Many people thought that Ah-Chung was one of the best of the 18 Taiwan-made movies that were released last year. Its director, Chang Tzou-chi, has only come to people's attention recently, but his experiences over the last decade are representative of Taiwanese directors as a group.

A cold front swept across Taiwan in the days before the Chinese New Year, a time when film distributors prepare to make a killing at the box office. The made-in-Taiwan Ah-Chung, which had been finished for a year, was finally scheduled to open on January 25. The film's imminent encounter with audiences couldn't help but please its makers, but people in the industry were skeptical about how well it could do without big names in its cast.

It was facing tough competitors: Jackie Chan in First Strike, Tom Cruise in Jerry McGuire, Sylvester Stallone in Daylight, and Amuro Namie in That's Cunning, not to mention all the 101 dalmatians.

With a no-name cast and a production budget that came to only one-twelfth of First Strike's, director Chang Tzou-chi hadn't wanted to open against those Chinese, Japanese and American stars.

Just don't let them fall asleep

But Hong Rong Films President Lin Tien-lung, provider of half the movie's money, had had his fortune read in mainland China and had been told that he would make a bundle in January, so January it was. Chang resigned himself to the decision. "The box-office returns for domestic films are so poor that there's no longer any such thing as a 'strong season' or a 'weak season.' I'd rather go up against Jackie Chan's First Strike and play the tragic hero," he said.

Although prepared to take a beating, when they heard that theaters in southern and central Taiwan were putting their posters for Ah-Chung in storage instead of pasting them up, and when on opening day people came to theaters only to find that the film had already been replaced by Western movies, the makers of Ah-Chung angrily complained to the media that the theaters weren't even giving them a fair chance.

Chang, who himself worries about dozing off while at the cinema, says that he only had one hope when filming Ah-Chung: "That audiences wouldn't fall asleep." "There are many different measures of a drama's quality," he explains. "Not sending the audience to sleep is the least you can do." Domestic audiences have seemingly come to the conclusion that all Taiwanese films are "downers," and so he felt that the most he could aspire to was to "keep the audience from getting up and leaving in the middle, so that I could hear their opinions after they had seen the film all the way through."

Chang points to proof of his success: When the film was shown at the Golden Horse Film Festival last year, the audience was laughing for tens of minutes, and when it went to festivals in Europe, mainland China and other places, the audiences would ask if Ah-Chung had smashed a real beer bottle against his head in the final scene when he gets so angry in a fight with his father. Chang feels that he has accomplished what he hoped, in that at least audiences have watched the film to the end.

Easy to be a god, tough to be a man

Ah-Chung is a typical critically acclaimed work. It was first screened at the Chinese-language Golden Horse Film Festival late last year. Afterwards members of the audience would tell Chang that they planned to bring their mother when it opened in the theaters because the mother described in the film was so familiar. And the film critics and members of the media who saw the film before it was formally released praised it, calling it the biggest surprise among Taiwanese films last year.

Apart from providing free publicity, the reviews showed how much the critics admired this work that was deeply etched with impressions about lower-middle-class family life in Taiwan. To date, the film has participated in more than 20 international film festivals, garnering such awards as the special critics' prize as the Asia-Pacific Film Festival, the best director's prize at the Thessaloniki festival in Greece, and critics' prizes for the second- and third-best festival films.

A second-generation mainlander, Chang doesn't speak Taiwanese well, yet still he made a film whose dialogue is entirely in colloquial Taiwanese. "The language is what these characters would habitually use in everyday life; beyond that, there wasn't anything intended by the choice," Chang says. The eight household generals, which are a group of Taoist exorcists, provided a backdrop for the story. He had wanted to tell a true-to-life tale about little guys ever since he observed the lives of people outside the cities when shooting a documentary about life on the Kuantu Plain.

The entire film is told through the eyes of Ah-Chung, the film's namesake. It depicts one family that lives on the Kuantu Plain. The mother performs in a traveling kangle music and drama troupe; the father is an alcoholic taxi driver. The two have lived apart for many years but don't want to break the ties of marriage. After the older sister-the father's child but not the mother's-is raped by her father, she leaves home to live with a gangster. The mentally handicapped little brother says over and over that he wants to go to the drainage channel to dig for crabs. The mother's father is very proud when Ah-Chung adopts his maternal surname, and he plans to go back to his old house to inform his ancestors.

