Take two
This year, as every year, the New York Times listed its critics' choices of the films and directors that should have been in the running for an Oscar. Two of the three nominations were for Edward Yang and his film A One and a Two (Yi Yi). Few people who have seen the film would question those nominations. The New York Times found it "sublime", the LA Weekly described it as "a quiet masterpiece of emotion" and when it was shown recently in cinemas in LA people burst into applause at the end.
A One and a Two is the story of a Taiwanese family experiencing the punctuation marks of life from birth to marriage to death. It deals with romance and rejection, jealousy and disappointment, optimism and alienation. Central to the film is a dying grandmother, whom the family have been encouraged to talk to even though it is not clear if she can understand what they are saying, and a small boy who likes to take photographs of the backs of people's heads so they can see the half of life they normally miss.
This is Yang's seventh film but the first to have a proper international film release and the one that may finally bring his work to wider audience. Born in China in 1947, Yang moved with his family to Taiwan as a child and was fortunate that his father was a film buff. "My dad grew up in Shanghai and loved to go to the movies," says Yang, a self-effacing man, sitting in a Beverly Hills coffee bar. "It was quite expensive and unusual, so every time I went I would tell my schoolfriends what I had seen and then I started to draw the films so that more people could see them. After that, I started to make up sequels and my own stories."
At the time Yang was growing up, Taiwan was anxious to forge good diplomatic relations and would distribute the kind of European films that might not oth erwise have been seen there. "I remember I went with my sister to [Federico Fellini's] 8, and only she and I and two bar-girls were there. The two bar-girls would keep complaining and saying, 'I can't understand the story.' We were lucky - Robert Bresson's films were commercially released in Taiwan, too. None of my French friends believe me when I tell them."
As a young man, Yang moved to the US to study electrical engineering at the University of Florida. His fascination with cinema took him to the University of Southern California to study film. But he dropped out and worked in computer design for the next seven years. "I had given up and said, 'I am not built for becoming a film-maker,' until one night when I was driving downtown in Seattle and saw this sign outside a cinema saying 'German New Wave: Aguirre, the Wrath of God' [the 1972 Werner Herzog film]. I went in and that turned me around."
He decided there and then that he had to, as they would say in Hollywood, pursue his dream. "I was telling this story later to a friend in San Francisco during the film festival there and my friend said 'Turn around' and there was Werner Herzog. We became good friends."
A friend from film school had already started to direct in Taiwan and knew that Yang had a lot of stories from the days when they drew comic books together. Yang returned to his home territory and gave up computers for ever. "Mum was really up set," he smiles, "but it was something I really wanted to do."
After working in television for a while, he made his own films. That Day, on the Beach (1983), Taipei Story (1985) and The Terroriser (1986) all won him critical admiration but his breakthrough came in 1991 with A Brighter Summer Day. Set in the 1960s, with a cold war backdrop, the four-hour film told the story of a teenager who falls in love with the girlfriend of a gang leader. Two satires, A Confucian Confusion (1994) and Mahjong (1996), followed. In the meantime his compatriot Hou Hsiao-Hsien had also been carving his own niche, making Cute Girl in 1980 and winning the critics' award at the 1986 Berlin festival for The Time to Live and the Time to Die (1985).
Did they see themselves as part of a movement, a Taiwanese New Wave? "In the beginning, it was a collective effort. Our generation was taking over and there was a new, more energetic kind of film-making. But after we made a name for ourselves we had different directions to go in, and in the last 10 years it has been pretty much individual efforts."
A One and a Two has been in gestation for more than a decade, its origins lying in a friend's dying relative. He was in a coma but the doctors felt he might benefit if people addressed him as if he could understand everything. "It was quite overwhelming to me to talk to the person pretending he's normal. In that kind of situation you have to be very honest not just to him but to yourself. That was in the 1980s but I knew I was too young to make the film then." Yang was then in his late 30s. "I let it sit in my head so that all the details came in and settled, and when I finally proposed the story [to the film's Japanese backers] two years ago, I felt I was ready."
One of the film's most memorable parts involves the obser vations of the small boy, played unselfconsciously by Jonathan Chang. "I didn't think that much about that part over the years. Most of the details developed during the writing because basically that character is the foundation of all the other characters, someone we all once were. Most of the people I talk to share similar feelings, whether they are men or women. I think we were all once that way, with all kinds of questions, and we didn't know which one was more philosophical than the other because we didn't have answers to any of them."
Yang gives credit to his largely unknown cast for the success of the film. "The writing doesn't stop at the script; that's a blueprint. There is still room with actors to accommodate their strengths and avoid their weaknesses. It's like a building - it has to be built under one concept or it doesn't work. Taiwan does not have a big pool of actors, and Jonathan was only seven at the time and I was looking for a 10-year-old. But he caught my casting director's eye and he said, 'Take a look at this kid.' I said 'Gee!' I was worried whether he would understand the things I would ask him to do but he was so smart."
While Yang's work has always found a responsive audience in Taipei, Europe was the first territory overseas to welcome it. "The London Film Festival in 1983 was the first moment that Taiwan's new cinema got a chance to be exposed to the world. I did one segment of a film done by four young film-makers that was invited to the festival and I hand-carried the tapes to London . . . After that, I think people realised what was happening and Derek Malcolm [the Guardian's film critic at the time] came to Taipei."
Japan followed suit. But it took years before the west was prepared to give proper releases to Asian films that were not exclusively concerned with martial arts. The success of Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love may push the doors wider open.
Yang is interested in exploring the world that the new technologies have created. "We have more and more things in common than in the past, especially in the cities. In the last 10 years, I [have become] more familiar with the streets of Tokyo and Hong Kong and some parts of Paris and LA than the rural areas of my own country." He has finished a script about "a young kid who travels the world with just a cellphone and a credit card. Those two things are all you need now. It's a new world and there are a lot of stories we can tell each other."
The success of A One and a Two has already led to new offers. "I feel like an athlete - all these clubs seeing if you would like to join the team. There are new possibilities but I think it depends on whether my style fits into their game - and if it does, it's wonderful." There had been approaches before, but at the time he felt that in Hollywood it was "bankers making the decisions". He believes that it is easier now for an independent film-maker to have control, and mentions David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino as two directors whose work he admires.
Yang hopes now to make a film in Seattle and, with the kind of budget previously unavailable to him, a second world war story set in Taiwan. His homeland's ambiguous geo-politics is a constant preoccupation for Taiwanese film-makers. "That's part of the reality so when you do a film that is genuine or authentic it has to have that element. I am an optimistic person. I think something positive will come out of this situation . . . there are a lot of things in common between [China and Taiwan] if we set aside the old ideologies."
Like the small boy with the camera in A One and a Two, Yang seems now to be in the perfect position to use film to show people the parts of their lives that they normally miss.