What is it about Wu that makes him someone everyone should know?
Wu Nien-chen has wielded one of the pens that Taiwan's directors have relied upon most. His importance is shown in his being able to get up on stage and publicly poke fun at the directors with whom he has worked.
Before presenting the award for best director during the Golden Horse Award ceremonies last year, Wu Nien-chen first went up on stage to introduce those nominees who were his former collaborators. While admiring their talents, he also kidded them for risking life and limb and suffering one indignity after another for the sake of "calling up the wind and the rain" or "realizing their dreams" while sitting in the director's chair. He saw irony in how senior directors such as Hou Hsiao-hsien, Ann Hui and Wan Jen beat their breasts and stamp their feet, hobble around in casts after they have broken their legs, or suffer from rheumatism on the set--only to create something that makes the audience just laugh and laugh.
Golden Horse Wu
Over the years, Wu Nien-chen has worked with more than 30 directors, and he's "not uptight at all"--as he puts it--about whom he'll work with. Wu's creative partners have spanned three generations, included directors from both Hong Kong and Taiwan, and run the gamut from an "auteur" like Hou Hsiao-hsien to Chu yen-ping, a commercial movie maker concerned chiefly with making a buck for his boss.
Quite a few directors rely on him both before and after they film. "Nien-chen helps deliver awards for best picture and best director," says Little Yeh.
His own award tally is quite impressive itself: six Golden Horses, including four for best original screenplay, one for best screenplay adaptation and one for best movie soundtrack.
After winning his first Golden Horse, there was a stretch where he was nominated every year for best screenplay. His friends called him "Golden Horse Wu," and it was even said that "You just had to hitch a ride on his Golden Horse train, and you had a good shot at getting nominated for best picture or best director."
Having scripted more than 60 movies, he is often asked how he starts. Where does he find material?
"It starts with visual considerations, learning how to use words to describe the movie in your brain." He takes himself as an example. "When people ask 'who is Wu Nien-chen?' you can't just use words to say 'he is a screenwriter.' You've got to try to describe the image in your brain."
"He looks much younger than his age," Wu says of himself, as he begins a lively catalog of wishful thinking. "He's tall and strong, distinguished, and very wise. His eyes sparkle. He's exceedingly gentle, especially when he laughs." Then Wu says, "If you can write 'accurately,' so that others believe you, then you've got a beginning."
The beginning of a vision
Where does Wu's fertile creativity and acute sensitivity come from?
Let's start with his background. He was born in Juifang Township in Taipei County to a family of miners. Because his family was poor, when he was 16 and finished junior high he went to Taipei to work and study part time. He apprenticed at a private clinic, wrapping packages of medicine and sweeping the floors, and worked in the maintenance department of an office building. He did all kinds of lowly work.
After finishing his military service, he went to work at the Municipal Sanitarium, before being admitted to the night program in accounting at Fujen Catholic University. For five years, he worked during the day and went to college at night. These were peak fiction-writing years for Wu. In his early twenties he was already publishing novels, and he won the United Daily News and Wu Chou-liu literary prizes back to back.
Before serving in the army, he had no intention of writing, but then he read Gong and Sayonara, Good-Bye by the "native soil" writer Huang Chun-ming, and discovered how it was possible to make moving descriptions of the people one comes across in everyday life.
From his childhood among "uncles" and "aunties" in the mining village, to his youth among the great masses of Taipei, his early experiences would filter into his fiction and screenplays bit by bit.
In 1979 he wrote his first novel, Incense for Ancestors, and it came to the attention of Ming Chi, then general manager of Central Motion Pictures, who asked Wu to work for him.
He first balked at the thought of entering the conservative, KMT-run Central Pictures, but the argument of a friend changed his mind: "Go and establish a foothold there, and bring about change from within. It's better you than someone else."
When he first entered Central Pictures, he would quietly listen to what his colleagues were saying. "I became confident, which was quite out of character for someone who had always had an inferiority complex. Among these people I wanted to compete to see whose abilities were really best. But besting them was so simple it was boring."
