Going it Alone Independent Filmmaker Huang Ming-chuan

After completing his third film, Flat Tire, Huang Ming-chuan was profiled in the press under the heading "A Don Quixote in Love with the Art of Film," and described as a man in the mold of Cervantes' creation-a crazy romantic dreamer who tilts at windmills and can't separate fantasy from reality.

In person, however, Huang-a rationally-minded former law student-is nothing like the impractical idealist portrayed in the media.

Huang likes to draw an analogy with Columbus' discovery of the New World: "He had guts, otherwise he never would have set out on his voyage of discovery." When Columbus began his explorations, five centuries ago, he and his crew of convicts had little more to go on than an incomplete chart and the trust of the Spanish queen. After several months at sea the sailors were close to mutiny, and Columbus could have been killed if not for the fortuitous sighting of land. "If you want to make discoveries you've got to be ready to take risks, to live on the edge," stresses Huang.

Voyage of discovery

How did this graduate of National Taiwan University's college of law get into filmmaking?

Huang, who is 45 years old, admits that he came to cinema by a circuitous route. It was during his third year at the top law school in the land that he realized he wasn't interested in a legal career. He kept up his studies, as his parents desired, but his heart wasn't in it. During his spare time he began to learn oil painting, printmaking and woodcarving. His ambition on graduating was to study painting in the US and become an artist.

That was in 1978, when the NT$/US$ exchange rate was still around 40:1. Huang went to New York, checked out the city's art galleries, and realized it was "motion pictures" that he really liked. He began to spend all his free time at the cinema, and saw numerous films from Eastern Europe, Latin America and Japan. After a year he moved to Los Angeles, to study photography and benefit from the lower living costs and school fees. Later he returned to New York and got a job as a photographer's assistant.

Huang explains that he moved back to the East Coast because, in his words: "Los Angeles is one of the most boring places on Earth, where you can't see any good dance groups, bands or artists." Also, it was easier for him to make a living as a photographer in New York-despite the many professionals already working there-such was the demand for pictures from the advertising industry in the United States' capital of art. After three years Huang opened his own studio. During this period he also published short stories in literary magazines in Taiwan, and returned to the island briefly for an exhibition of his photographs and paintings.

In 1988, after three years as a commercial photographer in New York, Huang was fed up with the routine of his job and the monotony of his life. He decided to uproot himself again and move back to Taiwan. Initially the idea was to come back and take it easy for a year or two, giving him time to familiarize himself with Taiwan after ten years away. But then, through a friend's introduction, he found himself filming documentaries about truck drivers, coroners and miners for a Broadcasting Development Fund series about people in various lines of work.

"The reason betel nut is so popular in Taiwan is that people's lives are so stressed," says Huang. Making these documentaries gave him an insight into the real lives of people on the lower rungs of Taiwan society. Take truckers for example. It takes about a day to drive from the South of Taiwan to the North, and Huang's program included a vivid sequence with one driver throttling up the freeway through the night, hurrying to deliver a cargo of pigs to market in Taipei County by 3 a.m., with his partner spraying water on the pigs in the back to prevent them from over-heating.

Filming for the program on miners led Huang to an even more surprising discovery, and started him on the road to independent film production. He originally intended to film coal miners, but all pits in Taiwan were under inspection at the time following a series of mining accidents. Instead, Huang turned his attention to quarry-workers in Hualien, and it was making this program that introduced him to the beauties of Taiwan's eastern seaboard, with its lush green expanses. He was drawn by the linguistic cocktail of Mandarin, Taiwanese and aboriginal tongues spoken in the region, as well as by the warmth of the people and the texture of their skin. Huang sensed an element of theater in all this, and was thus inspired to write the script for his first film, The Man from Island West.

Wanting to film

The Man from Island West is the story of Ah Ming, a sinicized Atayal who returns to the village on the East Coast where he grew up, searching for personal identity. Weighed down by the disappointments of city life, he means to kill himself by driving over a cliff, but an old Atayal saves him and puts him up in a chicken shack by the river. The old Atayal and his son, Ah Chiang, both work at a quarry. Ah Chiang is desperate to get away and envisions a successful life for himself in Taipei, but his father is against him leaving.

