Your collaboration with Edward Yang started quite early: you helped facilitate In Our Time and then worked with him the following year on his first feature.
Right, I started collaborating with Edward Yang on the 1983 feature That Day on the Beach. It is quite interesting to work with Yang. He is completely different from Hou Hsiao-hsien. Hsiao-hsien prefers talking about the stories first; he likes to exchange all kinds of stories. When we come upon something that touches us, we will expand it and get a better sense of it. Edward Yang works differently; he usually has an idea of what he wants in the movies before the screenplay is written. For instance, he might want to make a statement about his judgment of society’s system of values or express his view of intellectuals. He never clearly spells out what he really wants, but he will listen to the details you fill in and then pick out which ideas suit the movie. As a result, it is a very interesting process to work with him on writing the screenplay, but it is an extremely time-consuming process that often leaves you with the feeling that you are getting nowhere. But over the course of the process he gradually constructs a story out of the little stories and details you present him with. So writing with Edward Yang is really about throwing a lot of ideas at him and letting him make up his own mind.
There is also another characteristic of his work, that is, the language of his screenplays, especially in terms of dialogue, is very Westernized; it is actually very similar to English. He once asked me, “What language do you think in?” I told him that I think in Chinese or Taiwanese. He responded, “I think in English.” He lived in the United States for a long time, which makes him quite different from other directors. So there is a strong internal force in his films that is very powerful. But sometimes these ideas and internal themes can overpower the plot, and when that happens the movie suffers. For example, I know what he was trying to do with films like A Confucian Confusion and Mahjong, but the story lines of these movies are very weak. He seems to spend too much time exploring the deeper philosophical themes in order to show his own views of the society, and the story gets left out in the cold.
Hou Hsiao-hsien, on the other hand, aims to achieve the opposite effect. His movies do not set out to tell you some serious message, yet somehow, in some subtle way, they do. Hou’s approach is much closer to traditional Chinese aesthetics, like landscape paintings, whose artistic conception is not openly expressed but depends on your own interpretation. It is an entirely different approach. Edward Yang, on the other hand, is very intent on getting his message across. His movie That Day on the Beach shows that he was very compassionate toward human beings, but you see a change with films like Terrorizers and Taipei Story, which reveal an emerging suspicion about human nature. In Taipei Story he expresses confusion about the true value of love and friendship, while later in Terrorizers he seems to have already developed a very negative view of human nature, revealing a world where everyone is capable of horrific deeds. He is very honest with himself and through his works, you can see the development of his viewpoints and ideas. When we get to A Confucian Confusion and Mahjong, it is obvious that he has already completely lost faith in society. Only after Yi Yi does he seem to have finally come full circle. For although the film is still critical in some regards, at the heart of Yi Yi is a much more embracing worldview. I think his works are very fascinating.
Wu Nien-jen, 2002 interview from Speaking in Images
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