From baking, to acting, to directing, has Lin had more opportunities? How have movies changed his life?
Short and pot-bellied with stubble on his chin, Lin Cheng-sheng has an earthy appearance. He is the first choice of many directors to play the role of a Taiwanese farmer.
In Tropical Fish he plays the unsophisticated kidnapper of a boy preparing to take the joint entrance exams for high school. The abductor finds himself getting caught up in the preparations for the exam, spending time and money to buy books for his captive and urging him to study earnestly. In Buddha Bless America, which is set in southern Taiwan in the 1960s, Lin plays the only literate person in the village who gets caught in the middle of a conflict due to misunderstanding between his fellow villagers and the US army, which is carrying out a military exercise thereabouts. In Yours and Mine he plays an unkempt man with wild frizzy hair whose doubts about his sexual abilities prompts him to use a "vacuum enlarger" in an attempt to unleash his masculine powers.
Though he played the leading man in each of these films, Lin Cheng-sheng has never thought acting was his calling.
Memories of Youth
"I was just playing myself, sharing my own appearances with the audience," he says, describing himself as a poor actor whose body just moves back and forth. "True actors have got to do a lot of homework." If he were really to make a career out of acting, he feels that his performances should be making people who know him exclaim, "How is Lin Cheng-sheng acting like that!" He says that he has a nervous temperament and isn't suited to being in front of the camera.
Just as audiences were becoming familiar with Lin's talents as a comic actor, he was beginning to live out his dream of becoming a director. In 1995 he got a grant for NT$4 million that allowed him to start shooting his first full-length drama, A Drifting Life.
A Drifting Life is set in eastern Taiwan, where the tragic lives of a man and three generations of women unfold as the four seasons turn in their cycle. After the man's beloved wife dies in childbirth, the crushed husband takes to the road in great pain, leaving his daughter and son with his mother. He moves from place to place, finding work on construction sites and occasionally coming home to visit his family.
Evoking the atmosphere of a past era, the film is based on Lin's memories of childhood and his imaginings about his mother, who died young. In the film, the mother of the girl and boy dies young, and the girl forsakes school to take care of the boy, much as Lin's third sister, six years his senior, didn't graduate from elementary school until she was 15 because she had to take care of him.
Lin's second movie, Murmur of Youth, portrays the lives of two girls, both named Meili (which means beautiful), who start the film experiencing the tragedies and joys of youth in their separate lives. Eventually they both get a job in the same movie theater and become friends, enjoying their youth together. In one of the Taiwan film industry's biggest news events of last year, the actresses who play them, Liu Juo-ying and Tseng Ching, shared the award for best leading actress at the Tokyo Film Festival.
In Lin Cheng-sheng's two films the nature of the relationships between the female characters is rather ambiguous, so that some people even think that Murmur of Youth is a lesbian movie.
"It is true that women interest me more than men," Lin says. "A woman's psychology is delicate and complicated." Lin had never had a girlfriend before he got married. His twisted relationships with the opposite sex consisted either of secret crushes or trips to the whore house.
Murmur of Youth is an expression of my feelings about my mother and my realizations about married life," Lin says. As for A Drifting Life, he explains, "I wouldn't say that I shot a lesbian movie, for it really just touched upon the beginnings of love between two people of the same sex; it's really more about youth."
Going back in Time
Now that he is finally making films, he seems to be a success. But Lin has taken a career path that is much different from those of most aspiring Taiwanese directors.
Generally speaking, directors in Taiwan have taken one of two paths: They have either built up experience working in the field or they have graduated from film school. Lin neither came up through the ranks in the movie industry nor studied film in school. His off-the-beaten-path career has been described in some media reports as "legendary."
Lin grew up in southeastern Taiwan, in Taitung County's Kuanshan. His grandfather, who was active in the resistance to Japanese rule, was wanted by the authorities and had fled to Yenan, where the communists were based in the mainland. When Lin's grandfather left, Lin's grandmother was already pregnant, and when he finally returned from the mainland he discovered that he had a ten-year-old son. This was Lin's father, who had received a Japanese education and dreamt of pursuing advanced studies in Japan. Yet when Lin's grandfather returned to Taiwan, he forbade his son to read Japanese books. Lin's father deeply resented this, feeling that his bright future was being snuffed out by his own father.
As a child, Lin Cheng-sheng would frequently awaken to the arguments of his father and grandfather. "Life is very dramatic, and my father was destined to have a similar sort of relationship with his own son." Bitterness between the generations over thwarted ambitions ended up characterizing the relationship between Lin and his father too.
