Partners in business
Looking at today’s Taiwanese filmdom, partners like Tsai and his wife Yu Hsiao-hui are few. They do all promotions and publicity work as a couple. But how do they separate their private and work lives?
Yu admits, “It’s really hard. Sometimes when we have disagreements at work, I get confused: our feelings for each other are so deep, so why do we have to fight so often about work? And then when we go home we just pretend nothing happened.”
As to who blinks first, she says with little hesitation, “Of course it’s me. How could ‘Wu Yingxiong’ blink first? We’re different from how we appear: I look strong, but he’s really the stronger one, and we need to respect him.”
Though he doesn’t blink easily, he is a good father. Says Yu Hsiao-hui, when not filming, Tsai dotes on the children and enjoys organizing the house. He loves cooking, preparing everything from simple mapo doufu to banquet-grade abalone chicken soup; he checks recipes, learning and refining his technique.
Married over decade, Yu Hsiao-hui says frankly, “He gives less time to his family and more to the audience. The kids and I know he’s busy, and we adjust our time to be with him.”
Because of his upbringing, filming is in Tsai’s blood. “In the early years, a Taiwanese director was like an emperor. Once on the set, everything needed to be done right, and the director just sat in the director’s chair giving orders. This is not the case at all now; directors of our generation like Niu Chen-zer or Giddens Ko not only need to know their work, they also need to know how to deal with people,” says Tsai.
As a scion of a Taiwanese directing family, Tsai has been greatly influenced by his father.
“Everyone was impressed by my father’s Gangland Odyssey in which Alex Man won the Golden Horse Award for Best Actor, but in fact, before that, he filmed Taiwan’s first social commentary film The First Error Step, shooting scenes at Huaxi Street, getting local gangsters to help out. So when he was filming indoors, the gangsters were fighting for turf outside. Even then he was a director who dared to film materials that the audiences loved to watch,” says Tsai.
“Lots of people say I’m fussy, but my father’s even more so, reluctant to shoot if the weather and lighting aren’t just right. For Big Land, Flying Eagles, he needed to shoot a scene of people flying out of the desert. It was just around Chinese New Year and it was raining, so he sent some crew members to Baishawan to bring back some sand, and cooked it dry in a big metal wok, since wet sand won’t blow away. Each time director Li Hsing saw my dad, he’d say, ‘You’ve forgotten how scary you were before,’” says Tsai, smiling heartily, his expression exuding admiration.
Yu Hsiao-hui has considered making her father-in-law’s long and winding life into a movie.
When Tsai Yang-ming was born, his family left him for dead, thinking he was stillborn. Luckily a relative discovered that he was still alive, and his life was spared. Once when he was falsely accused of stealing money as a child, he jumped into a well to kill himself, but was rescued. Like a blade of grass, he lived a tough and lowly life. After growing up he made a vow at the temple in Beigang that he’d one day be a movie star. Everyone laughed at him, but it turned out that he really became a star.
Yu Hsiao-hui says that the aim of this film would not be to praise her father-in-law, but to record the history of Taiwanese film through his life, and to record an era of Taiwan and the “vitality and fighting spirit of the little guy.”
Tsai, who built his career filming TV drama series, has recently crossed over into filmmaking, pursuing his ambition to bring Taiwanese film into the international arena.