Tastefully dressed in black, commercial director Chung Mong-hong (鍾孟宏) looks relaxed as he sits down for our interview in his studio on Minsheng East Road (民生東路). Decorating his workspace are storyboards pinned on a wall like pieces of art and several vintage bicycles that lean against a spotless glass window.
Chung has just finished a television commercial that took two days to shoot.
But the subject of this particular meeting, though, is not the 43-year-old director’s
successful career as a maker of TV advertisements — he’s filmed more than 100 — but his debut feature film Parking (停車), which premiered this year in the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard section and opened last weekend in theaters across Taiwan.
Parking is a black comedy and contemporary fable about one man’s Kafkaesque journey through Taipei over the course of one night, and stars a company of fine actors including Chang Chen (張震), Jack Kao (高捷), Leon Dai (戴立忍), Chapman To (杜汶澤) and Kwai Lun-mei (桂綸鎂).
Taipei Times: You were an information technology engineering major at National Chiao Tung University (交通大學) and obtained a master’s degree in filmmaking from the Art Institute of Chicago. What inspired you to become a director?
Chung Mong-hong: I had lived in the countryside in Pingtung until high school. Going to a movie was the ultimate form of entertainment. We saw lots of Bruce Lee (李小龍) and Michael Hui (許冠文) films. I was particularly fond of the James Bond movies because they were like pornography for us kids. [He laughs.]
In high school I had a chance to see Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence. There is one scene where David Bowie kisses Ryuichi Sakamoto. It got me to start thinking, “Wow, movies can show so many special things, things I don’t understand.”
TT: You came back from Chicago in 1994. Why did it take so long for you to make your first film?
CM: Filmmakers born in the 1960s were born under an unlucky star. We were in high school when Taiwan’s New Wave cinema started to take off in the early 1980s. We were inspired and had certain expectations and ideals for films. We went abroad, studied film and came back, only for Taiwanese cinema to collapse in the early 1990s.
Back then all you saw and heard were people selling houses and borrowing money to make movies that no one wanted to see. The only option you had was whether or not you wanted to follow the same road. I chose another way.
TT: Why did you choose to make your entry into the film world with the documentary Doctor (醫生)? The subject mater was rather challenging, especially considering you had no previous experience in documentary filmmaking.
CM: To me, it was like taking an oath and chopping off a chicken’s head in a temple to show your determination. [He laughs]. Documentary filmmaking is the opposite of commercial filmmaking. By taking a stab at a medium that’s foreign to what I know best and doing it right, I can tell myself, “Yes, we are here to stay and make movies,” and show others that, besides technique, I do have other abilities required for being a film director.
[Chung and his team spent three years making Doctor, which was completed in 2006. Shot in black and white, the award-winning documentary explores the meaning of life and death through the story of a Taiwanese-American doctor who loses his 13-year-old son to suicide and then a young Peruvian patient to cancer. The film was well-received because it refused to fall back on sentimentalism, and looked at its subject matter with a composed and contemplative gaze.]
TT: Do you consciously make a distinction between making films and commercials?
CM: ‘Consciously’ is not the word. You must divide the two. Have you seen any movies made by television commercial directors? Basically they all fail. It hurts me to see my colleagues fail. The problem is if you look at a 100-minute project with an eye trained for a 30-second ad, you are bound to be crushed.
Styles and forms are not sins in and of themselves. But the most important thing is to return to the basic question: what do you want your audience to see? It would be wrong if a director plays with a [visual] style thinking, “Wow, it’s cool!” and repeats it for 100 minutes. As a commercial director, you have to give up what you excel in — images and combinations of images.
TT: Is it easy to get lost in visual styles?
CM: Absolutely. We are trained to look at things from this or that angle. But you have to stop looking and see what happens. Films are not about angles. They are about characters, their surroundings and how they survive and live in these environments.
TT: There are quite a few leading roles in Parking and they all appear natural and rooted in life. How do you build up a character?
CM: The first thing to start with is to think of what they do and how they live. But to me, the principal aspect is the character’s state of mind. I worked with a psychologist for two-and-half months to understand and analyze the characters. I will say that characterization is the most demanding part of the making of a film.
TT: Did you revise your characters to suit the actors during the shooting of the film?
CM: Definitely. My way of working is to put aside the script when it is finished and change the dialogue on a daily basis after the shooting begins, since the characters emerge from the haze of the script and become clearer each day on the set.
Once I come to know the actors better, I am able to appropriate their habits, gestures and senses of humor and incorporate these in the personas of the characters they play, and bring the two closer to one another. It’s probably why a lot of people say the performances seem to be on the same wavelength even though the actors come from different backgrounds.
TT: How do you work with your actors?
CM: I have an aversion to rehearsals. I like to show up on the set with different dialogues every day so that the actors don’t have time to memorize the lines. They can improvise when their minds are uninhibited.
There are actors who do exactly the same thing for 10 takes. That is not what I want.
TT: It seems to me that you make a few references to Chinese-language films in Parking ...
CM: I do?
TT: Jack Kao’s (高捷) role reminds me of the one he plays in God Man Dog (流浪神狗人). The section where Chapman To (杜汶澤) plays a Hong Kong tailor is quite Wang Kar Wai-esque.
CM: There are certain types of music, narration and visuals that have come to be known as Wang’s signatures. If mine seem similar, then I guess you can call it a tribute.
If I ever talk about other Taiwanese films in my works, I would make it a satire. [Chung pauses.] Taiwanese films sometimes appear self-mutilating to me. Yes, you can tell stories about people who are wretched or traumatized, but the dignity must always be there. I loathe watching films that only show how miserable the characters are.
Look at the films of Yasujiro Ozu. The man’s wife is dead, his daughter has been married off, and he has to live the rest of his life alone. What about Aki Kaurismaki’s characters? Aren’t their lives miserable? But they deal with their situations and lives with dignity.
TT: Is that also the reason why you choose to maintain a distance from your subjects in Doctor and Parking?
CM: Rather than trying to pull the audience right into the story, I like to keep a distance between the two. To me, one of the cinema’s great attractions is that distance.
TT: Parking has a strong visual style. What was your inspiration as the film’s cinematographer?
CM: Are you familiar with the paintings of Edward Hopper? [Chung quickly scrolls through several files on his computer and shows me a few of Hopper’s scenes of American urban landscapes.] Look at his use of light and shadow and how his characters are portrayed in terms of their relation to the environment. [Here, Chung clicks on Nighthawks (1942).] Hopper’s city is lonesome and desolate. I wanted to give Taipei the same noir feel and look.
TT: Is it easy for you to be both the director and cinematographer on the set?
CM: It is actually easier because I don’t need to communicate with another person. We hired a cinematographer at the beginning. But he ran away, probably because he couldn’t stand me. [Chung laughs.]
I started doing the cinematography for all the commercials I have directed after an advertiser made me the cinematographer and Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢) the director for a car ad in 2000.
TT: What are your plans for the future?
CM: I will keep making commercials and feature films. Unlike filmmaking, making commercials is not about how you create a piece of work. It is about instant pleasure and satisfaction, and it is fun.
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