When Lin graduated from junior high school, his father insisted that he study at a vocational school to make it easier to find a job, whereas Lin thought he would only find happiness in life if he attended an academic high school and went on from there to college. In the end, he didn't attend either and ran away from home when he was 16.
Ever since the father objected to him studying at an academic high school, the father became Lin's object of resentment for life not working out the way he had planned. The road took him to Taipei, an unfamiliar place where he knew no one. He slept in the waiting room of the Taipei Train Station for many days. But dumbly sitting there was not making things better, and so he wandered off in the area behind the station, where he saw a bakery with an "Apprentice Wanted" sign. Lin walked in and ended up working there for 10 years.
During the difficult years of his apprenticeship, he hated his father. When he got tired of baking, unhappy over the prospects of spending a lifetime making bread, and yet having no alternatives apparent with only a junior-high-school education, he resented his father even more.
Epiphany
After he finished his military service, he didn't feel like baking any more, but he couldn't find any work that he really wanted, so he just went back to baking bread. Weary of it, he would work a while, quit, and then go back to it for a month or two when he was broke. Then, when he couldn't find a job, he would go to his father for money. He ended up working less and less and spending more and more of his father's money. When his father put his foot down and stopped giving him money, he started to steal it instead, first taking any cash he could find around the house and then taking his father's bank book and forging his signature on a withdrawal form. Eventually his father personally reported him to the police.
"I dared to take such liberties with my father and tortured him so because I had an excuse: Who told him not to let me go to an academic high school anyway? He was the one who took away my bright future."
It was by chance that he enrolled in a scriptwriting and directing class. Outside of a movie theater he happened to notice a sign announcing a film-making class put on by the Taipei Film Industry Association, and he thought he'd give it a try, but he never expected that it would give him a new lease on life.
At first, the most difficult part of the class was keeping himself awake during screenings of films by auteurs such as Fellini, which he couldn't really understand.
The first film to give him confidence was Citizen Kane by Orson Wells, the tale of a newspaper reporter struggling to uncover the meaning behind the last words of a newspaper baron. The visiting teacher asked the class for the meaning behind the film, and his classmates offered up a lot of film theory. The teacher didn't think it was that complicated, and Lin raised his hand and answered, "He's looking for love."
The first film to move him personally was the film Tokyo Story by the Japanese director Ozu Yasujiro. The film, about an old country couple who go to visit their children in Tokyo only to be given the cold shoulder, made him think about his own relationship to his father, and he suddenly understood something.
"In that old couple's helplessness I could see the feelings of my father," he says, "In their cries of pain, I could see my father's disappointment in me. And most of all, in their children's busy self-absorption I could see myself." He was depressed for a long time afterwards.
First love beneath the osmanthus
Films gave him more than just food for thought; they also improved his relationship with his father and allowed him to meet his wife, Ko Shu-ching.
Lin enrolled for the third term in which the screenwriting and directing class was offered. Ko Shu-ching had enrolled for the second term, but they became classmates when they both took the advanced class.
Lin Cheng-sheng and Ko Shu-ching came together thanks to a osmanthus tree. After class, Lin used to hang out with Ko and her buddies. One day, in front of his rented home in Hsintien, Lin climbed an osmanthus tree to pick a bloom, and when he looked below at Ko, who was just about to return to Kaohsiung, he suddenly felt a strange and indescribable attraction for her. Perhaps the fragrance of the blooms put a spell on him. The two went from classmates to sweethearts to husband and wife. They were both 29.
After getting married, Lin Cheng-sheng concentrated on writing screenplays, and the two would occasionally help out as hands on a farm friends ran up in the hills. On the Chingching Farm the couple had a big workers' shed to themselves, and Lin would joke that it was like they were taking their honeymoon again. Up there they didn't spend any money, and after they had saved up a bit, they would come back down to town.
When they knew that Hou Hsiao-hsien was going to film City of Sadness, they volunteered to work on the picture, but the day on which shooting was to start kept getting pushed back, and the two of them were once again called to work at their friend's orchard on Mt. Li. They left their number with a member of the film's crew, but soon thereafter they were surprised to read in the paper that filming had already started. "We felt very bad because we loved Hou Hsiao-hsien's movies," Lin recalls. "But all we could do was tell ourselves that we weren't fated to work on that picture."