He recalls that the first time he made a proposal for a future film, he mentioned Huang Chun-ming's work, and his colleagues didn't even know who Huang Chun-ming was. He recommenced adapting such novels as Huang's The Sandwich Man and A Flower in the Rainy Night, Chen Ying-chen's Clouds, and Yang Ching-chu's In Meinan, but the proposals were rejected one after another and so after a while he started spending most of his time on the job reading.
"New cinema" flame fanners
Then Little Yeh also got a job at Central Pictures. Here is how Wu once described their work there together: "We'd write stories, tell stories, report on stories for our superiors, make short reports, hear conclusions that only someone who had been working in government for a decade or more could understand as 'yes' or 'no,' and then, after the decision was made to 'put off filming,' we'd start again thinking up and writing stories, as the whole stupid cycle would start all over again."
It went on like this until 1981 when he wrote the screenplay for Classmate for another company and it won a Golden Horse. Central Pictures began paying attention to Wu and Little Yeh's opinions, and their proposals starting getting accepted. When Growing Up about a typical family living in a military dependents' village became a box-office smash, it gave their opinions even more weight.
By the early 1980s the number of movies produced in Taiwan had already fallen from a peak of 200-300 to only 40-50 a year as Hong Kong films grew more and more popular. As Little Yeh and Wu Nien-chen saw it, relying on one or two directors wouldn't turn the tide for Taiwanese film. They held that if Taiwan was going to make a stand in the market a lot of directors were going to have to make a lot of films.
And so they came up with a strategy of "making directors fast" by using several directors to shoot one movie. In Our Time and Sandwich Man were both filmed in this way.
Whether the films were simply "flashes in the pan" or "remarkably original and forceful" films that held up over time, in regard to so much movie glory being produced in such a short time the critic Chiao Hsiung-ping has said, "In assigning credit for the fires produced by the 'new cinema films' of Central Pictures, there are subjective considerations, but without a doubt the screenwriters Little Yeh and Wu Nien-chen were principal fanners of the flames."
Concern and nostalgia
These years were Wu Nien-chen's most productive. He wrote screenplays for many films that were both critical and commercial successes. What was the special characteristic of his work that made so many directors ask for his scripts?
"Wu Nien-chen's greatest strength is his great feel for society and his deep sympathy for local people at the bottom," says the critic Huang Chien-yeh. Take Old Mo's Second Spring, a story about an old KMT soldier and his Taiwanese aboriginal bride. From the payment of money for her, to their differences involving provincial origin, age, lifestyle and culture, "he described it all with great depth, detail and restraint."
His works usually begin with a feeling. At the door to the Taipei First Girls' High School (Taipei's most prestigious girls' school) he saw an instructor from a cram school leading a group of boys pass by, who were shouting "I love Chienkuo High." (Chienkuo is Taipei's best boys' school and presumably the first choice of boys cramming for the joint high school entrance exam.) The feeling of humiliation the scene imparted colored his screenplay adaptation of The Loser, The Hero, which dared to criticize cram schools and Taiwan's exam-hell educational system.
What's more, notes Little Yeh, "The suffering of his motherland, and the difficult process of his rootless floating while working and studying have continued to affect the innermost feelings of his creations whether they are visible or not; he can't escape them, and he doesn't want to cast them off." Scenes derived from Wu's memories of his family and hometown have turned up in the films of many directors.
Hou Hsiao-hsien's Dust in the Wind and Wang Tung's Hill of No Return are representative examples. Dust in the Wind is the true story of Wu's first love. When the male lead spends his military service on an outer island, his innocent girlfriend ends up marrying the postman who day after day delivers his love letters. Hill of no Return, on the other hand, is a story from the Japanese era about the tragic lives of Wu's mining ancestors.
Through the director's lens, the beauty and declining fortunes of the area of Northeastern Taiwan around Chiufen, Juifang and Chinkuashih, stir up nostalgia in both the writer and the audience.
Strong-willed screenwriter
Yet Wu does more for his directors than just writing screenplays. He throws in some "extras" along with them.
In 1987 he adapted the novel Osmanthus Alley for the screen. It describes a woman who had a line in her palm that foretold her husband would die young, and her relationships with four men. After completing the script, Wu Nien-chen wrote in Taiwanese the lyrics to its theme song: "Brooding on My Fate."
