Taiwan Today

Chung Mong-hong combines a gift for visual storytelling with profound sentiment.

To filmmaker Chung Mong-hong (鍾孟宏), nothing matters more than staying faithful to the art of cinema. “Truth to tell, I don’t care about being a ‘humanist’ director,” Chung says of the title often bestowed on him by critics in Taiwan. “What I want to do is to convert my ideas into visuals and stories and make decent films.”

Chung’s fans seem to appreciate his approach. For many viewers, the appeal of the 47-year-old director’s work is in its many layers—its sheer visual splendor, accurate mise-en-scène, ample possibilities for interpretation, idiosyncratic camera work and subtle ways of approaching the subject matter, which usually revolves around the predicament of less fortunate or marginalized members of society.

Staying faithful to the art of cinema has been working quite well for Chung and stands in contrast with the goal of commercial success sought by many industry insiders, especially financial backers. Since 2006, he has scripted and directed one picture every other year, adding cinematography to his credits since 2008. Each of his films has met critical success locally and internationally. Doctor (2006), for example, won the award for best documentary at the 2006 Taipei Film Festival and screened at New York’s prestigious Museum of Modern Art’s Documentary Fortnight in 2008. Also in 2008, his first feature, Parking, was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard category, which showcases young directors or innovative works. Two years later, Chung’s The Fourth Portrait won seven nominations at the 2010 Golden Horse Film Festival, where it garnered awards for best director and best supporting actress. Currently, he is working on the thriller Soul, which is slated for release in 2013.

French film magazine Première lauded Parking as “the best thing to happen to Taiwanese movies in a long time.” Lin Wen-chi (林文淇), director of the Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC) at northern Taiwan’s National Central University, agrees with that assessment. “Chung is surpassing his contemporaries with a vibrant signature style and rare sense of cinematography, both of which have been absent since the heyday of [Taiwan’s] prime exponents of the craft like Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢), Edward Yang (楊德昌, 1947–2007) and Tsai Ming-liang (蔡明亮) in the 1990s,” Lin says.

Remarkably, only seven years ago Chung was best known as a director of commercials with more than 100 advertisements to his credit. His rise to movie fame was not due to an abrupt change of heart, nor the result of serendipity, however, as making movies has been the director’s dream since early adolescence. “As a kid living in the countryside, I found watching movies to be such a pleasure and one that opened a whole new horizon for my imagination,” Chung says, courteously asking permission to smoke even though the interview is conducted by video call, then recounting his first contact with motion pictures between puffs.

Broader Horizons

Chung was born in 1965 in Pingtung County, southern Taiwan, but moved to the capital city Taipei to attend high school at the age of 16. Watching movies remained his favorite pastime throughout his high school and university years. He recalls how he was impressed with Japanese master filmmaker Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983). “Before that, the [social] atmosphere in Taiwan was conservative,” he says. “Things like the homosexuality underlying Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence were not only taboo, but simply unheard of. The content and the style of Nagisa Oshima’s films … revealed there are different ways of thinking.”

At his parents’ urging, Chung studied computer engineering at National Chiao Tung University in Hsinchu County, northern Taiwan. In his free time, though, he watched foreign films and started learning photography from Juan I-jong (阮義忠), who is noted for his black-and-white images of people and landscapes.

After graduation, Chung pursued a master’s degree in filmmaking at the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC), a school renowned for the experimental and art-house movies produced by its students. Chung says the two-and-a-half years of study at AIC were energizing and inspiring. “What I learned at the Art Institute of Chicago had no transferable market value, yet it taught me to think like a genuine cineaste,” the director says. He acknowledges that AIC’s facilities and equipment helped him to become technically savvy, its museum held an abundant collection and the film and photography departments exposed him to the vast fields of those arts. Still, he says the best thing about the school was his versatile and high-caliber peers.

“Many of my classmates were not only talented in filmmaking, but also in fine arts,” he says. “Comparing each other’s works and discussing ideas inspired me and opened up myriad ways of viewing and making films. I also realized I could create my own style instead of just following in the footsteps of film masters.”

In 1993, on the second day of his return from Chicago and with a newly minted master’s degree, but loaded down by debt, Chung found a job as an assistant director at an advertisement production company. Despite the assistant director title, what Chung did most was take notes and move props. He had occasional chances to direct small-time commercials, but those rarely led to high-profile ads, let alone movie offers, and between 1994 and 1996, Chung was quasi-unemployed. His then girlfriend Tseng Shao-chien (曾少千), who is now his wife, was often bewildered to see him at home, so that Chung sometimes told a few white lies—such as “I’m right in the middle of post-production”—to avoid further probing.

