Art Director Hwarng Wern-ying: A Labor of Love
Lee Hsiang-ting / photos Spot Films / tr. by Phil Newell
September 2015
“For me, The Assassin actually started in 1998, after Flowers of Shanghai was released….”
Hwarng Wern-ying has worked with director Hou Hsiao-hsien for 20 years, of which Hwarng spent 12 planning and preparing for The Assassin. The sense of realism that comes through inside the frame comes from Hwarng’s research and commitment to aesthetic style outside the frame. She has outstanding talent, and US director Martin Scorsese even asked for Hwarng by name when he came to film in Taiwan. But she is also a low-profile person. In fact, you could say she is a little bit like the assassin in the movie: she doesn’t draw attention to herself, but when she goes to work, she’s got you before you even realize she’s made a move.
Hwarng Wern-ying has served as art director for Hou Hsiao-hsien films since 1994, including Good Men, Good Women (which won “best art direction” at the 1996 Asia–Pacific Film Festival); Goodbye South, Goodbye; Flowers of Shanghai (which won “best art design” at the 1998 Golden Horse Awards and at the Asia–Pacific Film Festival); and many others, culminating in 2015’s The Assassin.
Most people would assume that anyone able to keep up with Hou Hsiao-hsien’s perfectionism about film aesthetics and follow him as he conquers one international film festival after another would have to be a formidable person indeed, someone with a powerful persona. Otherwise, how could they satisfy Hou’s aesthetic standards?
But when you meet Hwarng in person, she is polite and friendly, and speaks softly. She talks as if it is no big deal to spend 12 years designing one film: “The Assassin is like an old friend who has been by my side for a long time.” Though she does admit, “As far as one individual’s design career goes, 12 years is a little bit long!”
Nothing less than perfect
Hwarng Wern-ying says that because the script for The Assassin went through 37 revisions, and she had 17 different versions on her hard drive, by the end it wasn’t even worth the effort to read them, because the more she read, the less she was able to keep on working. She reveals, “Director Hou often changes things that you had already done right there on the set, which can be a real blow to your self-esteem. It’s been so many years now—Hou’s team members have all been working with him for ten or 20 years, and he has trained them to the highest standards. If they mess up, they will know it themselves, and take themselves far, far away out of shame.”
“As for why I work with Director Hou, I can say with pride that I chose him myself.” It’s ironic, then, to hear that Hwarng’s first encounter with Hou was literally terrifying. When she was small, she saw the film Taohua Nü Dou Zhou Gong (“Peach Blossom Maiden Fights Zhou Gong”), for which Hou wrote the screenplay, and the whole atmosphere of the movie was so spooky that she had nightmares.
After graduating from university in Taiwan, Hwarng got an MA in theater at the University of Pittsburgh and then an MFA at Carnegie Mellon University. She never failed to see each Hou Hsiao-hsien release, which at that time meant everything up to and including The Puppetmaster (1993). While doing theater design in New York in the early 1990s, because she admired Hou’s work so much she wrote him a letter recommending herself, to try to get the opportunity to work with him. “With some people, as soon as you see their films you know intuitively, ‘I want to work with that person.’”
Hwarng, who when she was small insisted on choosing even her own socks before going out in the morning, is also a relentless perfectionist about aesthetics. For The Assassin, a period film set in the Tang Dynasty, she kept up with Hou as he exhaustively read ancient texts. “Right from the start I was very clear that a film is the recreation of a world. Though it’s hard to completely reclaim the past, every good film is invariably an act of recreation through the accumulation of authentic details.” This understanding is in perfect accord with the realism that Hou Hsiao-hsien aims for.
In search of the Tang
To bring the Tang Dynasty back to life as was done in The Assassin required a lot of preproduction work in terms of scouting locations and collecting data and materials. For first-hand historical materials, while Hwarng generally starts her search with ancient paintings at the National Palace Museum (NPM) in Taipei, “For me, that kind of research is the bare minimum; it’s merely the most basic part. Design is a way of seeing. It’s intuitive, and that only comes from going through relevant materials all the time, as part of your daily routine, as part of your lifestyle.”
The NPM has a great library, and members of the public can go there to do research. And Hwarng once filmed a documentary about the NPM, so she knows a lot of researchers there, of whom she can ask questions.