In 1989 he and Chu Tien-wen worked together to write the screenplay for City of Sadness, describing the ups and downs of a Taiwanese family as it experienced the February 28 Incident, and he wrote this line for its poster: "You've never heard this story before, nor have you dared to ask about it." With such a "sensationalist" headline and the affirmation of having won the Golden Bear at the Venice Film Festival, the domestic box-office receipts for City of Sadness topped NT$100 million.
And Wu has also been pressed into service when actors are in short supply. In Out of the Blue, he was a teaching assistant; in My Favorite Season he was a down-on-his-luck writer of kungfu novels; and in City of Sadness he was an intellectual who felt great compassion for his family and nation.
He not only has done a lot of work in film outside of writing scripts, but he is also very strong-willed.
Edward Yang sought out Wu to write the screenplay adaptation for Mahjongg, Yang's new film. In it he plays a blundering head of a gang. Taking advantage of his status as the screenwriter, Wu made the part bigger. After editing, Edward Yang predicted that Wu would this year be nominated for best screenplay and best supporting actor for Mahjongg and best director for his own film.
Not the right place to be a director
This writer of screenplays is so strong-willed that his close friends think that he should have started directing long ago.
As early as a decade ago, Little Yeh was saying, "He should gather his courage and direct." But there were other considerations: "How could we who were deciding who should direct what film, select ourselves!"
At that time his thinking was, "Does a screen-writer have to become a director?" In looking back today, he attributes his reluctance to not having enough confidence and lacking moving subject matter.
After he had been working at Central Pictures for nearly nine years, a new boss took over and Wu felt they were headed for a personality clash. Wu simply wrote "This place isn't suitable for me" on his notice of resignation and suavely left.
Five years later he finished directing his first film A Borrowed Life. He made it in memory of his father, who had strong sentiments about the Japanese, but he was writing about that entire generation. "They received Japanese educations," he explains, "and then overnight had to become Chinese. Fundamentally, they had problems identifying with the land of their ancestors."
Whether as a screenwriter or a director, Wu Nien-chen has wanted to make "films that your average Joe or old lady can understand." This is because movies belong to the masses. "A novel's cost is low and you can do all sorts of experiments and be as idiosyncratic as you like. I turned from writing novels to writing screenplays, because I thought they would make a bigger impact."
His father--a man of his times
In turning from putting words on paper to making images, how well has Wu done?
The Hong Kong director Ann Hui holds that "Wu's depiction of his father was both vivid and moving. And the technique was well practiced." Nevertheless, Hui was disappointed that "the style was so much like Hou Hsiao-hsien's." In the latter half of the movie, when the father gets severely ill and jumps off a building, and his son (symbolizing Wu himself) takes his ashes to Japan to see Mt. Fuji and the emperor's palace so that his father can realize his wish of touring Japan, "It loses focus, becoming too personal and over-emotional."
Little Yeh, on the other hand, doesn't see Hou Hsiao-hsien's influence in A Borrowed Life."Lots of people simplistically say that whenever someone uses long shots with a fixed camera it's Hou Hsiao-hsien's style." Little Yeh stresses that most of A Borrowed Life was shot in the mountains, where it was necessary to make the most of scarce light. If they were constantly changing the camera angles, they might never have finished shooting.
"In trying to delve inside and understand the father's pain, and also to reexperience the process of nearing death, Wu decided to make the film from the son's point of view," says the critic Chiao Hsiung-ping. "Cool detachment isn't part of Wu Nien-chen's character, and his movies are like his person. He throws himself into them. They're passionate and emotionally moving."
When America meets Taiwan
From the Japanese influence on Taiwanese culture, Wu turns to the later-arriving American cultural influence for his second film, which is set in the late 1960s in southern Taiwan.
In Hengchun farmers have planted sisal on a mountainside. One day the military comes and says that it wants to borrow the mountain for a military exercise, and that it will compensate the farmers. A local family thinks that 'an exercise' just means that some soldiers are going to run around, but then they discover that it's a big joint Chinese-American military exercise. The whole mountain is covered with smoke as the big guns boom and the sisal gets destroyed.
