The name Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢) has been synonymous with Taiwanese cinema for many years now. A movie by the acclaimed director invariably features sparse dialogue, muted colors, passions held in check and a deeply aesthetic feel. Through his lens, performances are imbued with a quietly assured power. The films themselves feel eerily realistic, as though the events might well have truly happened to someone, somewhere.
Each of Hou’s works has the power to captivate audiences. His most recent film, The Assassin, is no exception. No matter how long the shot, the viewer always wants to look deeper into the scene. And after the movie ends, it always takes a while to digest all the rich imagery that unfolded.
The Assassin trains a spotlight on the spiritual side of martial arts, an aspect that is often overlooked in cinema. “A true martial artist does not kill lightly,” Hou says. “The Chinese character for ‘martial,’ namely wu [武], is actually a combination of zhi [止] and ge [戈], which together mean ‘to rest one’s spear.’ A martial artist should not kill for political reasons, nor for any selfish motive. The plot may be based on a Tang dynasty [618-907] short story, but it remains relevant in our modern world,” he explains.
The director insisted on achieving realistic portrayals of Tang dynasty environments. (Photos by Tsai Cheng-tai / Courtesy of Spot Films)
In the original story, the heroine, Nie Yinniang (聶隱娘), is trained as an assassin, but her sympathic nature leads her to abandon the profession. It was the psychological aspect of the tale that first inspired Hou to make the film.
Hou was intrigued by the story of Nie. However, the version he chose to tell differs in many respects from the source material. “The original tale contained mythical elements. It wasn’t always realistic. I changed those parts,” he reveals.
The film script therefore used only the basic skeleton of the storyline. “Sticking faithfully to the original story would have been a big headache,” he says. To get the details right, Hou scoured classical texts, studying the timelines of people, places and events crucial to the plot. He read authorized histories, unauthorized histories and novels, and spent years piecing together the relationships between the key players and the events during which they took place. The complexity of the tale convinced him that reinterpretation was absolutely necessary. And there was another factor that motivated him to press ahead with the project—he had found the right actress to play the part of Nie.
That actress was Shu Qi (舒淇), whom he had previously cast in Millennium Mambo (2001) and Three Times (2005). Hou felt she was the perfect choice. “The thing is, Nie Yinniang is very much like Shu Qi herself,” he says. “If we had first written a script and then gone looking for a lead actress, it would have taken too long, and there’s no guarantee we would have found the right person. We had to have the actress from the get-go.”
The director’s long-time scriptwriting collaborator Chu Tien-wen (朱天文) once said that Hou is not a storyteller, but a poet. From the time when he was a key player in the rise of Taiwan’s New Wave Cinema in the 1980s, Hou’s films have been marked more by beautiful camera work than by storytelling.
Hou peers through a camera on the set of The Assassin. The director hopes local companies that worked on the film learned a lot in the process. (Photo courtesy of Spot Films)
Some observers have said that Hou spent too long filming The Assassin, which took about two years to make, but the director disagrees. The movie did, however, take longer to complete than any of his other projects. “The fact that the story is set in the Tang dynasty was the biggest difficulty we had to deal with while filming. After all the historical reading we did, we realized just how difficult it would be to recreate a Tang dynasty environment,” the director says. The more he read, the more minutiae he wanted to work into the movie. But achieving a completely accurate re-creation was never a possibility.
One example of the level of detail built into the film is Hou’s depiction of the Tang custom of beating drums daily—3,000 times in the morning and 5,000 come evening. Once the evening drumbeats ceased, villages would close their gates, and no one was allowed in or out. To the uninformed, the seemingly endless drumming would appear devoid of purpose, but it was necessary for Hou’s vision to come to life. The director says he enjoyed studying Tang dynasty literature, and once he had a clear image of the society of that time in his head, he would not allow himself to stray from a realistic portrayal. “Restrictions set you free,” he says.
The filmmaker always wants the acting to be as realistic as possible. Once the camera starts rolling, he lets the actors take over so that the scene can play out as naturally as possible. “I’ll tell you what’s most beautiful: It’s when an actor gets totally immersed in the role,” he notes.
Hou does not tell his actors how to play their parts, and just like American director Martin Scorsese, he does not use a script breakdown, which is designed to help a filmmaker visualize where people and objects will be placed within a particular scene. Scorsese, however, enjoys the support of the Hollywood production system, with its highly refined division of labor. Hou does not have such a polished system, and instead relies on a team that he has worked with for years. An artist’s job may be a lonely endeavor, but the director notes that “a film isn’t something you can do all by yourself.”
As for the disjointed way in which the film’s storyline progresses, Hou says, “My script is perfectly logical, but some of the clues to what’s going on are hidden. Some parts of the story may show up in the scenes, while others do not.” He reveals that virtually every bit of the story was filmed, but of the 134,000 meters of film that were shot, only about 10,000 made it into the movie. It was up to him to pick the one frame in 44 that would survive the cut yet ultimately lead to a finished film that would stand up to scrutiny.
Hou, center, and some of the lead actors of The Assassin pose for photographers at the film’s Taipei premiere in late August. (Photo by Chuang Kung-ju)
“I can’t set everything out explicitly in my films, like some sort of soliloquy. I can only show part of what’s going on,” he says. Interestingly, whereas moviegoers generally hate to be exposed to spoilers before they see a film, Hou would like audiences to understand the plot as well as possible ahead of time. The more they know, the better. “I can only reveal a little part of the story, but if you are capable of connecting the dots, you’ll understand everything clearly.”
Hou has a deep love for Taiwan’s film industry. He is a three-time chairman of the Taipei Film Festival, and is a member of the executive committee of the Golden Horse Awards, Taiwan’s premier film awards event. At his insistence, all of the massive postproduction phase of The Assassin was handled by local firms. It might have been cheaper to do it in Thailand or South Korea, Hou says, and the U.S. has better technology, but he decided to have the work done in his home country. “Taiwan’s postproduction firms do enjoy an edge in one area—they have a very good intuitive feel for the task at hand. Both technically and artistically, they are every bit as strong on the fundamentals as anyone overseas.”
Three organizations—Central Pictures, the National Center for Traditional Arts and Images Infinitely—collaborated on the postproduction work. Central Pictures played the lead role, and invested in significant equipment upgrades to ensure the best end product possible. “I want Taiwan’s film industry to grow stronger. I hope the companies that worked on this film learned a lot in the process, and that Central Pictures will spin off new enterprises,” he adds.
For Hou, life and cinema are both about the tales people tell, and the stories told about them. “My films are actually an extension of my life. They’re a part of me. You know what I notice when I’m out and about? It’s people.”
Hou’s films have always focused on exploring the complexity of human experiences. When he leaves home, he usually travels by metro or bus. He says he cannot be cut off from people, and chuckles about a discovery he has made—those who take public transportation are stone silent in the morning, but boisterous by late afternoon, especially the students. “I like to observe all kinds of people,” he adds. “In my line of work, if you don’t get the people right, everything goes wrong.”
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A version of this article originally appeared in Taiwan Panorama.