Hou Hsiao-hsien—Freedom Amidst Constraints

There is really only one way to watch a movie by Hou ­Hsiao-­hsien: to gaze upon it in silence.

In a movie by Hou, the lens has the power to arrest the eyes and hold them captive. His most recent work, The Assassin, is no exception. No matter how long the shot, the viewer always wants to look deeper into the scene. And after the movie ends, it always takes a while to digest all the rich imagery one has just seen.

In a recent interview with the director, we talked about the imagery captured in his lens. We asked Hou—who has just made the first martial arts film of his career—what sort of spirit he was trying to express.

Dressed in a white baseball cap, a polo shirt, and jeans, the 68-year-old Hou looks like he’s gotten thinner amidst a hectic schedule of publicity activities. My photo­grapher asks him to take off his ball cap. Hou complies, but while doing so runs a hand through his hair and asks, “But my hair has been flattened by the cap. Sure it’s ok?”

He sports a crewcut, so we don’t see any problem, but maybe this is one of those things that a director would be a stickler about? A crew member who’s worked with Hou for years reveals that if the director takes off his ever-present white cap and starts running a hand through his hair while working on set, everyone knows to keep a safe distance, because it means that something is bothering the boss.

Constrained at the filming stage

Liao ­Ching-sung, who’s been a film editor with Hou for years and acted as a producer of The Assassin, explains that Hou, not wanting to put off the filming of The Assassin, turned down an invitation to film a remake of ­Akira Ku­ro­sawa’s 1952 film ­Ikiru (“To Live”) in honor of the 100th anniversary of Ku­ro­sawa’s birth. Hou was quite frank about his reason: “Because it would have been really difficult. The atmosphere in a movie about Japan is not the same. And ­Ikiru is a period piece. I just thought it would be very difficult to do.” Plans for the remake of ­Ikiru had been drawn up specifically with Hou in mind as director, and the organizers had gone to great pains to secure his services.

But Hou couldn’t ignore the difficulty of the task at hand, and decided, with complete candor: “Forget it. I’ll just do my own movie. It’s what I know best.” He stated that a filmmaker is limited by hard realities. This has in fact shaped his thinking for 40 years.

Ku­ro­sawa once expressed great admiration for Hou’s cinematic freedom. Ku­ro­sawa especially liked The Puppetmaster. He watched it four times, and said he could never film anything quite like it.

The Assassin trains a spotlight on the spiritual side of the martial arts, an aspect that has long tended to get short shrift in cinema. Says Hou: “A true martial artist does not kill lightly. The Chinese character for ‘martial,’ 武 (wu), is actually a combination of 止 (zhi) and 戈 (ge), which together mean ‘to rest one’s spear.’ A martial artist should not kill for political reasons, nor for any selfish motive. The story may be based on a Tang-Dynasty short story, but it remains relevant in our modern world.”

Constrained in the adaptation process

In the original story, the heroine, Nie Yin­niang, is trained as an assassin, but her innate sense of human sympathy leads her to abandon the profession. That is why The Assassin has no scenes in which fighters defy gravity, get in epic sword fights, or the like. It was this psychological aspect of the story that first spurred in Hou the idea that he would one day base a film on it. An avid reader of literature from throughout the world, Hou says there are many works of European literature in which assassins are not allowed to kill for just any reason. “The only exception is to avenge a family member’s death.”

Despite its simple plot, the story of Nie Yin­niang ­really caught Hou’s attention. From the first time he read the story as a college student, Hou always harbored the intention to make it into a film. However, the story as told by Hou differs in many respects from the original. Says Hou: “The original story contained elements of myth. It wasn’t always realistic. I changed those parts.” (See the note at the end of this article.)

The film script therefore only used the basic skeleton of the storyline. “Sticking faithfully to the original story would have been a big headache. It would have been too hard to recreate two different military garrisons, so I just simplified things and had her sent to kill Tian Ji’an.” To get the details right, Hou scoured numerous classical texts. He studied the timelines of particular people, places, and events. He read authorized histories, unauthorized histories, and novels. He spent years piecing together the relationships between people and events in the story. The complexity of it convinced him that adaptation was absolutely necessary. And there was another factor that motivated him to press ahead with the project—he had found the right actress to play the part of Nie Yin­niang.