Believing that they haven't been compensated enough, villagers pilfer army blankets and dried food to get their fair reward. The father is reluctant to do so, but after his wife yells at him every day for being useless, he finally says that if he is going to take something, he's going to take something big, and he brings back two large metal boxes. The envious villagers all come by to look, but when he opens the boxes, he discovers two dead American soldiers inside. It's a mad-cap comedy.
Wu explains that God Bless America's Chinese title, "Pacific Nation," is meant somewhat ironically, since what seems to be a paradise-like treasure island isn't "pacific" in the least.
This story was originally included in the script for Dust in the Wind, but Hou Hsiao-hsien felt that it didn't fit in the film's plot and cut it out. Its story remained in Wu Nien-chen's brain until he became a director and had a chance to put it up on the silver screen himself.
You can't have a film without a script
Whether a movie is good or bad depends in large part on the script. Difficulty finding good ones is a worldwide phenomenon.
In recent years many Hollywood films, including The Firm and Jurassic Park, have been adapted from best sellers or have been remakes of old movies such as Sabrina. In Hong Kong director Tsui Hark has recently reinterpreted Liang Shan-po and Chu Ying-tai, Huang Mei-tiao's classic from the sixties. The reason for all these remakes and adaptations may simply be that there is a shortage of good scripts.
With good new scripts hard to find, writer-directors are more and more common. Ang Lee, Tsai Ming-liang and the new directors Chen Yu-hsun and Lin Cheng-sheng all direct from their own screenplays. Is this a new trend?
"For a director, writing scripts is a basic skill. If you can't write, sooner or later you're not going to find any work," Wu Nien-chen says. Most directors can't find satisfactory screenplays, and so if they can mold material into a script themselves, then they'll often do double duty as screenwriter and director.
Lin Chen-sheng, the leading man of God Bless America, who has also just finished directing his first film, believes that screenwriting and directing are two distinctly different skills, and while a director should understand how scripts are written, he needn't write them himself. "Nevertheless, in the Taiwanese film industry it is hard to say whether or not it should be done." Lin points out that it's hard to make a living in the film industry, and professional division of labor, as a result, is lacking. People's passion for making films is the only reason they are willing to work so hard for so little material compensation.
Little Yeh agrees with Lin's way of putting things. He holds that the main reason so many films are being written and directed by the same person is that too few movies are being produced, and that you can't make a living anymore just by doing one job or the other.
Director of the common folk
With the movie industry having fallen on hard times, there aren't many opportunities for work, and directing is a highly competitive field. What's Wu's edge on other directors?
"It's a bit easier for me to get backing for my films. First of all, I've been working in movies so long now, and everyone feels that I don't have such an artistic temperament. Secondly, I know how to tell the story in detail to the person putting up the money."
Wu has a resonant voice and he gesticulates often when talking. Altogether the effect is quite impressive. He's funny too, with three out of any ten sentences making people laugh.
Little Yeh stresses that Wu is a natural-born storyteller, and through his description, expressions and movements, a hum-drum story becomes quite interesting. "A lot of bosses get scared when they see words on paper, and you've got to tell it to them to get them interested. It even gets to the point where you've got to act it out while you're telling it."
Little Yeh confirms that when Wu Nien-chen shoots a movie, "one of his greatest strengths is controlling the crowd."
The "crowd" doesn't just mean the investors or studio bosses but also the members of the panels allotting government grants to supplement a film's budget. A Borrowed Life and God Bless America, each got NT$10 million in grant money. Last year, nine movies were competing for three grants of NT$10 million. God Bless America got the most votes of all.
"The first film I just did for the fun of it. If I'm going to make a second film I might as well work a little harder at it." He's willing to give himself a couple of years, to work on it until he's fifty and see if he can accomplish something with it. Wu Nien-chen wants to be a "common-folk director" who is close to the crowd.
God Bless America is a mad-cap comedy about American soldiers and Taiwanese farmers and the conflict between them which stems from cultural and linguistic differences. （courtesy of Lienteng Motion Pictures）
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