Chung finally got a break in 1997 with a visually stunning commercial for a brand of bottled water, an ad that created a stir in the local commercial production circle. Creative executives and media directors were keen to inquire about the unknown director who had made such a success of selling plain water. Sensing an opportunity, Chung quit the company and became a freelance director.

Unique visuals, unexpected plots, fluid camerawork and intriguing narration—often absent product features or specifics—have made Chung a very sought-after advertisement director for the past 15 years. His commercials have promoted goods, services and organizations ranging from luxury sedans and high-end beauty products to a nonprofit group. His 2006 commercial for the Active Conservation Awareness Program won that year’s award for best television commercial from an industry group known as 4As (the Association of Accredited Advertising Agents of Taipei ROC).

When pondering the impact of being a commercial director on his filmmaking career, however, Chung could not be more frank. “Commercials can be a devil that devours your creativity,” he says, referring to the fact that the financial rewards of ad work lure many would-be filmmakers away from their vocation. “Even though a director might never forget his ambition [to make films], in time, he’s very likely to lose the ability to tell a good story due to his habitual focus on image. Commercials are dominated by images, whereas stories are the backbone of a movie,” Chung says.

In 2002, he established Cream Film Production Co. in hopes of producing movies. He did not begin any film work until 2003, however, and then only after prompting from Tseng. “She said ‘Why don’t you just quit your movie dreams? All these years you’ve been talking about making movies, but they’re empty words,’” Chung recalls. Two weeks later, the director started work on Doctor, at a time when the couple’s second child was due. “She wouldn’t mind if I wasn’t at her bedside when she was in labor,” he chuckles. Tseng, who is an associate professor at the Graduate Institute of Art Studies at National Central University, produced Doctor, Parking and The Fourth Portrait.

Doctor was filmed in the United States and took three years to complete. The documentary features Taiwanese-born doctor Wen Pi-chian (溫碧謙), who lost his teenage son to suicide at his former home in Iowa, in the United States, and then a patient, a 9-year-old Peruvian boy, to cancer at his clinic in Miami.

Emotion at Arm’s Length

Subjects such as death and bereavement could easily have created a melodrama, yet Chung’s adept camerawork and subtle editing hold the audience at a distance from the tragedy on the screen. The director’s gaze on Wen’s loss is discreetly empathetic, and never crosses the boundary between sensibility and sentimentality. Chung even re-edited the movie, cutting some scenes that made viewers at a media screening cry. Throughout Doctor, Chung deliberately repeats the same questions to Wen to help the doctor work through his feelings of grief. Eventually, the doctor is able to respond to the questions quite calmly.

When asked about the necessity of subdued sentiment and the distancing effects prevalent in Doctor and his later works, Chung declares vehemently, “I hate those tearjerkers.” Explaining his ideas, he asks, “Don’t you think a scene where someone is holding in his sobs is much more moving than if he is crying his eyes out?”

“Tears are precious,” he says. “They should be saved for your family or someone you love instead of a bunch of strangers in a public place like a dark theater. It’s the same for deep emotions. They should be preserved in a safe place and only released when truly necessary.”

Two years later, Chung directed his first full-length feature, Parking, a dark, postmodern comedy about a man’s misadventure during a night in Taipei. The protagonist stops at a bakery to buy a cake to please his estranged wife, only to find his car blocked by a double-parked vehicle. While looking for the vehicle’s owner, the man becomes entangled in a series of mishaps and meets a gallery of eccentric characters. The people reflect the complex demographics of Taiwan and include an elderly couple who have lost their son and are living with their granddaughter, a mainland Chinese prostitute attempting to escape her pimp, a one-armed gangster-turned-barber, and a tailor who has fled Hong Kong, but is hounded by a loan shark. The film casts a light on both the isolation and multifaceted relationships of contemporary life.

The story is based on Chung’s experience of being blocked by a double-parked car for three hours. Instead of flying into a rage or calling a tow service, Chung conceived the idea for the script while waiting for the vehicle’s owner to return.

Parking not only gained attention when it was nominated for the Un Certain Regard category at Cannes, it also stood out at the 2008 Golden Horse Festival in Taipei, where it won the award for best art direction and the festival’s FIPRESCI Critics Award from the International Federation of Film Critics. It received the best new talent and audience awards at that year’s Hong Kong Asian Film Festival and the prize for most inspired film director at the 2009 !f Istanbul International Independent Film Festival. The movie was shown at more than 20 international film festivals, including events in Canada, Greece, South Korea and Sweden, followed by a limited theatrical release in key Canadian and European cities. Montreal-based Evokative Films, a DVD label, also purchased the rights to the film in 2009, the Canadian company’s first acquisition of a Taiwanese title.

