of time. Inserting this piece of Japan allowed me to accentuate, by contrast, the absence of memory in the youth of today, who live above all in the repetitive present, while it’s actually the accumulation of different experiences that creates memory. Initially, I wanted to divide the film into three parts: the past, the present, and the imaginary. In this framework, Japan would have represented the imaginary.
MC & HN: You’ve announced that for the next 10 years you’ll be making a series of films on contemporary Taiwan. Does that mean you’ll no longer revisit your country’s past, which is the subject of your trilogy A City of Sadness (1989), The Puppetmaster (1993), and Good Men, Good Women (1995)?
HHH: When we film the past, we have an accumulation of elements, of memories; we’re faced with a dramatic narrative. Whereas, faced with the present, it’s like standing before a hollow emptiness from which we ask ourselves what can be extracted? It’s true that now I’m turning my back on the past and am faced with a challenge. After finishing Millennium Mambo, I realized that confronting the contemporary is really very interesting, and that makes me want to continue.
This is an excerpt from an interview published in Positif, in November 2001.
Millennium Mambo (2001)