A stack of scripts as tall as himself
The couple then rented an orchard on Mt. Li, investing NT$1.2 million. While the land did yield an abundant harvest a year later, the cheap price of fruit hurt farmers, and Lin and Ko lost almost all the money they had invested. Some apples that they couldn't sell they used for making apple wine.
Deciding to film the process of turning the apples to alcohol, they used the left over money to buy a simple camera. Lin, forever the "inquisitive boy," thus started fooling around with making documentaries.
In 1990, using the life of farmers who worked the orchards of Mount Li as a backdrop, he shot Old Chou, Old Wang, A-hai and Their Four Farm Hands, which won top honors in the China Times Express contest for non-commercial films.
The judges agreed that Lin's "creative approach was straightforward and unpretentious." One judge, Ching Ying-juei, noted, "The filmmaker wasn't intentionally trying to convey his affection for these people, but it is clear that he was like a friend to them. The uncomplicated relationship they have as equals gives the film great vitality. From the unhurried conversations distinct personalities emerge. The editing techniques used were also very straightforward."
Lin, whose hands had much experience of digging the soil, could get to the heart of the subject matter. They shot 70 reels, or 140 hours, and eventually it was cut down to a two-hour film.
In 1991 he shot Murmur of Youth (which has the same name as his second full-length drama he would later shoot), a documentary about a neighbor's daughter who loved to sing, tracking her life from adolescence to adulthood. In 1992 he returned to Mt. Li, and people's relationship to the land became once again a main theme in A-Feng's and A-Chien's Peacock Place. Both of these films also won awards from the China Times Express. He had won in the same category three years running, and in embarrassment decided not to enter any more of his documentaries.
Besides letting the camera speak, Lin was also hard at work writing. "The stack of screenplays I've written is as tall as me," he says. "There are more than a dozen stories." Looking now at what he had written, he feels that he was "seriously narcissistic," always writing about his own childhood and youth. "I could never finish all the stories I have to tell about myself. But who would want to read them? It is really pretty pathetic."
For three years running he competed in the Government Information Office's contest for outstanding screenplays without any success. His wife Ko Shu-ching, however, won with her first submission, High Mountain Balloon.
Using life for films
Throughout his life, Lin has found that new possibilities only presented themselves when he reached a point of desperation. Yet he feels he has been very lucky. "As soon as I got an idea to do something, I got the chance. When I didn't feel like writing screenplays, I started shooting documentaries. From filming documentaries came the opportunity to shoot short dramatic films."
In 1993, among the activities connected to the ROC's "Year of Films" included a contest for best short dramatic film. Lin received a grant to shoot a family drama: The Family Jewels. In 1995 and 1996, going the route of most new directors who get their money through government grants, he shot A Drifting Life and Murmur of Youth, both of which cost about NT$15 million, back to back.
Hsu Li-kung, a movie producer who has known Lin for 10 years, describes Lin and his wife as "film festival migratory birds." Whenever there was an international film festival, they would come down from the hills and help the sponsoring organization clean up the theaters and collect tickets in order to gorge themselves on watching films. "They're film buffs, pure and simple."
Hsu was moved by the realistic style of several of Lin's short films, especially for the way "he captured people's feelings for the land." As a result, when he became head of Central Motion Pictures, he offered to put up the money for A Drifting Life.
Some people believe that A Drifting Life, with its long shots that capture the changing light over the four seasons, was filmed in the mode of Hou Hsiao-hsien. Critic Huang Chien-ye agrees that Lin uses the camera in that film much as Hou does in his films, but points out that the film includes various spiritual and mystical elements, such as the appearance of the deceased mother's spirit, which are entirely absent from Hou's work. Furthermore, it is much colder and more removed in its handling of emotions.
In recent years the number of movies shot in Taiwan has dropped dramatically. Last year only 24 films were shot. Many directors make their first film only to find that they can't make a second. Huang Chien-ye believes that Lin has come out with films three years running because he has worked hard looking for opportunities. Still, "the film industry is in such dire straits here that you can't earn a living through them. It's dreaming to think you can."
Lin Cheng-sheng's hard work has borne fruit. After Hsu left Central Motion Pictures to start his own company, he teamed up with NHK from Japan to provide the financial backing to produce Lin's third film, Sweet Degeneration, about the relationship between a girl and her younger brother.
Hsu argues that the works of many directors, including Ang Lee and Tsai Ming-liang, reflect their backgrounds. "Lin Cheng-sheng draws on his life experiences for his movies too," Hsu says. "But whereas many directors choose to conceal the true face of life, Lin perhaps feels that progress will only happen if first people's dark inner sides are exposed!"
