Transformation and opportunity
Orz Boys, for which Lee served as executive producer, hit theaters just as Cape No. 7 was beginning its dazzling ascent. Lee's film had a respectable box-office showing thanks to the solid reputation generated by extensive preliminary screenings which reached 6000 people. All in all, they invested a total of NT$14 million including promotion and ended up with NT$36 million.
The astronomical box-office figures that Cape produced were unprecedented in the history of Taiwanese cinema. They are, opined film critic Wen Tien-hsiang, "about as likely to be duplicated as dinosaurs are to reemerge from the ooze."
Cape perhaps really was something of a miracle. Orz Boyz, on the other hand, wasn't a matter of chance. When Orz's youthful director, Yang Ya-che, sought Lee out script in hand in 2007, Lee's producer chops had already been finely honed by years of work in television, including the show that won her four Golden Bell Awards, The Death of Mr .com. She in fact did harbor big-screen aspirations the whole time she was working in television, and, not being the type of person to simply leave her dreams out to dry, she was only waiting for the right opportunity to present itself.
That year the industry's vital signs showed marked improvement. Movies like Island Etude, Eternal Summer, and Spider Lilies all cleared NT$10 million, the sum generally considered to be the threshold of success, with Spider Lilies doing considerably better at NT$50 million. "I sensed that a transformation was taking place," she says, "almost like hearing winter ice beginning to crack apart-I knew that the opportunity I had been waiting for had arrived." The Orz Boys script was in front of her. Reading it made her cry. She decided that she would take the gamble and come aboard as its executive producer, her first foray into filmmaking. "It was a rare opportunity-for all I knew, it could be my last."
Her gamble involved thinking in terms of the worst-case scenario. With the cast still unpicked and no obvious focal point for gossip and buzz, she knew that this movie needed to be handled very carefully or it could easily bomb.
"I thought it over: even if it flops to the point that we don't recoup a cent, that's about NT$10 million. I could keep working and repay the debt within seven or eight years at most. Plus, I knew that it couldn't fail that badly," she recalls.
With the most abject scenario already mapped out in her mind, she was then ready to take the plunge.
The story centered on two mischievous kids who find refuge from loneliness and emotional neglect in their imaginations. Calling on the highly attuned discernment she cultivated over her many years in front of the camera, Lee herself screened child after child in order to find the right kids for the roles of "Liar 1" and "Liar 2." The two youngsters proved to be so natural in front of the camera that in the end their performances carry the film.
Lee's fundraising efforts have since become legendary. After borrowing from all of her friends with the ability and willingness to lend, she had still only raised three-quarters of the capital she needed. But how could she come up with the rest? It seemed difficult without any collateral of her own for such a significant loan, so she turned to her mother for aid, who took out a mortgage on her house.
From the whimsical Orz Boyz to the big-budget gangster hit Monga, to the small-budget Jump Ashin!, Lee's uncanny ability to pick out winning scripts has consolidated her standing in the newly emergent Taiwanese cinema. (courtesy of One Production Film (above), Green Day Film (center), and Activator Marketing