Life of Pi by Taiwanese director Ang Lee (李安) has won applause from reviewers; earned a London Critics’ Circle Award for director of the year, a Golden Globe Award for best original score and 11 Oscar nominations, including those for best picture and best director; and had raked in about US$500 million worldwide by the end of January this year. Of course, accolades from film critics and audiences the world over are nothing new for Lee, who has drawn attention since his first movie, Pushing Hands, was released in 1991. With Life of Pi, his 12th and highest-grossing feature film, however, the Oscar-winning director has not only given people in his homeland something to be proud of, but also left a substantial legacy that is expected to benefit Taiwan’s film industry.
According to Jean Shih (石靜文), director-general of the Taichung City Government’s Information Bureau, Lee chose to make the movie in Taichung, central Taiwan over other locations in India and Australia. Some of the filming still took place in India, which is understandable, as Life of Pi tells the story of an Indian boy who escapes from a sinking ship only to find himself sharing a lifeboat with an irascible tiger. The majority of the movie, however, was shot in Taichung, as well as in Taipei and Pingtung at the nation’s southern tip.
Taichung made a concerted effort to attract Lee and his film crew. According to Shih, Taichung Mayor Jason Hu (胡志強) is an old friend of the director’s and personally invited Lee to make the movie in the city. As part of the offer, Hu promised extensive support, including the provision of spacious, decommissioned Shuinan Airport near the city’s center to house the sets for the film, Shih says.
The majority of the scenes in Life of Pi were filmed in Taichung, central Taiwan. The shooting of the Hollywood hit in Taiwan has had a significant impact on the local movie industry. (Photo Courtesy of Francis Lee)
Hu oversaw efforts to raise funds for fact-finding trips by Lee’s American film crew to assess Taichung’s moviemaking environment in the first half of 2010. The city government then joined forces with the central government to offer the director subsidies of more than NT$300 million (US$9.5 million) to film the movie in Taichung.
The city’s courtship of Lee is one of the most visible recent efforts to encourage film production in Taiwan. The first sustained push by a local government to attract filmmakers came in Kaohsiung City, southern Taiwan in late 2004 when the city established the Kaohsiung Film Commission. In 2010, the commission was renamed the Film Development and Production Center and took on the responsibilities of formulating film-related policies and providing services ranging from location scouting to equipment storage.
Taipei City, where more than 95 percent of Taiwan’s TV and film production companies are based, established the Taipei Film Commission at the end of 2007 as a single window through which filmmakers can apply to receive administrative and financial support. Another major step came in November 2012, when the Taipei City Government announced plans to build film and music production facilities in three locations around the city. Construction of the first of those facilities is expected to begin in the spring of 2014 at the earliest in a rezoned area of Neihu District in the northeast part of the city.
According to the Bureau of Audiovisual and Music Industry Development under the Ministry of Culture, nine other local governments in Taiwan have joined Kaohsiung and Taipei in establishing film promotion offices. The most recent to do so is Chiayi City in southern Taiwan, which opened a film office in June 2011.
Around 250 Taiwanese technicians and artists worked with Ang Lee’s American film crew during production of Life of Pi. (Photo Courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp.)
To shoot Life of Pi, Lee used a mixed team that brought members of his Hollywood-based film crew together with local movie technicians. The work ethic of the US crew members had a memorable effect on their Taiwanese counterparts. “The attitude of the Hollywood professionals toward their work was what impressed and inspired me the most,” says Francis Lee (李佳懷), who was responsible for controlling life-size animal puppets in the movie. “They set up clear rules for every aspect of filming and overlooked no detail.” Francis Lee is founder and operator of Fantastic Creative Studio in Taichung and was hired by Los Angeles-based Legacy Effects to work on Life of Pi. Legacy’s previous work includes creating live-action effects for Hollywood hits like 2012 and Avatar.
