Action! Foreign Filmmakers Flock to Taiwan
Lee Hsiang-ting / photos TFC / tr. by Phil Newell
June 2015
In May of 2015, following the wrapping up of work in Taiwan for Oscar-winning director Martin Scorsese’s Silence, CNN reported that Taiwan has become the new favored spot for filming locations in Asia for Hollywood movies.
Taipei City is making itself the stylish place to make movies. Underlying the filming-friendly environment, there are goals that far exceed merely promoting the city itself. It is hoped that the local film industry can be upgraded to become the Asian center for international collaborative moviemaking, and that our film culture will become something in which the people of Taiwan can take pride. With this in mind, the Taipei Film Commission has been continuously nurturing the capabilities needed for this art form.
It is the end of April, and the production team for the Taiwan film The Tag-along is shooting some street scenes alongside Wenhua 3rd Road in Taipei City’s Beitou District, having completed over two months of filming on sets in the Beitou Chinese Movie Studio (BCMS). At the same time, in another corner of the BCMS, where the production team for the movie Silence has its support center, workers are going in and out of meetings as they prepare for some night scenes that they will film nearby.
A few days later, two cranes hold aloft giant lighting equipment as Silence director Martin Scorsese and the film’s star Andrew Garfield begin five straight nights of filming. The city government had begun planning work for the location, a slope along Beitou’s Xiushan Road, two years previously. The relevant agencies held dozens of meetings, and completed preparations even before Scorsese decided to use this location. The Taipei Film Commission (TFC), responsible for facilitating the filming process, and which has accumulated vast experience in dealing with the intricate process of making a movie, really pulled out all the stops.
International trust-building
TFC director Jennifer Jao explains why Scorsese chose Taiwan. While a recommendation from director Ang Lee was certainly important, even more vital is that Taiwan has the requisite skilled professionals to meet all production needs. A director coming here need not bring along a complete crew, which makes filming very efficient in terms of costs and support functions.
“Before deciding to come to Taiwan, Scorsese scouted many other cities in Asia, naturally including Japan, because the film is based on a Japanese novel. After he made the choice to come to Taiwan, he only needed to bring 68 people with him, with all other crew members being local Taiwanese.” Jao says that this indicates the director’s trust in Taipei, and also naturally was a big confidence booster for local production staff.
For the work on Silence in Taiwan, the producers spent over NT$400 million, an outlay that included hiring 350 full-time staff and paying more than 3000 extras. Even more importantly, the production provided further impetus to the growth and development of the film industry here. Scorsese praised the Taiwan crew as friendly and professional, was dazzled by the rich variety of topography and vistas, and—like everyone who comes to Taiwan—had great things to say about the food.
To help make sure that skill transfer takes place, the TFC and the Taipei City Bureau of Cultural Affairs plan to invite several key professionals from the Silence team to teach at a specially organized “Taipei Film Academy,” where film professionals from Taiwan will learn the latest skills and techniques being used in Hollywood. Jao says, “Only when technical skill is integrated into culture can the film industry be upgraded. Only this kind of cooperative filmmaking can genuinely have a positive impact on Taiwan’s film industry.”
Great expectations
In 2013, production teams did filming work in Taipei for a total of 56 foreign films, and last year that number leapt to 92.
Silence, which just recently finished its work in Taiwan, followed closely upon the heels of Lucy by French director Luc Besson, X+Y by British director Morgan Matthew, and Shield of Straw by Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike. Silence was the largest-ever international cooperative project for the TFC, and it was also the first time that there was genuine in-depth collaboration using the Hollywood model of film production. It was obviously a tremendous challenge for the TFC’s on-the-ground film assistance team, which has only eight members. For Silence alone, location scouts came to Taiwan at least four times, and filming locations included Yangmingshan, Jiufen, Hualien, and Taichung. The TFC had to take the lead in each case, after which local governments would follow up and take over responsibility.
Grace Xie, location and production manager for the film assistance team, recalls an especially hectic period for her at the end of 2013. At that time, even as Lucy, for which she was responsible, was right in the middle of work at the Taipei Railway Workshop, director John Woo was installing sets for his movie The Crossing at Xiaoyoukeng on Yangmingshan. Because this location is governed by national parks legislation, the parties had to negotiate regarding the materials and construction methods for the structures. That was in the middle of December, when it was cold, windy, and rainy, and she had to ride her motor scooter back and forth between the mountains and downtown Taipei. This experience working on two major international projects at the same time was one she will not soon forget.
