Comes the producer
At a roundtable discussion between cinema directors from Taiwan and mainland China that was held in Taipei in June 2009, Feng Xiaogang said that ever since the making of A World without Thieves in 2004, Chen had worked together with him on all his scripts, helped him to find his main filming and artistic crew members, and found the right cast members who could be hired within budget.
Feng notes that "the position of producer didn't even exist in mainland China's film industry until Chen introduced the concept, but now people are starting to appreciate the advantages of having a producer."
Chen explains that he does two types of work as a producer. First, he decides on a general theme and develops a script, then he looks for investors, recommends a director, and gets a crew together. On matters of this sort he wields rather strong control. This was the model for his collaboration with Tsui Hark, for example, in making the martial-arts film based on the story of the famous Judge Dee.
Another form of collaboration is like that employed in the making of Mountain Patrol (a story about the efforts of rangers in Tibet to fight against poachers) or the movies of Feng Xiaogang, where the director comes up with an idea for a movie and Chen makes a judgment call regarding its feasibility.
When Feng was preparing to film Assembly, a story about the bonds of brotherhood between soldiers fighting in the Chinese civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists, he was originally considering having Hong Kong star Andy Lau in the cast, but Chen advised against it as soon as he heard about the idea, because he felt it would ring insincere to cast a Hong Kong actor in a movie where the lead role is a soldier from the People's Liberation Army.
"I often follow my hunches without stopping to question myself, and at times I get a bit nervous about that, and whether it might not lead me to really mess up a movie someday." But hunches are rooted in experience, and Chen's intuition seldom leads him astray. Feng took Chen's advice by casting Zhang Hanyu, who had always played in supporting roles. Zhang ended up winning the 45th Golden Horse Award for Best Leading Actor in 2008, which propelled him into the ranks of mainland China's top actors.
Aiming high
As a film-industry veteran who has spent many years shuttling quietly back and forth between Beijing and Taipei, Chen is often asked whether there are still opportunities for people in Taiwan's film industry to advance their career in mainland China.
Chen says that when he first arrived in the mainland, he felt that it would be impossible for him to carry through on a lot of his ideas unless Huayi Brothers had enough mid-level people. Mainland China, furthermore, was still an emerging film industry with insufficient personnel, while filmmakers in Taiwan and Hong Kong already had half a century of experience, so all the core people involved in marketing and production were hired in Taiwan.
However, some of the types of positions where the mainland is short on qualified people cannot be filled by professionals from Taiwan. In such areas as art, props, and costumes, for example, the mainland already has decades of experience in the making of television dramas, while specialists from Korea and Thailand are hired to fill positions that have been created more recently, such as computer graphics and special-effect makeup. Over the near term, Taiwan and Hong Kong will still be an important source of manpower for mainland China's movie industry.
As for the future of Taiwan cinema, Chen laments that "Taiwan's filmmakers feel contented to serve the Taiwan market rather than aim at the entire Asian audience." He feels that Taiwan movies ought to target the mainland China market. For example, a director from Taiwan who doesn't insist on using only actors from Taiwan, but is willing to also use actors from Hong Kong and the mainland, and is willing to film some scenes on the mainland, may be able to attract mainland or foreign investors.
"As long as you're ambitious," says Chen, "it doesn't matter if you meet with setbacks. You just learn your lessons and keep pushing forward."