Top-Quality Work
Francis Lee notes that the Taiwanese crew members were determined to do only top-quality work on Life of Pi because they did not want to be seen as a disappointment to Ang Lee or to Taiwan. “Everybody felt great pressure to do their best during shooting,” Francis Lee says.
Mori Hsueh (薛義森) is general manager of Taichung-based Babylon Pool Systems Co., which built the large wave pool used to create the main set for the movie. “The director said he hoped [the Taiwanese crew] would achieve what was expected of us, and he said he hoped that the deep involvement of Taiwan’s movie professionals in Life of Pi would help our movie industry make some progress,” Hsueh recalls of conversations Ang Lee had with some of the 250-plus local crew members.
Oscar-winning R&H Studios, creator of the visual effects in Life of Pi, decided to establish its sixth studio in Kaohsiung, southern Taiwan in November 2012. (Photo Courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp.)
The wave pool Babylon constructed is expected to attract more filmmakers to Taichung in the future. According to Hsueh, the Shuinan facility is the world’s largest wave-making pool and features 12 machines that can create various kinds of waves. Since the completion of work on Life of Pi, the Taichung City Government has managed the pool. Shih says that several foreign film projects have already shown interest in renting the facility. The city government plans to commission a short documentary to promote the pool and screen it at major international film festivals.
In fact, the pool is playing a starring role in Taichung’s simultaneous efforts to boost the local movie industry and redevelop the area occupied by the defunct airport. Shuinan’s days as an active airport ended in 2004 with the inauguration of civilian flights at Taichung Airport in the city’s northwestern suburbs. The first redevelopment plan for the old airport was released in 2008 and the area was rechristened the Taichung Gateway District in 2010. On Shih’s strong recommendation, in April 2011 the redevelopment scheme was modified to include a 4.5-hectare business park for the movie industry. Plans for the park include the wave pool, a state-of-the-art film studio, accommodations for film crews and a screening facility that will be open to the public. The Cabinet-level Council for Economic Planning and Development is currently conducting a study on the feasibility of the park, which has an estimated construction cost of NT$1.2 billion (US$40 million).
Many effects in Life of Pi were created with computer-generated imagery (CGI), including the frighteningly true-to-life tiger. To produce such photo-realistic imagery, Ang Lee worked closely with US-based Rhythm & Hues (R&H) Studios, producers of CGI animation and visual effects for movies such as Babe and The Golden Compass, for which it won Academy Awards for best visual effects in 1995 and 2008 respectively. R&H worked on two movies that received Oscar nominations for best special effects this year: Life of Pi and Snow White and the Huntsman. In Taiwan, meanwhile, Ang Lee’s collaboration with R&H has resulted in at least three knock-on benefits for Taiwan’s movie industry.
Taichung City Mayor Jason Hu, second right, and Ang Lee, right, tour one of the city’s night markets during the shooting of Life of Pi. At left is Jean Shih, director-general of the city’s Information Bureau. (Photo Courtesy of Taichung City Government)
First, through Ang Lee, R&H was introduced to government officials responsible for economic and industrial development from the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Kaohsiung City Government. In summer 2011, after representatives of the US studio took a fact-finding trip to the southern city, the company began developing a strong interest in establishing a presence there. In early November 2012, the American company decided to set up the VFX Center—a wholly owned subsidiary studio dedicated to producing CGI animation and visual effects for moviemakers worldwide—in the city’s Pier-2 Art Center. R&H cited Pier-2’s ambience and the potential talent resources in art and design programs at colleges in southern Taiwan as the most important factors behind its decision to launch the VFX Center in Kaohsiung. In fact, some of the Taiwanese graphic artists who took part in the production of Life of Pi have been recruited by the newly founded studio. The VFX Center is R&H’s sixth studio worldwide and is expected to employ around 200 local effects artists within three years.