The extremely superstitious mother hopes that all that has been going wrong with the family will be righted when Ah-Chung joins the eight household generals. From his experiences with his fellow generals, many of whom are gangsters, Ah-Chung comes to the conclusion that "it's easy to be a god, hard to be a man."

True-to-life drama

The critic Wen Tien-ping says of the film that "it is written in simple film language and delves deep into lower-class life in Taiwan. The natural performances of the cast make the film even more incisive and persuasive." Quite a few people who have seen this film have been struck by the impression that "the entire film is so true-to-life it's almost like a documentary."

In response to such reactions, Chang patiently explains that many people regard "true-to-life" and "documentary" as equivalents, but he believes that while the film may be infused with the spirit of documentaries, "what the film offers is still drama."

Because he couldn't afford big-name actors, Chang strategically used people who came from backgrounds similar to the characters they were playing. For instance, Chiou Hsiou-min, who plays the mother, is in real life a singer for a kangle troupe. The grandfather actually plays nanguan and beiguan music on his suona horn at the gate of a Keelung Temple.

It is remarkable how the actors, nearly all acting for the first time, deliver performances that ring so true. "The portrayal of the family amplifies greater issues about society and life in Taiwan." In the film, the mother shrewishly yells at the neighborhood chief, but then she considerately cares for her aging father and the members of her family both old and young, supporting a family that her scoundrel of a husband has abandoned and abused, showing the strength and vitality of Taiwanese women. The performance, Chiou's first on the silver screen, earned critics' praise and a Golden Horse for best supporting actress.

To get the non-professionals up to speed, before filming Chang brought them together in the house where the film was to be shot. They cooked, ate and conversed together. The crew anxiously waited for a whole month, but the director never said when they would start shooting. Then one day, Chang was watching Chiou cook as she chatted with the actress playing the older sister, and the actor playing Ah-Chung shouted from upstairs, demanding to know who had moved things around in his room. At last Chang said that they would start shooting the next day.

Starting as an apprentice

Apart from the character of the younger brother-for whom Chang had all along wanted to use an actually mentally retarded person-the cast is composed of non-professionals solely for reasons of cost: he only had NT$8 million to spend.

There are few companies willing to invest in a film by a new director, which is a major stumbling block facing many who dream of making movies in Taiwan. "No two routes to becoming a director are the same, and yet Chang's path is very representative," says Wang Chih-cheng, the editor-in-chief of Premi鋨e, a film magazine that will start publication soon. Chang had a broad grounding in movies, from making documentaries, to writing scripts, to applying for grants and completing the process of shooting a film. "His experiences encapsulate those of all Taiwanese directors."

The 36-year-old Chang studied electronics in vocational school, and when he was serving in the military was assigned to a movie screening unit. Seeing movies every day, he developed a yearning to make them. After he finished his military service, he entered the film department at Chinese Culture University. Upon graduation, he went to the West Gate district of Taipei, "where there were eight film companies in a single building." There he worked moving props, setting up lights, and doing all sorts of odd jobs, before serving as an assistant director for Yu Kan-ping, Tsui Hark, and Hou Hsiao-hsien.

This period of apprenticeship lasted for four years, during which time he saw the stark differences between movie production in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

For the many productions being made every year in Hong Kong, where the industry was booming, the same basic material would be recycled over and over again. Chang recalls that when Hong Kong director Tsui Hark came to Taiwan to film the King of Chess, he once said, "What are we waiting for now?" To which came the response, "To adjust the lighting." Hsu replied, "The shot is only three seconds long. The audience won't have time to notice your lighting. Shoot!" Conforming to this faced-paced working style, the crew would retire to the hotel at night and rest briefly, before meeting again and not breaking until breakfast, after which they would continue with the morning's work. In this way, without having time to sleep, they completed the film in 12 days.