Not long after, on the third day of the Chinese Lunar New Year holiday of 2014, Martin Scorsese brought a team to Beitou to scout locations, and Xie accompanied them for their entire itinerary. She says, “I can’t tell my troubles to my family or friends when they ask why I never seem to get any time off. This is because for our team to keep major foreign projects coming here, we have to prevent any information from leaking out, so we can’t breathe a word.”
And they are only getting busier. TFC statistics indicate that the commission assisted with 477 films in 2013 and 577 in 2014; and with 223 thus far this year, they expect the total for 2015 to exceed 600.
Why do they come here? When Luc Besson came to film Lucy two years ago, he recited a long list of reasons. He noted first of all that the most beautiful cities are not necessarily the easiest ones in which to get the best shots. New York is very beautiful, for example, but it is not easy to find the just the right angle you want, whereas Taipei is a very photogenic city. He also had words of high praise for the transportation system, declared that “people in Taipei are the friendliest and most helpful to my crew of any I have ever seen,” and was also impressed by the rich variety of scenery, noting that they had filmed in built-up urban areas, forests, mountains, at sea, and on beaches, all within a radius of 100 kilometers.
Like Scorsese, Besson was also able to bring only a skeleton crew with him (35 people in his case), fleshing out his 150-strong production team with full-time local staff while also hiring more than 600 local extras. Throughout the process, he was fully confident that he would be able to proceed with his filming in Taipei without any worries.
Finally, there is the governmental factor. Ang Lee, who recommended Taiwan to Scorsese, has said that Taiwan’s competitive advantage in filmmaking is not just a matter of having the necessary technical people, but that you have full creative freedom. And Luc Besson stated, “The most important thing is that the government here is very trustworthy and dependable.”
Currently major cities around Asia offer incentives and actively work to attract Hollywood moviemakers. Korea and Japan are especially active, and the latter nation even organized a group to go to New York and directly brief film producers on the advantages of working in Japan. For the film Lucy, eight Asian cities competed for the production, before Taipei finally emerged at the head of the pack.
Jennifer Jao says, “The point of getting movies made here is not just that the filmmakers find the right sets, do their thing, and then pack up and leave. The point is for us, through film production, to market our ‘soft power,’ and let cinema buffs all over the world see Taipei and Taiwan right there on the silver screen. That’s why we wanted to get Silence here. The success of cooperation in making a major motion picture like Silence is to our credit, just like Life of Pi and Lucy before. They contribute to making our city stronger, upgrade the experience of our film production people, and help us bring even more productions here in the future.”
It’s a two-way street
New Zealand is one example of a country that has become a motion picture powerhouse, in large part thanks to the impact of the franchises The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, both directed by Peter Jackson.
Back in 1993 Jackson co-founded a company called Weta Digital to do the special effects for a film he was then working on. The Lord of the Rings trilogy later sent the firm’s reputation soaring, and since then the authors of a number of major films (including The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, The Avengers, Prometheus, and The Adventures of Tintin) have chosen to do postproduction in New Zealand. This is an ideal model for progressing from facilitating the filming of movies to developing a flourishing film industry.
If Taiwan wants a strong film industry, it will have to have a coordinated value chain, from scripts to filming to postproduction to marketing to advertising. Even more critical to deepening the industry’s capabilities is investment. Silence, for example, had Taiwan capital invested in it. The entertainment company CatchPlay, which invested in the film and will handle distribution, hopes that this will attract even more international filmmakers to come to Taiwan.
Jennifer Jao says, “The most important thing is to have good films, and if you are talking about a whole industry, there also has to be high production volume. Moreover, you can’t neglect performance at international film festivals, so investment in art-house films is important in its own way. In recent years the TFC has been pro-active about participating in international film festivals and trade fairs, has been holding a lot of exchanges with other countries, has been establishing links with or participating in international cinema organizations, and has built substantive collaborative relationships, all with the aim of increasing the international visibility of films from Taiwan.”
From their first ally—the Commission du film Ile-de-France—the TFC launched formal exchanges with the Capital Regions for Cinema (an alliance of film organizations in several European capitals) and later forged alliances with several national film commissions, as well as continuing Taiwan’s participation in major film festivals (including those in Venice, Berlin, Busan, and, most important of all, Cannes).
The TFC also has shifted from passive to active mode with the “Taipei Factory” production program. This program creates full-length productions by combining several short films, each made jointly by one young director from Taiwan and one young international director who has shown at Cannes. These composite works are testimony to the concrete cooperation between international film production teams and Taiwan.