Constrained in casting decisions

That actress was Shu Qi, whom he had already cast to play in Millennium Mambo in 2001 and Three Times in 2005. Hou felt she was the perfect choice.

“The thing is, Nie Yin­niang is very much like Shu Qi herself. If we had first written a script and then gone looking for a lead actress, it would have taken too long, and there’s no guarantee we would have found the right person. We had to have the actress from the get-go.” Using performers that he’s familiar with is a basic principle that Hou sticks to, and it’s another of the constraints he works around.

But subject matter and casting were not the only areas where Hou faced limited options. His art team worked for 12 years to achieve an authentic recreation of the Tang-Dynasty physical environment; the director’s options in this regard were very limited indeed. On top of that, the movie has but sparse dialogue (Shu Qi speaks on only nine occasions), and half of the lines are in classical Chinese. The narrative style places little stress on continuity, and the assassin can’t find it in herself to kill anyone, into the bargain. Wasn’t Hou worried that Western judges at the Cannes Film Festival would find the story hard to follow?

No such worries, says Hou, who explains that the spirit of the “principled warrior” does exist in Western novels. “For example, in 8 Million Ways to Die, a movie adapted from the detective stories of Lawrence Block, there’s the idea that you can’t lightly kill a person. This spirit imposes that same limitation in my film.”

Hou’s long-time scriptwriting collaborator Chu Tien-wen once said that Hou is not a storyteller, but a poet. From the time when he was a key player in the rise of Taiwan’s New Wave cinema, Hou’s films have been marked more by beautiful camera work than by storytelling. When The Assassin premiered in Cannes a noted film critic, writing in the French publication Cahiers du Cinéma, asked: Is it so important to understand a film? His answer: No, it is more important that a film should make me want to keep watching.

When watching a film by Hou, it’s easy to get drawn into the world it creates. Those who see deeply into that world will naturally grasp the deeper meaning of the film.

I’m restricted, therefore I’m free

Observers generally feel that Hou spent too long filming The Assassin (it took about two years), but the director himself doesn’t think so (although it’s the longest he’s ever spent filming). “The fact that the story is set in the Tang Dynasty was the biggest difficulty we dealt with while filming. After all the historical reading we did, we realized just how difficult it would be to recreate a Tang-Dynasty environment.” The more he read, the more details he wanted to work into the film. Achieving a completely accurate recreation was never a possibility.

One example is the Tang custom of beating drums daily, 3,000 times in the morning and 5,000 come evening. Once the evening drumbeats ceased, all the villages would close their gates, and no one was allowed in or out. This beating of the drums is included in the movie, but anyone unfamiliar with the old custom would surely not understand the ceaseless drumming. Hou very much enjoyed studying Tang-Dynasty literature, and once he had a clear image of Tang society in his head, he wouldn’t allow himself to stray from a realistic portrayal. Says Hou: “Restrictions set you free.”

Restricted, yet free. Hou always goes the extra mile to achieve realism, but is still able to create a strong sense of pathos, as he’s shown in the past with such films as A Time to Live and a Time to Die, A City of Sadness, The Puppetmaster, Flower of Shanghai, The Best of Our Times, and Good Men, Good Women. In the same vein, he also wants the acting to be as realistic as possible. Once the camera starts rolling, he lets the actors take over, so that the roles can play themselves out. “I’ll tell you what’s most beautiful. It’s when an actor gets totally immersed in the role.”

Hou doesn’t tell his actors how to act their parts, nor does he use a shooting script. And, just like American director Martin Scorsese, he doesn’t use a breakdown, either. Scorsese, however, enjoys the support of the Hollywood production system, with its highly refined division of labor; Hou relies instead on a team that he’s worked with for years, including editor Liao ­Ching-sung, art director ­Hwarng Wern-ying, director of photography Mark Lee, and scriptwriter Chu Tien-wen. For The Assassin, Hou also brought the young author ­Hsieh Hai-meng on board as a scriptwriter. An artist’s job may be a lonely endeavor, but Hou notes that “a film is not something you can do all by yourself.”

