Q: Huang Yu-siang is at the heart of your works so far; what is it about him that you want to get across to audiences through these three films?

A: I met Yu-siang at the 2005 Presidential Education Awards, where all of the recipients were physically challenged and/or from difficult family circumstances. The organizers had asked me to select one of the recipients to make a documentary about.

When I was younger, I always found myself sympathetic to the subjects of my documentaries, and sometimes the weight of their emotions could get to be too much to bear.

When I learned about Yu-siang being both visually impaired and a musician, he particularly caught my attention. In person, he seems very quiet and reserved, but the moment he starts playing, he becomes someone else, someone more confident, with a big smile on his face. It was this that made me think he’d be the perfect choice for the subject of my film.

Once the documentary, Prelude, was finished, Yu-siang tested into the Music Department at National Taiwan University of Arts, the same school I was at, so we had even more chances to hang out.

When he had just started his first year there, he was having trouble adjusting, and after we talked for a while, I got the feeling that his story still needed to told, but this time not in the documentary format, so I wrote a script, and in 2007 I shot the short film The End of the Tunnel.

I asked Yu-siang to take part, giving him a different experience and the chance to meet some new and different people. Honestly, I feel like through The End of the Tunnel, Yu-siang was able to get past a lot of the feelings of restriction that come with not being able to see, and so for him it was more than just the experience of being an actor, but one of transcending himself.

Q: Did you have to make a conscious change in how you told Yu-siang’s story as you moved from the documentary format into dramatic film?

A: Shooting the documentary helped me learn to really study characters and observe events, which was a huge help in my later efforts to create characters and give my films a sense of truthfulness.

Even though the people and events in The End of the Tunnel were real, I hoped to tell a story that was my own and not entirely Yu-siang’s, as well as to slip the bonds of simply telling an entirely reality-based story. Basing things on real people and real events was, of course, a great foundation, but after finishing The End of the Tunnel, I was more conscious of my desire to get even further away from the restrictions of “reality.” I didn’t want to be “trapped” by the truth, but instead wanted to really let my imagination run wild.

Virtually everyone who studies film dreams of one day creating their own feature film, and after shooting the documentary and short film, I not only had the resources, but had also matured as a filmmaker enough to have a go at making a full-length feature.

Q: Touch of the Light tells a very down-to-earth story, one without too much in the way of melodrama. Why was this?

A: It’s like singing a song—every singer brings their own interpretation to it, and singing is like speaking, in that the different ways each person sings reveal something about their individual personalities. The attitude of each piece comes from the “author,” so to speak. I don’t really consider myself much good at critique; instead I prefer to use a more lifelike, less melodramatic sort of approach, as I did in telling the “seeing/unseeing” story. That’s just my personality, my style.

But in the future, will I try and apply a different approach? Well, maybe. I’ve shot several commercials, adding elements of comedy and romance to them, so my style is certainly not absolutely fixed, but in the case of Touch of the Light, this kind of gentler attitude was what I wanted.

Q: Which character in Touch of the Light, aside from Yu-siang, is your favorite?

A: I found A-Qing quite interesting for how he represented how we (the cast and crew) treated Yu-siang: like A-Qing, we just treated Yu-siang like anyone else, and through A-Qing, we wanted to do something completely different to the stereotypical way in which blind people are treated in film.

The other character I liked was Sheu Fang-yi’s teacher character: she was really someone I looked up to and learned a lot from, both in and out of character. Some actors are very different in person from the image they project, but Fang-yi was the same person no matter what; all we did was bring out her true self in the film. For the scenes where she and her students interact, we first went to see how she actually teaches, then crafted scenes that were similar to that. This also gave her something familiar to do, rather than having her do something unfamiliar or trying to force her into situations where she didn’t feel totally comfortable.

Q: Is there much of yourself in Touch of the Light?

A: Of course, the biggest part would be in how A-Qing and Yu-siang get along. In the past, I was worried about whether or not something I was going to say would hurt Yu-siang, even if it was just something innocent like “Don’t you see?” or “You can go on your own.” I was so over-cautious about everything. But in the past few years, we’ve begun joking around with each other, and I’ll sometimes get him to go do something or other himself. This is honestly how I think you should really treat friends who are “different” in some way—like everyone else. I wanted this kind of attitude to come through in the film, so that’s the attitude that A-Qing and the rest of Super Music show.

Xiao-Jie is also a bit of projection on my part; growing up, I saw a lot of people like her. Those of us who study film, we all have big dreams for what we want to do, but after we graduate from university or graduate school, how many of us really end up in the industry, never mind directing?

Xiao-Jie is much like most of today’s young people, getting bogged down in “real life” after graduation and never going on to realize the dreams they had as students.

In the time I’ve known Yu-siang, I’ve learned a lot about the idea of “seeing” and “not seeing,” which is really the core idea of this film. We see so much these days, but in the process of looking, there’s so much that we overlook or just don’t see clearly. It’s not about being blind as a weakness—Xiao-Jie has her own weaknesses, as does A-Qing. Every one of us does, in fact.

In Touch of the Light, I wanted to create a cinematic world where Yu-siang could feel free and fearless, where he didn’t have to worry about how people saw him, where he could live his own life under his own steam without having to rely too much on others. This was also what I wanted out of The End of the Tunnel.

Touch of the Light is the concluding chapter in Chang Jung-chi’s “Seeing/Unseeing” trilogy, and is the first time Huang Yu-siang and Chang have worked together on a feature-length film. This photo shows the two discussing the details of a scene during shooting.

Performing in the film gave Huang the chance to make new music-loving friends, who have since formed the band Baba Band. This photo shows them performing at a live venue, with vocals from Japanese singer Masaki Baba.