From fastest to slowest

In 1988 Chang worked on Hou Hsiao-hsien's film City of Sadness. Hou was accustomed to holding up a cigarette to a scene, musing for a long time, and calling the cinematographer over for a look before finally concluding, "The feeling isn't right. Let's stop shooting today." The move would stun the crew and actors, who had already put on their costumes and make-up.

Chang's experience working with Hou, who makes art-house type productions, has deeply influenced the way that Chang works. In filming Ah-Chung, Chang would often look for impromptu developments among the actors themselves. He would film them chatting and included bits of their discussions in the film itself. Chang says that he learned his respect for actors from Hou.

Along with experiencing both the quickest and slowest paces of shooting, his own ambitions would change too: "In my first year in the movie industry, I often thought that I would like to be a director," Chang recalls, "but in the second year I had no such desire, because the prospects of becoming one seemed so distant." Many of his colleagues were still nursing dreams to become directors themselves after working as assistant directors for a decade or more.

Why do so many people want to become directors? Chang says it's because "it's so difficult." Films are a combination of so many different arts, and after working in these media, one is inclined to want to "undertake that final challenge."

Storytellers

In many people's impression movie makers are all dreamers. "A more accurate way of putting it is that we like to have people listen to our stories, but we don't like to open our mouths to tell them," Chang says.

The path to becoming a director is a long one. After shooting City of Sadness, Chang's friends all turned to making quick bucks in the advertising industry, whereas he turned to making documentaries for television about teenage motorcycle races and drug use. "Teenagers are full of energy, and well matched with my personality," he says. He also had written a script entitled Midnight Shooting describing a policeman with a Jekyll-and-Hyde personality who saw his mother commit adultery when he was young, and now, without fully being aware of what he is doing, kills a criminal while making an arrest. Chang, like every aspiring new director, applied for a government grant, and after great struggle was able to secure one for NT$4 million in 1992.

But the road that followed was a rocky one. Originally he had applied for the grant under the auspices of his friend's company, but the company then requested that Chang put up NT$4 million of his own money as collateral, in case the movie was never completed and the government asked for the money to be returned. As Chang was unable to come up with NT$4 million, negotiations fell through, and in the end he painfully had to let go of the grant money.

The following year the Hong Kong director Chang Chih-lang happened to hear about Midnight Shooting, and agreed to pay Chang Tzou-yi NT$6 million to make it. Once the film was finished, Chang Chih-lang worried that Hong Kong audiences might be put off by so much dialogue in Taiwanese, and so he cut 30 minutes of it before showing it at the Hong Kong Film Festival. Although as executive producer Chang Chih-lang had the right to edit as he saw fit, Chang Tzou-yi felt that as the original director he should have at least been informed, and even today he doesn't acknowledge the film as his work. It has never had any prospects of being shown in Taiwan.

Grant money

In 1994 Chang got a grant of NT$4 million to make Ah-Chung. The film was originally budgeted for NT$14 million, but Lin Tien-jung, the boss of Hong Rong Films, who had offered to back the film on the original budget, told Chang that because he had invested in film facilities in the mainland he had cash-flow problems, and could only give him NT$4 million. He hoped Chang could find other backers. Chang went to the Central Motion Picture Studios, but Central didn't want the scene of the father raping the daughter, so negotiations fell through.

From shooting to finishing the editing took one year, and then it took another year for the film to hit the screens. So Chang devoted two whole years to the film.

"As time went on, I began to ask myself if there was any point to all the struggle. I started to wonder if I was displaying perseverance or pigheadedness. But I suppose pigheadedness is a condition that doesn't last that long," Chang says. "Film makers ought to devote their energies to making films." The other work they do is not part of their true calling.

Unfortunately, in Taiwan there is no way for them to focus simply on making movies. Making a movie is like giving birth to a child that has been inside you for nine months. Others may not love it, but you can't abandon it yourself. If theaters aren't willing to publicize it, then you paste up the posters yourself. What with all the festivals, the whole process forced Chang, as he sees it, to become someone else. He feels very uncomfortable in a suit and tie. And both at festivals and in publicity interviews he found it even more annoying to try again and again to recall how he felt while shooting, after memories had had two years to dim.