Getting settled
After marrying, Lin told his wife that he would never go back to working as a baker, which was a big disappointment to Ko Shu-ching, who loves to eat bread. After the orchard on Mount Li started losing money, Lin became certain that film was the only future left for him.
The two have always lived simply. When they left home and were renting a place to live, their monthly expenses would only amount to NT$7000-8000. But when you can barely support yourself, how are you to go about supporting the next generation. After they got married, Lin had a vasectomy.
Ko describes this change from another angle: Because Lin had such a bad relationship with his father, he worried that "his son would pay him back by resenting him." A few years later, husband and wife were getting along well. Ko's only complaint was that when shooting A Drifting Life, Lin was under enormous pressure and threw all his energies into the film, his first full-length dramatic feature. "I felt cast aside," she recalls.
A Drifting Life was entered in the contest for young directors at the Tokyo Film Festival, and it won second place. The award money went to make the down payment on a house in the Taipei suburb of Shenkeng, which they moved into last year. After drifting about for so long, the feeling of having a house and being settled, was-in Lin Cheng-sheng's words-"rather strange."
Directors in Taiwan are used to finishing one film and not knowing when they will have a chance to make another. This uncertainty has prompted Lin to imagine other lives for himself outside of film-perhaps going to Hualien or Taitung to open a small general store and write novels in his spare time.
"Making films aren't some vehicle for attaining an ideal or some great ambition," he says. "You'll only keep on with it for long if you approach it as a way of life."
Ko Shu-ching shot her first film three years ago, and now she hopes to shoot her screenplay High Mountain Balloon. The story is about a girl from the city who goes to Mount Li, where her father plants fruit trees. Husband and wife have already agreed that if she gets a director's grant this year both of them will throw themselves into its production, with Lin serving as the film's producer.
Films have saved my son
Lin long ago became conscious of how films have changed his life and character: "I speak with more confidence, but sometimes confidence turns into conceit. My wife scolds me often for getting too big for my britches."
But films' biggest impact on his life was in giving him more and more to talk about with his father. When Lin lived in Hsintien, his father would sometimes come by to take a novel back to his house to read. When he was reading novels by Shen Congwen, his father would often discuss them with him, and sometimes would write his own observations in the margins.
Lin recalls how his father once hid a letter notifying Lin about when his screenwriting and directing class would start, worrying that the bright lights of the movie world would lead his son astray. But before his father died, "he was suddenly moved to say one afternoon that he had never expected movies to save his son's life and let him live like a man," Lin recalls. "I'll always remember my father's mood on that day-it was a comfortable feeling of being at ease about his son."
After many anxious years, films let Lin Cheng-sheng find himself and let his father find his son.
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Shooting Murmur of Youth in the Taipei suburb of Hsichih the year before last. The short and fat Lin Cheng-sheng, who has worked baking bread, growing fruit trees and acting in films, has finally been able to realize his dream of directing. (photo by Chien Hsiang)
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For his first dramatic film, A Drifting Life, Lin drew on his own youth. When a young mother dies, her husband, heartbroken, leaves his children with his mother and takes to the road. Under this great burden, the grandmother's health flags. (courtesy of Central Motion Pictures)
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Two young actresses, Liu Juo-ying and Tseng Ching, shared the Tokyo Film Festival's best actress award for their work on Lin's Murmur of Youth, which describes the joys and sorrows of two young women who sell tickets in a movie theater. (courtesy of Central Motion Pictures)
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Not long after they married, Lin and his wife went to Mt. Li to grow fruit trees. His experiences there allowed him to shoot his first documentary, which earned him recognition when it won the China Times Express award for best documentary. (courtesy of Lin Cheng-sheng)
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Having moved to a house in the Taipei suburb of Shenkeng, Lin and his wife Ko Shu-ching finally feel settled. (photo by Pu Hua-chih)
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Films are based on stories told with words. When Lin isn't shooting films, he's hard at work writing at home. (photo by Pu Hua-chih)
Not long after they married, Lin and his wife went to Mt. Li to grow fruit trees. His experiences there allowed him to shoot his first documentary, which earned him recognition when it won the China Times Express award for best documentary. （courtesy of Lin Cheng-sheng）
Having moved to a house in the Taipei suburb of Shenkeng, Lin and his wife Ko Shu-ching finally feel settled. （photo by Pu Hua-chih）
Films are based on stories told with words. When Lin isn't shooting films, he's hard at work writing at home. （photo by Pu Hua-chin）
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