After much anticipation, Chung’s second feature, The Fourth Portrait, was released in 2010. The story is a detached but delicate portrait of a 10-year-old boy who is reunited with his mother after his father dies. The woman, who abandoned the child at a young age, has remarried, and the stepfather resents the boy’s presence in their poverty-stricken family. The director uses three of the boy’s drawings and a final “fourth portrait” to string together the episodic narratives.

No Time for Misery

The audience has little chance to wallow in the boy’s misery, but can discern his emotions through moody lighting and carefully chosen color palettes. Quirky humor and light-hearted digressions into the boy’s friendships with a school janitor and a petty thief also lift the mood.

Like Parking, The Fourth Portrait launched a wave of discussion in the wake of its screenings at many international film festivals from Melbourne, Australia to Toronto, Canada. Critics admired it from diverse perspectives, but not without some bewilderment. Niels Matthijs from Canadian film website TwitchFilm called it a top-notch art-house drama that is a lush and gripping visual masterpiece. Daniel Kasman from the Toronto International Film Festival commended Chung’s camerawork as creating a “destabilizing but constantly intriguing effect; I’ve never seen anything quite like it and it is somewhat difficult to accurately describe.”

Chung says many interpretations are valid as he wishes to leave ample room for different approaches to reading his films. As for people’s critiques, the director appreciates their encouragement but has to shrug them off, explaining that once a film is released, what is done is done. “During the production process, I will exercise the most rigorous standard for my work and criticize it without reserve, but [after that] I never want to review it. It’s kind of like seeing your ex-wife. How embarrassing would that be?” he jokes.

In addition to The Fourth Portrait’s triumph at the 2010 Golden Horse Film Festival, the movie won the prize for best cinematography at the Valladolid International Film Festival in Spain the same year.

True to His Art

Despite the critical success, the box-office earnings of both features have not found the same support. For one thing, Chung declined to send Parking or The Fourth Portrait to censors in mainland China, and the movies have been banned there as they include scenes about mainland Chinese immigrants engaged in the sex trade.

Lin Wen-chi says he once suggested to Chung that the director inject elements of romance or slapstick into his movies to engage audiences more and make it easier to find financial support for productions. Chung respectfully declined the suggestion. “I’d like to please the audience if I could make a natural delivery of such entertainment, but I can’t,” Chung says. “Wouldn’t I be a fraud to say I like Nagisa Oshima’s movies, but then shoot something like Titanic?”

As for funding, Chung admits that securing it is an issue facing every indie film director. Out of every 100 financial backers, just one will consider investing in an art movie, he says. “There’s no point complaining about the lack of funding, though. Shooting films is just a personal choice. No one is pointing a gun at me, forcing me to make movies,” he remarks.

How then can the director sustain his movie-making dreams? Lin advises Chung to consider where his movies are placed in the spectrum of art-house and commercial films. “If being an art-house film director is what he wants, then he stands a better chance to succeed if he can work on a global scale. What he can do is to tap into subject matter that is more universal than parochial.”

Currently, Chung shoots around six commercials per year to sustain his movie projects. The most unusual part is the level of trust his clients place in him. Regardless of the budget, which can run to US$200,000 or more, none of the commercials is acquired through the standard process of submitting a proposal to bid for the project. “If the client asks to see a detailed treatment, I’d rather give up the project. I have to save time for writing scripts and shooting films,” he says. He spends around three weeks working on a commercial including preparation (one week), shooting (three to five days) and post-production (one week).

Interestingly, when he works on a screenplay, Chung omits references to camera work, while depictions of a setting and its atmosphere can go on for paragraphs. In this way, he tries to help the actors understand the emotional landscape of a scene. Similes are added here and there as a guide to a character’s demeanor or mood. “I try to leave my voice, the auteur’s voice, between the lines,” he says.

Comedian Lin Yu-chih (林郁智), better known as Na Dou (納豆), and seasoned actor King Shih-chieh (金士傑) welcome Chung’s style as a director. “Chung can see through my typecast as a sidekick and uncover my potential as a character actor,” Lin said in a television interview. The entertainer appears in Parking and plays the petty thief in The Fourth Portrait. King, who appears in Parking as a store customer and The Fourth Portrait as the janitor, echoes the sentiment. “Chung has faith in his cast. He usually hands over the characters to his actors, leaving plenty of room for them to create the characters,” he says.

Still, the process of creating a final script, Chung admits, is a slow and difficult one. He gives an example from his current project, Soul. “I decided a long time ago which characters should die, but just don’t know how they’re going to die,” he says. “So day and night, I think about how to kill these imaginary people. Should I use a dagger or a bat? Should the victim be stabbed five or six times? Isn’t that morbid as a lifestyle?”

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Wang Fei-yun is a freelance writer based in Vancouver, Canada.

Copyright © 2012 by Wang Fei-yun