Queen of Taiwan's Film Industry--Ye Rufen

Soon after film festivals in Pusan and Tokyo, it was time for December's Golden Horse Awards. Ye Rufen took a few seconds to bask in the excitement and glory of hearing "And the winner is...," and then she was back to work scraping together funding for the next project. The Government Information Office (GIO) examines candidates for film production subsidies at the end of each year, and for the local industry, that's a key factor in whether or not a project can go ahead. "With a few million in subsidies as an endorsement, it's easier to find the next round of funding," Ye says. In late November 2008, she finally had some free time to sit down over tea and discuss film with a reporter.

Ye (second from left) took on the film Winds of September and did all she could to help first-time director Tom Lin (at center, with glasses) achieve his dream. The crew is pictured here at the Tokyo Film Festival.

Film is work and life

After all the work of promoting and selling a film and finding investments, people, and subsidies, there are only a few free days left at the end of the year. She can use the time to do her core work in her Taipei office on Fuxing South Road, which is a remodeled apartment and still has a kitchen. She reads scripts, discusses new projects with directors, or chats with her Ocean Deep Films co-workers about the progress of films in production.

In the evening, she has the rare opportunity to leave work early and see a movie in Ximending. "That's purely for pleasure," she says with a bright smile. Coming out of the theater, she hails a cab and heads for Shida Road. Opening the door of the Blue Note nightclub, she sees her friend, Orz Boyz director Yang Yazhe, is already there waiting for her. Dark beers arrive on the table, and the two filmmakers get to talking-the subject, of course, is film.

Just like in any other business, when you want to make a film in Taiwan, networking is key. These people work together and play together. Film pulls work and life together inextricably.

"If you need lighting, I can introduce someone. I don't have any projects going on right now, so I can be your assistant director and at least keep that feeling of working around film," Winds of September director Tom Lin once said. After Wei Te-sheng, or "Xiao Wei," as his friends call him, finished writing the script for Cape No 7, Lin was one of the first to read it. "Reading scripts, giving feedback, finding people, finding funding-everybody helps each other out. We'll even introduce commercial and television work to help pay the bills."

For Orz Boyz, which among last year's domestic films was second only to Cape No. 7 in popularity and box-office returns, Yang considered asking Ye to produce before settling on Li Lie.

However, "Rufen was too busy at the time," Yang says. In 2007 and 2008, all of her time was taken up by Red Cliff, Winds of September, and the Chinese-Japanese international production Tea Fight. Does she have to justify to herself working on Winds of September and missing out on the hit Orz Boyz?

"I don't think about it that way, because I said yes to Tom first. I always felt like I owed him a film. At that time I'd already signed on to Winds of September and couldn't accept an offer for another film. Moreover, Lie was so great. She supported Yazhe completely and found the right actors." Ye is confident that with domestic films finally getting attention, the success of any single filmmaker is a source of pride for all.

Miss Kicki, a joint production with Sweden, shows Ye's ambition. Pictured are Ye and director Hakon Liu (left) inspecting the just-finished footage.

Intensive course

When Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet won a Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1993, the GIO immediately announced that it was the year of Taiwanese film. The most important element of the promotion was an intensive filmmaking course that gave many young people with no experience or training a chance to learn what filmmaking was all about.

Ye was nervous about applying, but she was accepted. The brief course of just over two months was a formative experience for her, playing a key role in turning her into the powerful figure in the industry she is today.

"Actually, before I took the course I worked in a video parlor in Gongguan," she recalls. "This was before DVDs-there were only VHS tapes. The selection wasn't computerized, either. My job was finding the tapes."

"Some customers had big appetites and would want to watch one after another. Then I'd have to look all over for tapes, everything from French New Wave to the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu. Sometimes I'd have to write descriptions myself." At work, Ye was immersed in the world of film for two years. She read many books about film and saw hundreds of movies-all purely as an audience member. "That's how I got to know the films of the world," she says.

Ye (second from left) took on the film Winds of September and did all she could to help first-time director Tom Lin (at center, with glasses) achieve his dream. The crew is pictured here at the Tokyo Film Festival.