With its depiction of the contemporary plight of people caught between the conflicting urges to "go back" and to "flee," The Man from Island West was nominated for best picture, best supporting actress and best cinematography at the 27th Golden Horse Awards, and was commended as an Outstanding Film in the 1990 China Times Express awards. Critic and jury-member Huang Chien-yeh says: "The film commands respect for its spirit of nativist concern, and for the courage and sincerity that it conveys as an independent production." But others criticized The Man from Island West for being too alienating, and for bringing the angst-ridden perspective of an intellectual to the subject of the gulf between the cultures of the mountains and the plains.

The Man from Island West attracted interest for its cinematographic celebration of the lushly wooded scenery of eastern Taiwan. But the fact that the film was written, directed and shot by Huang Ming-chuan on a budget of NT$3.5 million was what really raised eyebrows, and this triggered debate within the industry about the possibilities for "independent production."

"I have no foundation in film theory," says Huang, who admits that he didn't know about the concept of independent production at the time. One year after the film was finished it was screened in the Golden Horse International Film Festival, and as articles and reports appeared referring to the fact that Huang had made the film on a low budget and with his own crew, the term "independent production" began to be used.

Independent spirit

Chen Ju-hsiu, associate professor in film at the National Taiwan College of Arts, has researched the history of independent films. As Chen explains, Hollywood first became the template for film production in the years after World War I. Disillusioned with the Hollywood production line-characterized by a sharp division of labor and all-controlling studio bosses-a handful of filmmakers broke away to set up their own small companies, and independent production was born. In the period after World War II the auteur theory caught on in European cinema, encouraging directors to stamp their films with a personal style and aesthetic, and this basically accorded with the spirit of independent filmmaking.

However, the definition of the term gradually widened to encompass any film not funded from Hollywood, not lasting for the prescribed 90 minutes, not released through the main theater chains, and generally made outside of the mainstream commercial system. By such a definition, notes Chen Ju-hsiu, practically every film made in Taiwan today qualifies as independent.

Before The Man from Island West, non- grant-funded movies always needed investment from film companies, but filmmakers often felt that the investors interfered too much. By raising the money himself, Huang Ming-chuan was obviously able to be more "independent." Huang's approach seemed to promise a third way for movie production, and this aroused interest in the film community.

Some pointed out that Huang's method of production-featuring amateur casts, low budgets, real locations and creative freedom-had already been seen in the new wave of Taiwan cinema during the 1980s, and that The Man from Island West simply raised this approach to a peak.

Huang says that he was lucky in that when he raised the cash for his first movie, in 1989, the industry in Taiwan was in much better shape than it is today, and with the stock market on a roll there was no shortage of investors with cash to burn. He raised around NT$3.5 million from among a dozen friends, then set off for the East coast with his crew.

Huang says that with his background in writing, photography, oil painting and life drawing, he already had a grasp of the key elements of film-script, cinematography, lighting and so on-and didn't expect making a film to present him with any major difficulties. Shooting for his first film went very smoothly, and was wrapped up within 40 work-days. Many of the scenes took place outdoors, using natural daylight, which cut down on equipment needs and helped save costs. Unfortunately the film fared poorly at the box office, recouping just NT$500,000 in Taipei.

After releasing The Man from Island West Huang was sought out by advertising companies, and during the next four years he made a dozen or so TV ads for drink products. But the more he pursued this line the less it interested him, especially given that so many people, from the clients to the advertising company, wanted their say about how things should be filmed. Huang began to feel he was wasting his life.

Island dream

Taiwan was experiencing a wave of street protests at that time, and Huang felt stirred by the unpredictable mood of the times. "My brain wouldn't sleep and I had lots of weird nightmares, some of which provided material for film scripts." One such led to the film Bodo: "In a time of peace, the story of a depressed soldier who deserts."