The spoken and the unspoken

As for the disjointed way the storyline progresses, Hou has a thing or two to say: “My script is perfectly logical, but some of the clues to what’s going on are hidden. Some parts of the story may show up in the scenes, while others do not.” To make his point, Hou ends up spending a half-hour explaining the entire storyline. He explains that virtually every bit of the story was filmed, but of the 440,000 feet of film that were shot, only about 10,000 feet made it into the movie. It was up to Hou to pick the one frame in 44 that would survive the cut, so naturally the film is a challenge to understand.

“I can’t set everything out explicitly in my films, like some sort of soliloquy. I can only show part of what’s going on.” Interestingly, whereas moviegoers generally hate to be exposed to a spoiler before they’ve seen a film, Hou feels just the opposite. He would like for audiences to come prepared, having done their homework. He would like for them to understand the plot as well as possible ahead of time. The more they know, the better. “I can only reveal a little part of the story, but if you are capable of connecting the dots, you’ll understand everything clearly.”

Film critic Wen Tien-­hsiang likens The Assassin to a poem: every scene is like a beautiful line of verse. If you look closely, you may come to appreciate what scriptwriter Chu Tien-wen said: this film will leave viewers with something to savor long afterward.

A boost for the local film industry

In addition to filming, Hou has chaired the executive committee of the Golden Horse Awards and has also chaired the Taipei Film Festival, and he cares deeply about the state of Taiwan’s film industry. At his insistence, all of the massive postproduction phase of making The Assassin was handled by firms in Taiwan.

It might be done more cheaply in Thailand or Korea, says Hou, and the US might have better technology, but he decided to have the work done here. “Taiwan’s postproduction firms do enjoy an edge in one area—they have a very good intuitive feel for the task at hand. Both technically and artistically, they are every bit as strong on the fundamentals as anyone overseas.”

Three organizations—Central Pictures, the National Center for Traditional Arts, and Images Infinitely—collaborated on the postproduction work. Central Pictures played the lead role, and invested in big equipment upgrades to ensure success. Says Hou: “I want Taiwan’s film industry to grow stronger. I hope the firms that worked on this film will have learned a lot in the process, and that Central Pictures will spin off new companies.”

Turning to the topic of budgeting, he declares, “Postproduction was just too expensive! If I’d known, I wouldn’t have used celluloid. But digital equipment simply doesn’t capture colors, or light and shadow, the way celluloid does. And my sets weren’t inside a studio—they were out on an empty lot at Central Pictures. I needed actual wind, actual light. It’s really satisfying to film that on celluloid.” But Hou does plan to give digital technology a try with his next film.

Before The Assassin was delivered to the Cannes festival, Hou spent over a year and a half editing it, producing version after version. Not long before the film was due to hit the theaters, we asked if there would be any more edits. “No more edits,” he replied. But two days later when we went to the postproduction firm to interview art director Hwarng Wern-ying, we were surprised to see Hou still puttering around in the editing room.

So, did he edit it further that day? Perhaps mere moviegoers like us will never know.

Film till you drop

After 40 years as a director, Hou has said he intends to quicken the pace of his filming activities. Asked how long he intends to continue, he thinks for a few seconds before responding: “I don’t really know. I guess I’ll just keep going until I can’t do it any longer. The Portuguese director ­Manoel de Oliveira, for example, appeared with Shu Qi at age 99 at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. As long as I’m healthy, in good spirits, and mentally alert, I can keep on filming.” It wasn’t until April 2, 2015 that de Oliveira passed away at the age of 106.