Taiwanese not spoken here

Her first experience filming was on a TV drama. Like many who are new to the industry, Ye took the title of "executive producer" but actually did a little of everything. She described the three-month production in Miaoli clearly on her blog:

"On that job, I was incredibly busy from morning till night. The production assistant and the prop master left in the middle, so every day I had to check the script, watch the budget, call actors to set, keep track of the cast and crew, find locations, bring actors from Taipei down south, borrow props, buy three meals.... We didn't stay in a hotel, either. The actors stayed in a residential building, the crew stayed in a courtyard house (which was also a filming location), and I had to clean up and do chores like taking out the garbage, making sure there was hot and cold water for bathing.... I couldn't really drive a nine-seat bus at the time, so I'd wait until the middle of the night to practice driving as I took all the trash away."

"The funniest part was, it was a Taiwanese-language show but our director, Song Cunshou, can't speak the language at all," she says. Thankfully, she managed all the hard work and earned the trust of the director. Song let Ye manage the budget and gave her the opportunity to use everything she learned in the two-month filmmaking course.

Ye's next job was on Lin Cheng-sheng's A Drifting Life. Without a thought, she gave up the steady work and paycheck of television and entered with Lin into the world of the silver screen.

In the 12 years since, Ye has worked with internationally known directors such as Lin and Tsai Ming-liang, as well as major investors and producers like Xu Ligong and Terence Chang, in critically acclaimed domestic films such as Murmur of Youth, Sweet Degeneration, Fleeing by Night, What Time Is It There, Brave 20, The Wayward Cloud, Silk, and Blood Brothers. Highlights of her TV work include April Rhapsody and The Legend of Eileen Chang.

The 2007 film God Man Dog, produced by Ye and directed by Singing Chen, was very well received in Taiwan and abroad. Pictured is a snapshot from their trip to the Pusan International Film Festival. To the left is the film's leading actress, Tarcy Su.

Promoting newcomers

In 2004, Ye started her own production company, Ocean Deep. Since then, her work has shifted from producing for "the big guys" to starting to help out newcomers and collaborate with cutting-edge artists. In just a few short years, she's worked with filmmakers like Zeng Wenzhen, Singing Chen, Tom Lin, and Wang Yemin, putting out their first films. Now she's working on the Taiwan-Sweden joint production Miss Kicki, the full-length debut of director Hakon Liu.

In addition to finding a creative script, the process of producing a film includes almost all the planning. In Hollywood, many films are produced in direct response to market trends. A producer finds a script or an original novel that fits the bill and then finds a director to work with. They work together step by step to create a product. For this kind of work, you need not only a sense for film quality, but also the sensibility to execute a plan.

Of the directors Ye worked with in her early years, most were "auteurs" with a strong individual style like Tsai Ming-liang and Lin Cheng-sheng. To them, a producer is just an assistant who cannot have any say in the direction the film takes. But Ye saw that the fatal flaw of Taiwanese film was placing the director first and valuing art over commerce. She also realized the cruel realities facing films after their release. So she made a big change in the way she produced films.

"After so many years of training, now when I look at a script the first thing I think about is, 'Does this film have an audience?' This audience isn't only in Taiwan but international," she says. In other words, "I look at the process the other way around, from the market back. That's especially the case with first-time directors. I always tell them that whatever they do they shouldn't become a 'one-film' director. Then if they want to go forward with it they have to think about the question of market appeal."

Knowing what's possible

Ye believes that films are collectively made products rather than individual artistic creations. Accordingly, teams making movies should be multi-faceted. The movies shouldn't be planned only by the producers but by the distributors and marketers as well, from the beginning of the process. This kind of specialized division of labor meets market conditions.

In order to keep her finger on the pulse of the market, Ye doesn't shy away from being thought of as a strong producer.

Winds of September director Tom Lin remembers how in 2004, when he was just 30 years old, he went to Ye with a script about a middle-school girl who dies during a botched abortion and ends up as a ghost. After reading it, Ye only gave one line of comments: "Too dark-it'll be hard to get the government funding!"

In order to help Lin, who she says has the basics of filmmaking down pat, Ye still passed the script along. As expected, the GIO didn't grant it a subsidy. In 2006, Lin wrote Winds of September. This time, Ye assisted with the entire process, from applying for GIO funding to the filming. She also requested Lin make revisions to the script so it would do better commercially.