In the summer of 1992, Huang and his team-the cast was also the production crew-crammed into a 9-seater minibus and set off to spend several weeks on location, aiming to film for as long as the money lasted. When the money finally did run out, about halfway through, shooting was suspended and they returned to Taipei. Huang's thinking was that the film could still be finished-whether they shot 20 minutes or an hour of film every year-as long as they kept at it and at least one actor remained through the whole process.

Just when it seemed that all options had been exhausted, a friend of Huang's from New York volunteered the needed capital. The friend gave Huang a contract to make five movies.

But the good times didn't last long. Bodo earned a pittance at the box office, screening at just one cinema in Taipei in 1993, and when Huang's backer wanted him to do a commercial movie to make up the losses, the collaboration came to an end. Although Bodo was nominated for best picture at that year's Golden Horse Festival, the jury was polarized. Those who admired the film said that it showed the real problems of life as a conscript, and the emotional entanglements of army life, whereas others condemned it as a substandard and unintelligible piece of cinema, with a dishearteningly disheveled-looking cast.

Documenting Taiwan

Huang didn't despair over the loss of his financial backer: "Thanks to him I was able to complete my second movie." And while his works weren't exactly packing them in at the cinemas, they had at least captured the attention of cultural organizations.

After he stopped doing commercials Huang took to filming art documentaries, which he found more spiritually satisfying, if lower in budget. This included a series of programs about writers from Taiwan, funded by Avant-Garde Publishing Company, along with the filming of installation art works for official cultural centers in Taipei, Chiayi and Tainan.

In 1997, Huang used profits from his studio plus a NT$4 million bank loan to film Flat Tire, at a total production cost of around NT$6 million.

The story centers on two documentary makers traveling around Taiwan to film the island's political and religious statuary. The main characters seem to operate on a higher moral level than most people, because they alone consider it important to make a record of these neglected bronze and stone statues, to enable the public to understand their political and social significance.

The film, which seemed to satirize the work of filmmakers like himself, won best non-commercial picture at the 1998 Taipei Film Festival, and was screened in the Tokyo Film Festival.

Despite being involved in movies for a decade, Huang says that he has little interaction with others in the business. Media reports have described Huang's work, like the director himself, as difficult to pigeonhole. But for Huang, labels like "outside the system" and "non-mainstream" mean nothing.

Huang points out that he too has credentials from "within the system," having served on festival juries in the region, including the Golden Horse Festival and the Golden Harvest Festival. He gave up sitting on film juries, however, because "it's simpler just being a competition entrant." He also put one of his scripts in for a grant, though without success. "I don't make a special point of being outside the system," he claims. "It's simply a case of not having much money, and showing that it's still possible to carry on filming. Of course this does affect the content of a film, as well as the way that the story is told."

Huang concedes that the majority of film-goers are only interested in entertainment value, but he insists that "cinema also has an artistic component."

"There is practically no such thing as a money-making film in Taiwan at the moment, and no matter how good a film is it still can't earn back its costs through box-office. That's not the fault of the directors." Huang is quite clear about who watches his films: "My audiences are not children, and they're not college students wandering around the cinema district after class. They're people with experience and understanding, familiar with the ways of the world. They also tend to be busy, and may rarely make it out to the cinema."

Relying on creativity

With fewer and fewer films being made in Taiwan, is there scope for a new generation of filmmakers to follow in Huang Ming-chuan's tracks, raising the finance for low-budget works of their own?

"At least you can feel that making a film is not something beyond your reach," says Huang, who never took film classes and didn't shoot his first movie until the age of 34. "There'll always be a few people who dream about making their own films."

Shen Ko-shang, who graduated in 1999 from the film department of the National College of Arts, volunteered to help out on the production of Flat Tire, having come to know Huang after inviting him to the college to present a screening of his works. Shen feels that while the courses he took were strong on film theory, teaching students how to dissect the creative process and the use of various shots, they had less to offer in terms of practical application. For Shen, working with Huang was a direct education in how to make films in the difficult conditions that prevail in Taiwan.

