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One of
the pleasures of following your films is that we also get to follow your
character Hsiao-Kang's growth. From What Time I get the impression that his character
is more mature than what we have seen of him before. Perhaps it's because his character now has a job, or could it be because
he now drives a car instead of a scooter?
Well, a lot
of Hsiao-Kang's character in the film comes from his own real-life
experiences. For instance, in The River, the neck pain that Hsiao-Kang suffers – that had actually happened to him in real-life, and
in Rebels of the Neon God, Hsiao-Kang was in a similar situation as his character in the film, someone
who's preparing for the entrance exam for college, but who doesn't really
want to pass or even take it. So a
lot of it is about bringing his own spirit to the film. And the driving of the car is also him. Hsiao-Kang has more money now, so he can afford a car. Maybe in the next film, he'll be driving a nicer car once he replaces
the current one!
At the same time, though, what's very interesting is that I find him different every time. It's just like our lives. It's constantly changing – growing up, aging, the whole process. I'm especially interested in documenting that process. And actually that's the reason why I keep working with Hsiao-Kang, because if I change the actor, I lose what I can get from that process.
You can
really see the difference in the body language when, for instance, you think of
that scene in Rebels of the Neon God where Hsiao-Kang jumps up and down
on his bed and he hits his head. He
really does seem like the reincarnation of Na Zha, or at least a very active
teenager, whereas in the new film, there's something quieter about the way he
moves.
Yes, and yet
there's something that remains a constant in Hsiao-Kang's body language, and
that is his rhythm, which has always been slower than you'd expect. When I first hired
Hsiao-Kang to be in one of my films, I thought that I
had made a mistake, because he was always incredibly slow in doing anything,
even something as simple as turning his head around. I then asked him, "Can't you do that the way a normal person would?" And he told me, "That's
just the way I do it." Then I
suddenly realized that everyone has his own individual rhythm. It was a very important moment for me, and accordingly, that discovery
has affected the pacing of my films.
There's also the fact that Hsiao-Kang is often very quiet, and you don't quite know what he's thinking at a particular moment. It's a quality that reminds me a lot of my father, and perhaps because I never quite penetrated that mystery with my own father, I'm still trying to figure out through Hsiao-Kang, to try to understand more about this very quiet, very mysterious character. I'm still in the process of understanding!
There's something very unusual, within the context of your other films, about Chen Shiang-Chyi's character in What Time. She also appeared briefly, as the script-girl who sleeps with Hsiao-Kang, in The River. While most of the characters in your films tend to belong to a lower or lower middle class background, from both her behavior and the way she dresses, Chen Shiang-Chyi's character seems to be much more upper middle class. Maybe it's because I first encountered Chen in Edward Yang's A Confucian Confusion. But she certainly looks like someone who might have been to college, or at least is somewhat well-off. How do you look at this different class background when you develop her character?
Actually, I
first encountered Chen Shiang-Chyi when I was looking for an actress for The
River who would go to bed with Hsiao-Kang in the film. At the time, there were plenty of actresses in Taiwan who would be
prepared to do such a scene, but there was something about Shiang-Chyi that
appealed to me. She went to NYU to
study acting right after working on Edward Yang's film, and the impression I
had of her was someone who was very sincere and very intelligent, but also very
rational and very cautious. I
thought that she was not the sort of person who would go to bed with someone
easily, and that's actually what I was looking for. When I spoke with her and she told me that she was a devout Christian, I
said, "even better!"
Later we became friends and the more I knew of her, the more I like her. I find that sometimes she can appear uptight, because there is a lot happening inside her, but she tries not to let it show, and she is very self-protective in that way, and that's something that comes from her background. But you're right: it's true that she's very different from the other characters in my films, even Yang Kuei-Mei [from Vive l'amour and The Hole], and I feel I have to make much more of an effort when I work with her character, but I do want to make the effort and try and capture something of that character, and I would like to continue to work with Shiang-Chyi. She's also someone who always comes up with a lot of her own suggestions and ideas as an actor, and a lot of her character in What Time comes from her.
It's interesting that we never find out why her character is in Paris. How did this part of the film come about, that she goes traveling? Did you know from the beginning that you would leave to the audience's imagination why she is there?
Well, I think people like to travel a lot nowadays, and often they travel without a reason. They just want to escape temporarily, to get away from their normal lives. There doesn't have to be a reason. What's curious, though, is that when you're at the airport, and people are getting through on vacation, they never seem that happy! (laughs)
I like that idea of escape a lot, because so much of what your films are about revolves around the idea of an individual's independence, and what that means in opposition to the home and family. And if getting away from home somehow means a form of escape or rebellion, perhaps travel can be considered on a larger scale also something of an escape from home....
Yes.
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