Asked if there is no separating his life from his work as a director, Hou once again thinks a bit before responding: “My films are actually an extension of my life. They’re a part of me. You know what I notice when I’m out and about? It’s people.” His films have always focused on people. And when he leaves home, he usually gets around by metro or bus. Hou says he can’t be cut off from people, and chuckles about a discovery he’s made—people taking public transportation are stone silent in the morning, but boisterous by late afternoon, especially the students. One sees everything on public transportation; some yield their seats to the infirm, others don’t. It’s all very fascinating.

“I like to observe all kinds of people. In my line of work, if you don’t get the right people, everything goes wrong.” In his life, just like in his films, for Hou the most beautiful scenery of all is people.

Note:

The story of Nie Yin­niang is set in the Tang Dynasty, about 40 years after the end of the An Lu­shan Rebellion of 755 to 763. Yin­niang is kidnapped at age ten by a nun who trains her to become an assassin capable of killing a person within three moves.

She is taken on as a retainer in the service of the military governor of ­Weibo, Tian Ji’an, who sends her at one point to assassinate Liu ­Changyi, the military governor of ­Chenxu. But Nie Yin­niang comes to feel a deep respect for Liu’s ability to foresee the future, and decides to serve him instead. Later she foils two attempts on Liu’s life, first by Jing Jing, then Kong Kong. Both had been dispatched by Tian Ji’an. Having saved Liu’s life, Nie’s status rises considerably under the governor, but she doesn’t become arrogant. Even in a time of strife and chaos, she is an assassin with principles.

In Hou’s film script, Nie Yin­niang and Tian Ji’an are not master and retainer, as in the original short story, but childhood sweethearts, and it is Tian that she is dispatched to kill.

(upper photos by Tsai Cheng-tai, courtesy of Spot Films; bottom photo by Chuang Kung-ju)

Hou Hsiao-hsien does his own thing, paying little attention to comments or praise. His films roll steadily on, like a river deep and wide, at their own pace and in their own direction. Realism has always been a prominent feature in his works.

In addition to Hou’s rigorous insistence on aesthetic beauty, the characters in The Assassin show emotional restraint that nevertheless belies a dramatic tension and leaves viewers with something to savor. Hou feels that there is a romantic side to each person; it's simply that he doesn't make a point of bringing it out in his films. (photos by Tsai Cheng-tai, courtesy of Spot Films)

In addition to Hou’s rigorous insistence on aesthetic beauty, the characters in The Assassin show emotional restraint that nevertheless belies a dramatic tension and leaves viewers with something to savor. Hou feels that there is a romantic side to each person; it's simply that he doesn't make a point of bringing it out in his films. (photos by Tsai Cheng-tai, courtesy of Spot Films)

In addition to Hou’s rigorous insistence on aesthetic beauty, the characters in The Assassin show emotional restraint that nevertheless belies a dramatic tension and leaves viewers with something to savor. Hou feels that there is a romantic side to each person; it's simply that he doesn't make a point of bringing it out in his films. (photos by Tsai Cheng-tai, courtesy of Spot Films)

“I’ll tell you what’s most beautiful. It’s when an actor gets totally immersed in the role.” A realistic portrayal, in Hou’s view, will move viewers. He always finds ways to get his actors immersed in their roles, and has said more than once that Shu Qi was the only person he ever considered for the role of Nie Yinniang. (photo by Tsai Cheng-tai, courtesy of Spot Films)

“Seeking realism imposes limitations, but once you know what you intend to do, you have freedom.” Hou says it’s a lonely task to work away at a creation within a set of limiting parameters. He always looks for guidance in a wide range of literary sources. To his way of thinking, the written word and images are the same thing, the same form of expression. Lurking behind each expression, there is depth; a movie cannot be two-dimensional. Shown here are stills from A City of Sadness. (courtesy of Taiwan Film & Culture Association)

“Seeking realism imposes limitations, but once you know what you intend to do, you have freedom.” Hou says it’s a lonely task to work away at a creation within a set of limiting parameters. He always looks for guidance in a wide range of literary sources. To his way of thinking, the written word and images are the same thing, the same form of expression. Lurking behind each expression, there is depth; a movie cannot be two-dimensional. Shown here are Flowers of Shanghai. (courtesy of Taiwan Film & Culture Association)