Call it the Taiwanese invasion. The 2000 film year may be remembered best for not one but two acclaimed films from Taiwan that captivated American critics and audiences alike: Ang Lee’s glorious “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and Edward Yang’s delicate family drama, “Yi Yi.”
Each film has won a host of year-end critics’ awards and now seem poised to garner Oscar nominations in more than just the foreign film category.
Yang — who won best film honors from the National Society of Film Critics — is credited along with Lee as the architects of the Taiwanese New Wave. So it is fitting to learn that Yang, 53, decided to return to filmmaking after a seven-year career detour as a computer engineer in Seattle because of the German New Wave of the ’70s and ’80s dominated by Herzog and Fassbinder.
“I was working from 8 to 5. After 5, I was bored so I went to a movie theater in Seattle with a sign that advertised `German New Wave’ and I saw `Aguirre: The Wrath of God.’ I came out a different person,” says Yang in a telephone interview from Taipei. “I was undone by Herzog. I regained my confidence and eventually I got back into the film business.”
It didn’t take long.
Yang took a leave from his computer research job and went back to Taipei (he was born in Shanghai but his family moved to Taiwan two years later, in 1949). He worked on a script for a film directed by an old friend from film school. Yang had attended the USC film school in L.A. in the mid-1970s, but had dropped out after just one semester (“I felt I had no talent,” he says).
One year after returning to Taipei, in 1981, he was asked to direct a television drama. The film work continued and never stopped.
“I did not bother to go back to Seattle,” he says. “It was all fateful and accidental.”
Yang formed his own production company, Yang and His Gang, in 1989 and turned out six features. Yang says he wanted to make “Yi Yi” for a long time, but only two years ago did he feel he possessed the maturity, personal and professional, to tackle a sweeping and thoughtful family drama for his seventh feature.
The critical accolades are no small thing for a nearly three-hour film about the ordinary travails that beset a middle-class Taipei family whose members range from an elderly grandmother to a precocious 8-year-old boy. At once grand and intimate, “Yi Yi” examines the inner lives of its characters whose regrets and emotional insecurities are magnified when the grandmother suffers a stroke. As she lies motionless and speechless in the apartment that NJ, a successful high-tech businessman, shares with his wife Min-Min and their two children, the family’s emotional confusion and fragility is painfully exposed. It is scheduled to open in Chicago on March 2 at the Music Box.
Although Yang based NJ on his experiences in the high-tech world, the character in “Yi Yi” one is most tempted to compare with the director is the youngest, named Yang-Yang, the 8-year-old boy played by nonprofessional Jonathan Chang.
It is Yang-Yang who asks unanswerable questions about life, and who decides to photograph the backs of people’s heads in order to show them what they cannot see. There are other films about children in Yang’s body of work, most notably “A Bright Summer Day” (1991), Yang’s four-hour saga about assorted kids on the loose in Taipei. But few characters have resonated with audiences the way Yang-Yang has.
“People discover that, male or female, we all share so much in common with our childhoods. We have to find out answers for ourselves; that’s universal,” says Yang. “After we become teenagers, we develop in different directions.”
“I remember once I was watching a documentary about Frank Lloyd Wright, and he said, `Youth is not an age thing. It’s a quality. Once you’ve had it, you will never lose it,'” Yang says. “In a lot of ways, I am still a teenager, a boy lost in the 1960s. I like looking at a child’s outlook on he world.”
The German New Wave — including the Werner Herzog film that renewed Yang’s passion for filmmaking — inspired the Hong Kong New Wave, says Yang, which in turn quickly influenced Taiwanese moviemakers. Although mainstream Hollywood movies still dominate the Asian market by as much as 96 percent, notes Yang, he has seen a change just in the past three years. More regionally made films have trickled into Asian multiplexes, he says. Ang Lee and Hong Kong director John Woo are now recognizable Hollywood names; Yang, too, has had offers to direct in the U.S. and expects to get more now.
“Filmmaking is like the NBA,” he says. “You need talented players and they can be found in lots of different places all over the world. It’s just like the early days when directors came to Hollywood from Europe. Maybe we can give the industry a cultural boost. I may be overly optimistic, but I think globalization is a good thing and more fun.”
“I’m a city person. I was raised in the city and I’ve traveled a lot,” he continues. “Globalization has become a negative word, but over the last 20 years, the film world has become universal. There are less cultural barriers with film: You can see and hear a film. It’s much more direct than a book that’s been translated; more physically real than a piece of music. Maybe people are responding to the universality of humanity [in `Yi Yi’].”
His company Yang and His Gang expanded in 1992 to include theater work and was renamed Atom Films and Theater. In addition to financing and producing films and plays, the company is involved in high-tech multimedia experimental work. The computer scientist-turned-filmmaker is often called upon by his former colleagues to give lectures on the relationship between the human and the high-tech corporate worlds, he says.
“My former school mates are all billionaires in Taiwan,” he says. “I was the first to cross the border from technology [to art], so half my time is spent speaking to staff [at high-tech corporations] to keep them aware of the humanity side.”
Despite Yang’s high-tech background, “Yi Yi” is far from a flashy exercise in visual virtuosity; it’s a classically structured, slow-paced family tale far more concerned with human foibles than edgy style. Yang attributes this more to budget constraints than a passion for old-fashioned, linear storytelling.
“I won’t rule out using new tools such as digital video in the future. Some subjects are better suited to the new technology than others,” he says. “I’m all for it. I’m a guy for fun.”