Shen's analogy is that while Hollywood movie-making is like drawing with a good pen, independent productions make do with a pencil or a ballpoint, and emphasize content rather than financial resources or equipment. Shen says that provided you're not tied down by the requirement to first raise a certain amount of money, it's not that difficult to make a film in Taiwan, and he points out that virtually all 30-minute shorts in Taiwan are now made by independents. Shen himself has already made a 30-minute movie called With Mountains, for NT$450,000 and using a crew of seven, which won the best picture prize in the independent production category of the 2nd Taipei Film Festival.

Huang Ming-chuan's team is perpetually changing, with new members joining for each project. "I don't exclude those without experience. There's a lot of job-hopping among the young these days, and you can't keep the same people with you for ten years in the way that filmmakers used to."

Huang's legal training is reflected in his rational approach to team organization, and he gives careful thought to everyone's role before the start of shooting. Filmmaking actually involves a lot of administrative work, quite unrelated to cinema itself, such as planning itineraries and making arrangements for board and lodging on location. Huang also doubles up responsibilities, such that the continuity person might also be in charge of wardrobe. He rarely uses lighting crews, because they generally require at least three people, and because lighting is one of the most expensive and time-consuming elements of the filmmaking process. "So long as you're ready in the right place at the right time, you can get a better effect from natural sunlight than anything that 100,000 watts can do."

According to Huang, independent production is all about "action"-doing everything you have to for a project, from script-writing to raising money, scouting locations, finding actors, gathering a production crew and drawing up a filming schedule.

Seeing the world through celluloid

Huang's rational approach to filmmaking is reflected in his unsentimental attitude to the business. "My films have been acclaimed and they have been trashed, but none of them have yet paved the way for me to work on the next film. It's like starting from scratch each time around, so I'm lucky to have got as far as three films. Maybe there's nothing to show for life in the end-but at least I've got these three films."

As Huang says: "When you're poor, you've got to be creative to succeed. For a poor director, what matters is whether or not you can put the maximum amount of energy into your films."

For several years now the pattern of Huang's life has been to wrap up work on a movie, and then strive to sell it while thinking about his next script and taking on new projects. Getting back to Columbus, Huang points out: "Columbus didn't get wealthy from discovering the New World, but it was because there was no way back for him that he was ultimately able to win the whole continent."

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Huang Ming-chuan, who studied law before he began making movies, has come to be seen as the standard-bearer for independent films in Taiwan. Flat Tire, which he completed two years ago, tells the story of a pair of documentary makers traveling around Taiwan to film the island's religious and political statuary. (photo by Pu Hua-chih)

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Through painting, writing and photography, Huang trained himself to become a filmmaker. The picture shows a photographic work of his, "Trouble and Anticipation" (1986), in which he applies techniques from sculpture and painting.

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Completed in 1989, Huang's first film, The Man From Island West, is about aborigine youths stranded in limbo between their rural birthplace and the big city. The picture shows Huang with cast members.

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Bodo, Huang's 1992 film about army desertion and the emotional pressures of conscript life in peacetime.

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(facing page) Huang: "If you want to discover anything new, you have to take risks and to live on the edge." During a decade or so of making films, Huang has supported himself doing documentaries, while raising finance for his independent films. (photo by Pu Hua-chih)

Huang Ming-chuan, who studied law before he began making movies, has come to be seen as the standard-bearer for independent films in Taiwan. Flat Tire, which he completed two years ago, tells the story of a pair of documentary makers traveling around Taiwan to film the island's religious and political statuary. （photo by Pu Hua-chih）

Through painting, writing and photography, Huang trained himself to become a filmmaker. The picture shows a photographic work of his, "Trouble and Anticipation" （1986）, in which he applies techniques from sculpture and painting.

Completed in 1989, Huang's first film, The Man From Island West, is about aborigine youths stranded in limbo between their rural birthplace and the big city. The picture shows Huang with cast members.

Bodo, Huang's 1992 film about army desertion and the emotional pressures of conscript life in peacetime.

（facing page） Huang: "If you want to discover anything new, you have to take risks and to live on the edge." During a decade or so of making films, Huang has supported himself doing documentaries, while raising finance for his independent films. （photo by Pu Hua-chih）