At the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s latest work The Assassin, representing Taiwan, won the award for best director. Awards from international film festivals make everyone in film circles in Taiwan proud, and if Taiwan wants to get on the same track as the international motion picture industry, not only do we have to bring international production teams here, it is even more important to bring Taiwan films to the international audience.
Kaohsiung gets in on the act
The other line of film assistance in Taiwan leads to Kaohsiung. When Kaohsiung first opened its arms to filmmakers, this was immediately effective in terms of marketing the city. Aspirations for the near term mirror those of the Taipei Film Commission, with Kaohsiung likewise hoping to further nurture its cinema industry.
However, the two cities have not chosen identical strategies. Tu Jui-lin of the Kaohsiung Film Development and Production Center says: “Our starting point is investing in scripts.” He says that because good scripts are hard to find, the municipality’s initial support program is for movie treatments, aiming to produce more Kaohsiung stories.
Tu says that there should be more diversity in Taiwan stories. Kaohsiung accordingly has an ongoing artist-in-residence program for scriptwriters, aimed at providing support right at the most basic source of creative work. Offering both prizes and stipends in a two-track approach, the city has so far already completed four project cycles for Chinese-language screenwriters-in-residence to produce original film treatments. Projects that have won prize money from this program have gone on to win support from the funding committee of the Golden Horse Film Festival or a feature film subsidy from the Ministry of Culture.
“In the future, Kaohsiung wants to have a comprehensively structured industrial chain for the audiovisual industry, including upstream, midstream, and downstream components.” Tu says that Kaohsiung too has ambitions, and in the future hopes to attract more postproduction and special effects companies to the city, so that the industry can really set deep roots.
Just within the last two years there have been many promising developments. Crescent Digicast, a Tokyo-based firm which has one of the three largest motion-capture studios in the world, has selected Kaohsiung for its first overseas branch. From the Taiwan side, White Rabbit Entertainment, which has done visual effects for many films including Kano and Twa-Tiu-Tiann, has set up its headquarters in Kaohsiung’s Pier 2 Art Center. And Prajna Works Entertainment Company, which provided the production team for the cop action series Black & White, also has a long-term presence in Kaohsiung.
In fact, Tsai Yueh-hsun, the director of Black & White, has maintained the enormous 3000-plus-square-meter Kaohsiung studio he used for the motion picture, complete with sets and props, and has spent NT$60 million to convert it into Taiwan’s first ever movie-based theme park. He wants to adopt the model used by Universal Studios in Hollywood, which has long been an entrée into the real world of filmmaking for its many visitors.
Luc Besson has described Taipei as a very photogenic city, and says that the environment for filmmaking here is very dependable and trustworthy. The photo was taken during the shooting in Taipei of Besson’s film Lucy. (courtesy of UIP)
Because the process of applying for location permission in Japan was too complicated, the makers of Shield of Straw chose to come to Taiwan to film at the home base of our island’s High Speed Railway.
Prizes from international film festivals help upgrade the entire cinema industry in Taiwan. Hou Hsiao-hsien was just awarded “best director” at the Cannes Film Festival for his latest work The Assassin; the film also won an award for its soundtrack. (courtesy of Spot Films)
Director Ang Lee says that Taiwan’s comparative advantages in the making of motion pictures are its highly skilled professionals and its creative freedom. The photo shows Lee visiting the Taipei Zoo in Muzha in preparation for shooting the feature Life of Pi.
The film Monga was not only a critical and financial success in its own right, it brought business down to one of the key settings—the historic Bopiliao area of Taipei’s Wanhua District. In the photo, a scene is being shot on the Shuiyuan Expressway, which was closed off for the occasion.
The Taipei Film Commission is the agency responsible for facilitating filming work at locations in the municipality. As always, they were there every step of the way when John Woo chose Yangmingshan National Park for some of the scenes in The Crossing.
The winner of the first ever “Film Taipei” award, When a Wolf Falls in Love with a Sheep, which premiered in 2012, was written, produced, and directed by Hou Chi-jan. The photo shows the production team working on Nanyang Street in Taipei.
Film production assistance not only helps market a city, it also makes a positive impact on the development of the film and TV industry. The photo shows shooting of Where the Wind Settles, directed by Wang Toon, at the Port of Kaohsiung. (courtesy of the Kaohsiung City Film Development and Production Center)
Tsai Yueh-hsun, director of Black & White, has kept intact the Kaohsiung studio where he worked, with all its sets and props, and turned it into a theme park, allowing people to get up close to the authentic world of how motion pictures are made. (courtesy of Prajna Works)