Of course, there are also important materials held in private collections. A researcher at the NPM told Hwarng that every year there is a month-long exhibition in Nara, Japan, of artifacts from the Tang Dynasty that are part of the extensive holdings in the Shōsō-in repository of the Tōdai Temple. A different set of artifacts is put on display each year, so every year Hwarng has flown to Japan to visit the exposition.
Hwarng discovered in her studies that the reason why the Shōsō-in repository was able to accumulate so many Tang objects was that during the Sui (581–618) and Tang (618–907) eras, Japan sent a number of embassies (perhaps as many as 20) to China, with each one staying 15 years. Their ships carried all kinds of people—scholars, craftsmen.... Just like students going to study overseas today, they went to Tang China to learn skills. Tang China was a major power, and provided scholarships with all costs covered by the Chinese side. If a Japanese student was outstanding enough, he would be allowed to stay and work at the Tang court. “The way they do the exhibition really takes you back in time to that period.”
But Hwarng’s search for authenticity has taken her far beyond Japan. For example, while in Nara, “I found an exhibition in Japan of Uzbek textiles, and discovered that many features of the material were very similar to the exhibits from the Shōsō-in repository, so I went to Uzbekistan in search of fabrics.”
Hwarng also visited many other countries that were influenced by the Tang Dynasty, such as India. The Tang-Dynasty Buddhist translator and scholar Xuanzang (602–664) traveled to India from 629 to 645, and Hwarng passed though each land that Xuanzang did. She even went all the way to the Guimet Museum in Paris, which is devoted to Asian art, to look at some of their ancient holdings. During the research phase alone, she did tens of thousands of sketches and designs. But Hou Hsiao-hsien never once asked to see them; he trusted Hwarng completely to handle the design work.
Translating mental images into film footage
“To sketch something is one thing, to really make it is something else altogether.” What most worried Hwarng was not the design stage, but the phase of building the set, making the props, finding cloth material, and so on. This complex detailed work is what is actually important. Take for example a knife-shaped hairpin that was worn by the female lead. “It was only in 2009 that I got Chu Tien-wen’s story outline, and I found out that Director Hou had no interest in special effects with people flying all over the place. I then figured that he would certainly want help with the weapons. For example, in the script there is a kind of stiletto which, if shot into a tree, can be used as a foot brace or lever that a person can step on to spring upward. I integrated this into the hairpin.”
One time Hwarng was browsing through the Shilihe Market in Beijing and she found a knife that exactly fit a description in the script. Unfortunately it was too heavy, and not suitable for placing in the actress’s hair. So Hwarng drew up a design that mimicked the knife and asked the props department to make one just like it. “Every detail in the film is grounded in some source; nothing is imagined out of thin air. It’s a very complicated and meticulous process—even a cloth belt, or a hairband, has to be designed and remade from scratch.”
A lot of details of daily life in the Tang Dynasty show up in the film, but Hwarng always hopes that her designs can approach reality even more closely. “Only then does a wait of 12 years really pay off, when you aren’t just doing things that others have done before.”
Divide and conquer
As for the rituals and ceremonies in the film, Hwarng Wern-ying says that in daily life the people of the Tang Dynasty observed some of the customs of nomadic herding peoples, and both Han Chinese and non-Han beliefs were tolerated. (The Tang state shared long borders with northern nomadic herding peoples, who were in some cases conquered and integrated into the empire. The capital, Chang’an, was located at the terminus of the Silk Road and was especially cosmopolitan.) To get the period customs right, Hwarng read large numbers of studies published by the Academia Sinica in Taipei and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, including works on daily life in the Tang period by the late doyen of Chinese history Chen Yinke. “Because the project lasted for so long, there was a lot of opportunity for me to gain an understanding of how people lived their daily lives back then.”
In the course of her research, she also discovered that in the Tang Dynasty living spaces were divided up using draperies, hanging screens that could be rolled up or lowered (made of bamboo and other materials), muslin curtains, canopies, freestanding folding screens, and banks of sliding or hinged panels. It’s a lot like the way spaces are divided in traditional Japanese structures that you can still see today, a pattern which was strongly influenced by the Tang Dynasty. This kind of space can be organized and reorganized at will.