"Originally there a scene in Winds of September in which the male and female leads were about to make love but the man was suddenly impotent," she explains. "I thought that to put this scene in a high-school movie was too much so I asked Tom to consider taking it out." It went on to become one of 2008's best Taiwanese films alongside Cape No. 7 and Parking.

Red Cliff brought together talent from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan to create a world-class Chinese-language film. The sketch below was provided by art director Wong Ga-lang. In the photo above, Xiao Qiao (played by Lin Chiling) and Cao Cao (Zhang Fengyi) pair off against one another in a scene. At right, the ruse devised by Zhuge Liang (Takeshi Kaneshiro) to capture arrows from Cao Cao's archers is crowned with success.

Sense makes sensibility

After settling on a script and director comes a critical part-in order to win investors' confidence, Ye has to read the market and distribution channels as well as keep control of the budget.

"At least in Taiwan, producing is a job that depends on experience," she says. For example, in addition to professionals like producers, directors, actors, cinematographers, artists, lighting people, sound people, and set administrators, you also need people to rent locations and equipment and produce CGI effects. All of these have to be coordinated and the price has to be right, as do the conditions for them to work together. And it's not enough to try to figure it all out in advance. "There are so many changes right before filming starts, so when plan A falls through you have to have a plan B. You have to think about all of this as you're looking at the script and estimate how doable it is."

About this aspect, Red Cliff producer Terence Chang says of Ye, "I think she is the young Taiwanese producer who best grasps the market."

Red Cliff brought together talent from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan to create a world-class Chinese-language film. The sketch below was provided by art director Wong Ga-lang. In the photo above, Xiao Qiao (played by Lin Chiling) and Cao Cao (Zhang Fengyi) pair off against one another in a scene. At right, the ruse devised by Zhuge Liang (Takeshi Kaneshiro) to capture arrows from Cao Cao's archers is crowned with success.

Breaking a path

In 2006, John Wu returned to the Chinese-language film world after a long absence, announcing that Red Cliff would begin production, and that the producer would be his working partner of more than 20 years, Terence Chang. As Chang had worked with Ye before and seen her ability to control a budget, he hired her onto the production team with the title "administrative producer." She was in charge of a budget of more than US$70 million.

There were more than 700 actors on set, and more than 400 horses were used in filming. There were 120 vehicles on hand, with 120 drivers. All of it was under Ye's control.

Woo, who was used to filming big-budget films, would use five cameras for almost every scene. "To save money, I'd always have to think of an excuse," Ye says. "For example, the day before, I'd say 'Tomorrow's scene is indoors. Can we use one less camera?' Or sometimes I'd have to tell an out-and-out lie, saying one of the cameramen was sick. Anyway, I'd save every little bit I could," she explains with a smile.

"Red Cliff had what's known as second-team and third-team directors. For some scenes, John Woo would design the shots and delegate the shooting to another director. Woo wouldn't even be there," explains Tom Lin, relating what Ye said about the filming process. Familiar with the "cottage-industry" style of most Taiwanese films, Lin has a hard time even imagining such a complicated classic Hollywood-studio-style production with its multiple chains of command.

"With a huge production like Red Cliff, there are always good and bad things to be said. But when I think how this film is the work of people from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the mainland, and how they did their best because one person had a dream, I feel so moved," he says.

Ye hopes that by sharing her valuable experience she can help new filmmakers become more imaginative about their work. This is the way for Taiwanese filmmakers' storytelling to become more established, and for audiences to have more films to watch.

Red Cliff brought together talent from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan to create a world-class Chinese-language film. The sketch below was provided by art director Wong Ga-lang. In the photo above, Xiao Qiao (played by Lin Chiling) and Cao Cao (Zhang Fengyi) pair off against one another in a scene. At right, the ruse devised by Zhuge Liang (Takeshi Kaneshiro) to capture arrows from Cao Cao's archers is crowned with success.

To film the life story of Chiang Ching-kuo, Ye Rufen (third from right) went to great expense to shoot on location in Russia. Working in the ice and snow was an unforgettable experience.