As R&H created more CGI effects and scenes for Life of Pi, the need to store and access the digital footage led to a second major benefit. “R&H approached us via Ang Lee in the hope of using domestic computing infrastructure to handle the special visual effects data generated for the movie,” recalls Liang Kuan-hsiung (梁冠雄)—managing director of the Cloud Computing Lab under the Telecommunication Laboratories of Chunghwa Telecom Co. (CHT)—of the first contact with the American company in late 2010. The relationship between R&H and Taiwan’s leading telecommunications company soon resulted in their promotion of the development of a cloud-based platform for the international visual effects market.
Toward the end of November 2012, after Life of Pi had its worldwide premiere in Taiwan, the joint venture concept took a major step forward when R&H and CHT signed a memorandum of understanding to establish a Taiwan-based project called Cloud for Animation and Visual Effects (CAVE). According to Liang, CAVE will allow for easy content storage and retrieval, as well as provide a cloud-based software platform for content creation. CAVE will start out by handling R&H’s rendering jobs, but has the eventual goals of delivering CAVE services and on-demand cloud infrastructure to filmmakers worldwide.
Francis Lee, who controlled many of the life-size animal puppets in Life of Pi, says he was impressed by the work ethic of his American peers. (Photo Courtesy of Francis Lee)
As for the third benefit, in late 2011 R&H and its Taiwanese partners agreed to launch a project aimed at co-financing and co-producing major Hollywood movies. The venture is named East Grand Films and has the goal of raising US$100 million for investment in Hollywood movies featuring special visual effects and computer animation. East Grand aims to invest in 10 films over the next six years. So far, the company has received US$20 million in investment from R&H and US$21 million from Taiwan’s National Development Fund, which operates under the Executive Yuan, with the remainder expected to come from Taiwan’s corporate sector.
Not everyone is convinced that government spending to attract or fund the international movie industry will ever generate returns for taxpayers, however. Critics of the subsidies given to the makers of Life of Pi, for example, have said that filming the movie in Taichung did not help promote the city’s tourism industry, as all scenes shot in the city took place on elaborate sets at the old airport, not at any recognizable locations in the area. Shih responds to such concerns by noting that the movie has benefited the city’s tourism sector in other ways. When Life of Pi was being filmed in Taichung in the first half of 2011, more than 300 foreigners and locals involved in the shooting combined to boost the occupancy rate of hotels in Taichung by 10 percent, the Taichung Hotel Association says.
Other critics have asserted that Life of Pi is likely to remain an exceptional case, given Ang Lee’s obvious links to Taiwan, whereas only a minute number of feature-length movies are made in Taiwan by other international production companies. In 2012, for example, the Taipei Film Commission gave administrative support or counsel to a total of 464 film crews, the overwhelming majority of which were purely local teams shooting commercials, movies, music videos or television dramas. A Japanese crew that shot scenes at railway stations in southern Taiwan for a movie starring famous actress Nanako Matsushima was the only foreign team working on a feature-length film to visit Taiwan last year, the commission says.
At 75 meters long and 30 meters wide, the wave-making pool constructed for Life of Pi in Taichung is the largest of its kind worldwide. (Photo Courtesy of Taichung City Government)
Rich Resources
Those who worked on Life of Pi, however, say that making the movie in Taiwan has increased international awareness of the rich resources the country offers filmmakers. “People give me a thumbs-up when I tell them I worked on Ang Lee’s film crew,” Francis Lee says. “Of course, then they get suspicious that my studio might now charge a higher fee for projects,” he says humorously, but adds that some clients have decided to work with his studio precisely because he was part of the Life of Pi production team.
The legacies Ang Lee left by filming his recent masterpiece in Taiwan range from the intangible, such as the experience local technicians gained by working with Hollywood’s best, to the very tangible establishment of the VFX Center in Kaohsiung. As the result of Ang Lee’s effort to give something back to his homeland, Taiwan’s movie industry looks set to continue developing for years to come.
Write to Oscar Chung at mhchung@mofa.gov.tw