Therefore the art crew constructed two large interior sets and made a large number of freestanding screens and other kinds of dividers. They did a great job, and put a lot of colorful and refined detail into them. Using these, the director could rearrange the layers of space in different sizes and depths depending upon what was called for by certain roles or scenes. In his films Hou has always been a master of creating an effective depth of field within the frame, with different layers. “Every time there was a new scene to be shot, you could see Director Hou right there on the set scratching his head, because he also found it difficult. Each time it was a major challenge and he had to figure everything out on an ad-hoc basis.”
Creative collisions
Hwarng says that the sets for the different characters were all in fact filmed in the same space. The most difficult part was using dividers to rearrange the space each time, because you always had to leave enough room for the actors to feel comfortable and move about freely, while also taking into account the need for the lighting people to set up their lights and the camera guys to be in the right places to get their shots. It was never a simple matter.
If the director wants a wide shot, and you want to fill the entire frame with period details, not only do you have to consider the depth of field, and not only does the design have to be elaborate enough, but most of all you have to consider the budget. “For me, the filming of The Assassin was definitely a love–hate process. Director Hou has this amazing ability to improvise on the spot, without any forewarning. Working with a director like this, I had to be ready to adapt at a moment’s notice, and the design team was also under tremendous pressure. Sometimes I was really at a loss for what to do, because this was his first film set in ancient times, and I didn’t have any sense beforehand of the look that he wanted to achieve. So I had to clearly think through what my concept was, and then I would bring it to the set where I would find out what he wanted to do. It was always like a collision.”
In short, the problem for Hwarng was not merely to become an expert in the history and customs of the Tang era, but to express Tang life with a visual sense of authenticity that would, in every single detail, pass the Hou Hsiao-hsien eye test.
Silence! Filming in progress
When Martin Scorsese came to Taiwan to film Silence, he specifically asked for Hwarng to do the artistic design work for his film. At that time, The Assassin was already supposed to have wrapped up shooting, but things don’t always work out as planned. In fact, Hwarng had an intuition that this would happen. “Shooting on The Assassin ‘wrapped’ many times, and after every wrap it would be necessary to reshoot some scenes. Director Hou has a high opinion of actors from Taiwan, so he can’t tolerate anything that is even 1% imperfect.” For example, in one scene with male lead Chang Chen, Hou felt that his seated posture was not impressive enough—he was supposed to look very dominating and intimidating. So, half a year after shooting had “finished,” Hou insisted on refilming the whole segment, even though reconstructing the set for Chang Chen’s character was an extremely elaborate process.
In fact, Hwarng recalls that when Hou presented the list of scenes he wanted to reshoot, the art crew had to rebuild virtually every single set. “Even though I had already started work on Silence, I constantly had this feeling that The Assassin was going to keep popping up in my life at any moment.” Fortunately the indoor sets for the two movies were both at Chinese Movie Studios, and Hwarng had already explained to the Silence producer that she might have to do some reshoots for The Assassin. Also the two directors knew each other, which made things easier. It was really an unforgettable time for Hwarng.
“The art director for Silence told me that Director Scorsese wouldn’t start filming even with a 99% level of perfection—he had to have 100%. It seems like I’m always working with directors like this,” she says with a laugh. Hwarng notes that Hou and Scorsese have some similar habits, except that Hou deliberately keeps a very low profile. While they are both internationally renowned directors, Hou does not have a Hollywood lifestyle.
Sparing of words, like the sages of old
Speaking of her 20 years working with Hou, Hwarng says that in fact no film was more grueling than The Assassin. “This is because we are both very demanding about detail. If he wasn’t, then he wouldn’t be Hou Hsiao-hsien!” But, she notes, being demanding about detail is not the same as micromanaging and hectoring people about small things. “What I like about Hou is his character: he’s very straight and honest, but in a proper and dignified way. He’s a man of few words, but well-chosen ones. My grandfather has this same characteristic. After having been through so much in life, when he speaks he’s always very sparing with his words, just like the ancients when they spoke—straight to the point—and he expects the listener to understand what needs to be done and then take care of it. Even if Director Hou wants to draw your attention to your weak points or errors, he won’t deprive you of the chance to reflect and think about them for yourself.”
Since Hwarng is also a part-time producer in Hou’s production company, she was also involved in the fundraising side of the film. She says it’s a lot more difficult to draw up a proposal to recruit investors than it is to do art design! The whole process turned out to be controversial, because Hou delayed filming while waiting for a subsidy from the National Development Fund, which everyone assumed he would get. “I was continually pushing Director Hou to hurry up and film! It was only when our application to the National Development Fund was turned down that Director Hou seemed to come to his senses….” It was then that he realized that the project had been on hold for so many years, you couldn’t just say you had financial problems and keep putting things off. They eventually raised money from private sources.