Testing the depths for a year

Some people described last year as "a year in which the film industry hit rock bottom."

"Ah-Chung was lucky and media coverage helped a lot, but you've got to understand that First Strike and 101 Dalmatians got ten times the exposure, and the media was likewise supporting them," he says. In Taiwan the media is the only group left paying any attention to locally produced movies.

Be that as it may, Chang says that the audience really needn't understand a film's behind-the-scenes story; they really just want to see the finished product. Many people believe that it's very difficult to shoot movies in Taiwan, but Chang says, "Saying something is difficult has no meaning. It's like saying 'driving a cab is hard work, so fares ought to go up.' 'It's hard to make movies, so people ought to come and see them.'" Of course that's not how things work.

Yet in the second half of last year there were Chinese movies that grossed as little as NT$70,000 and NT$250,000 at the box office. A distributor told Lin Tien-jung, "Ah-Chung has no name actors; if it earns NT$1 million it will be doing quite well. It ended up grossing NT$1.6 million in two weeks.

When Chang's parents saw the film, their immediate reaction was to hope their son would change fields. They saw Ah-Chung at a theater in Chungho, where they discovered that all day only seven people bought tickets for it. They figured its director's future in film couldn't be too bright.

Apart from a lack of financial security, what people find most frustrating about making movies is the lack of respect. Films are a combination of all the visual arts, and one would think that the profession ought to have high status, but Chang explains that if you want to borrow a site for shooting, as soon as they hear that it's for a movie, they won't let you use it. "A director still has a future, because you can work in television or advertising," he says. But what future is there for a gaffer? One of the actors in Ah-Chung was a crew chief for City of Sadness. Afterwards he worked operating excavators at construction sites and earned as much as NT$20,000 a day. He took more than 10 days off to film Ah-Chung but for that Chang could only pay him NT$20,000. Making movies may be a collaborative art, but only directors get much attention, so they count as the lucky ones.

Although he is still in the field and quite determined to make movies, Chang is clear in stating, "The ones still at it are not necessarily the most talented." Whether in applying for grants or attending film festivals, there are so many rules to the game. Half of it's luck, and the rest is a battle of will and endurance. Being more determined than the next guy is the key to seeing one's dream of movie making bear fruit!

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Director of Ah-Chung, Chang Tzou-chi has struggled to make a living in the depressed Taiwan film industry for more than a decade. The film tells the story of a youth in the Kuantu Plain who joins a group of Taoist exorcists in an attempt to dispel the misfortune that has befallen his family. It offers deep insights into life among the common people in Taiwan. (courtesy of Hong Rong Films)

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The West Gate district of Taipei, which holds the largest concentration of theaters in Taipei, has long been a domain dominated by Western movies.

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The economic state of Taiwanese film has reached its nadir. Though Ah-Chung won award after award for artistic achievement, movie theaters wouldn't even paste up its promotional posters.

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The director consults with his cinematographer. Visually, Ah-Chung is quite simple, and yet it manages to convey deep meaning. At the Zhuhai Film Festival in mainland China, the film won an award for best cinematography. (courtesy of Hong Rong Pictures)

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A climactic scene from the film. Troupes of eight household generals, who perform at special temple ceremonies, play a unique role in Taiwan's folk culture. (courtesy of Hong Rong Pictures)

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Although the film-maker's road is a tough one, Chang Tzou-chi can't pull himself from it.

The economic state of Taiwanese film has reached its nadir. Though Ah-Ch ung won award after award for artistic achievement, movie theaters wouldn't even paste up its promotional posters.

The director consults with his cinematographer. Visually, Ah-Chung is qu ite simple, and yet it manages to convey deep meaning. At the Zhuhai Film Festival in mainland China, the film won an award for best cinematography. （courtesy of Hong Rong Pictures）

A climactic scene from the film. Troupes of eight household generals, who perform at special temple ceremonies, play a unique role in Taiwan's folk culture. （courtesy of Hong Rong Pictures）

Although the film-maker's road is a tough one, Chang Tzou-chi can't pull himself from it.