Hwarng recounts that the art department was more affected than anyone, because they have to start spending money even before filming begins. She notes that when she worked with Martin Scorsese, there was never any worry about money, but when working with Hou she has to keep herself in check, to make sure she stays within budget.
It was a long road, but finally the The Assassin was finished. Hwarng advises us that it is much more than just a period film. Hidden within it you can find Hou Hsiao-hsien’s feelings about history and politics, and the style is something that has been percolating and brewing for many years, has involved a great deal of experimenting and searching, and has taken shape layer by layer. She says with feeling, “If you really want to understand a movie like this, then it’s not enough just to see it once.”
CMYK.jpg?w=1080&mode=crop&format=webp&quality=80)
During 12 years of planning, Hwarng Wern-ying, art director for The Assassin, amassed countless sketches and designs. Her dedicated research into Tang-Dynasty history resulted in each and every scene in the film having an authentic aesthetic.
During 12 years of planning, Hwarng Wern-ying, art director for The Assassin, amassed countless sketches and designs. Her dedicated research into Tang-Dynasty history resulted in each and every scene in the film having an authentic aesthetic. (photo by Chuang Kung-ju)
An art director has to be well versed in a variety of fields and skills. Most of the time they have to “make something from nothing,” creating fine details that will fill every nook and cranny of the camera frame. The photo shows Hwarng and a member of her team laying down a layer of gold paint on a muslin curtain.
The sets erected at Central Movie Studios were constructed, down to every last detail, by craftsmen from Taiwan. Shown here is the set for the Nie family home.
Detailed sketches of Tang architecture and the accoutrements of daily life allowed the recreation of an authentic atmosphere when it came time to film. The upper sketch shows the home of a provincial governor, where the female lead, Nie Yinniang, conceals herself on top of a beam, waiting for the opportunity to strike.
CMYK.jpg?w=1080&mode=crop&format=webp&quality=80)
Detailed sketches of Tang architecture and the accoutrements of daily life allowed the recreation of an authentic atmosphere when it came time to film. The upper sketch shows the home of a provincial governor, where the female lead, Nie Yinniang, conceals herself on top of a beam, waiting for the opportunity to strike.
Design sketches for films normally go through many revisions in order to take account of every character’s role. Hwarng Wern-ying reveals that during the design process for The Assassin, director Hou Hsiao-hsien did not interfere and trusted the art team completely. Shown here are costume sketches for various characters.
Design sketches for films normally go through many revisions in order to take account of every character’s role. Hwarng Wern-ying reveals that during the design process for The Assassin, director Hou Hsiao-hsien did not interfere and trusted the art team completely. Shown here are costume sketches for various characters.
Design sketches for films normally go through many revisions in order to take account of every character’s role. Hwarng Wern-ying reveals that during the design process for The Assassin, director Hou Hsiao-hsien did not interfere and trusted the art team completely. Shown here are costume sketches for various characters.
Design sketches for films normally go through many revisions in order to take account of every character’s role. Hwarng Wern-ying reveals that during the design process for The Assassin, director Hou Hsiao-hsien did not interfere and trusted the art team completely. Shown here are costume sketches for various characters.
Hwarng worked with Chen Zhongxin, master tailor at the Yufeng qipao (traditional Chinese dress) shop in Taipei’s Yongle Market, to create the colorful embellishments on the costumes for the character Kong Kong. Chen has been working with Hou Hsiao-hsien since Flowers of Shanghai (1998), and designed the costumes for The Assassin.
Hou is very particular about light and shadow, so he was meticulous about the sizes and shapes of the candles used in various scenes. The art team bought large candles, melted them down, and then remolded them into exactly the specifications that each shot called for, even including the shaping of the dripping wax.
Hwarng, who has worked with Hou Hsiao-hsien for 20 years, including 12 years on The Assassin, says that Hou’s perfectionism is inspiring. She points out that the film has hidden layers of depth and makes such a lingering impact on the viewer that it is definitely worth seeing again and again. (photo by Tsai Cheng-tai, courtesy of Spot Films)
