CINEVUE: Arvin Chen was born and raised in the US before he went back to Taiwan in his twenties to apprentice with Edward Yang. Afterwards he came back to the States to get his MFA in Film Production at USC. In 2007, his short film MEI won the 2007 Silver Bear in Beilin’s International Short Film Competition. His first feature AU REVIOR TAIPEI (2010) won the Best Asian Film Award from the NETPAC (Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema) at the Berlin International Film Festival, and had its New York Premiere at AAIFF’10. His sophomore feature WILL YOU STILL LOVE ME TOMORROW? is a family dramedy centered on Weichung, a closeted gay caught between heterosexual marriage and his revived passion, and Feng, who knows nothing about Weichung’s sexual orientation and is thinking of having a second child. Read the Review. Asian CineVision Program Manager Lesley Yiping Qin talked to Arvin about this unique film and his work in Taiwan. WILL YOU STILL LOVE ME TOMORROW? has opened on Jan 17, 2014 at Quad Cinema and AMC Empire 25 in New York City.
CINEVUE: You said that you were inspired by gay friends in Taiwan to create this story. Did you do research on what closeted married gay men’s lives are like in Taiwan or Asia?
Arvin Chen: I didn’t do tons of research. I just talked to some of my friends and heard some anecdotes and stories. But the story of WILL YOU STILL LOVE ME TOMORROW? is totally invented. Just the situation is something that someone had told me. But the characters and everything else are pretty much just written.
CV: Did anything strike you as you got to learn more about this community in Taiwan?
AC: Only that it is kind of a weird phenomenon, because it is very open. Taipei, for an Asian city, is very open towards gay like that. It is pretty liberal. But the weird thing is that it is also a very conservative part of it, which is that you have to worry more about the family and parents. I think what’s different about it from the US society is that in Taipei there are a lot of gay men who are clearly gay, but they don’t tell their parents, whereas in America, the first thing you usually have to do is tell your parents. You really cannot confront your parents (in Taiwan). But these are also people living very openly outside of that. I think that’s what’s so different about Taiwan in Asia than other places.
CV: The wives of closeted gay men in the marital relationship has become quite a topic recently in discussions related to marriage equality. Did you have it in mind from the very beginning that Feng ‘ s revelation of her true self should be another anchor in the story?
AC: When I started to write the story I realized that the Feng character is even a bit more interesting than the gay character – a little bit more moving, because at least her husband actually knows that he is gay, and he’s trying to suppress it. But Feng does not know anything. So she is the character who has the most to deal with more than he does. So when I started to write this story, I realized that she was the saddest character, the one who has the most emotions to handle.
But it’s weird when I wrote the movie – when I made the movie – gay marriage was not an issue yet in Taiwan, at least not on the news yet. Unlike now you have big protests against it, you have celebrities having concerts for it. So in a way it’s weird that after the movie came out, half a year later is when gay marriage became a bigger issue.
CV: Did you see your film as part of this movement?
AC: If you watch the film, you could see that I am a total supporter of gay marriage. The reason why the main character has to do this is because he does not see for himself any other alternatives. That is how I feel personally, but this movie was not meant to be any social political message. It is about this guy and his family.
CV: Was it considered as such by the gay community in Taiwan?
AC: In a way a lot of people do not see it as a purely gay film. It’s a kind of film about different characters dealing with love and life. Obviously the main one is gay and he sets off the story. But to me I don’t think of it as a gay or straight film. I just think of it as this little romantic comedy about a family.
CV: How was the film received by different audiences at the different venues it was shown? Was there any difference in reactions that you detected during the extensive festival run around the world?
AC: Usually how people respond to the comedy is about the same. I think the difference is that culturally in Taiwan, people know less about homosexuality than those in US. In the US I think the audiences will view it as a little bit lighter, and in Taiwan the movie is a little bit more of a drama.
CV: What is the hardest part in inventing the story?
AC: Probably it’s trying to make a balance between comedy and the romance and the sadder moments. I knew I didn’t want to make a sad story – although for the most part it is – so the hard part was to find a comedy in it, to find a romance in it.
CV: What is the apparatus that you chose to strike this balance? I guess it ties into the choice of style as well?
AC: I just keep it light and shoot it in a style that it wouldn’t be a pure drama. It did help that I knew that I had one or two side characters that their stories are all the funnier, like the sister who’s going to be married, and her fiancé. Because I have a little bit comedy in the stories it helped me to make the whole thing lighter, and it helped me to cope with the of the more complicated side of the story too.
CV: Speaking of that, the casting is fantastic. What was the biggest challenge for Richie and Mavis to be immersed in the worlds of the characters? And what was your challenge, as well as the art directions, to make them convincing as ordinary people?
AC: The hardest part is that a lot of them are pretty much singers or musicians, so their lives are not like the lives of the characters. It took them a little bit time to get to be everyday characters. So we did a lot of improvisation for those characters in scenes that aren’t in the movie, the scenes that happened before the movie’s story. For instance, we improvised this scene where Mandy and fiancé for the first time they met. We did scenes when Mavis and Richie dated when they were younger. Things like that they are not in the movie, but it helped them to build the characters because they started to think more of themselves as the characters and everyday characters.
CV: Lawrence Ko is hilarious and he has the brilliant lines and commentaries. What did it take you to grasp the humor so precise and colloquial?
AC: Lawrence Ko is a good actor. He plays so many different characters all the time. I have some gay friends that I introduced and told him to hang out with and pick up some of their mannerism or the way they speak. Then for fun he would go to a lot of gay bars and just hang out with people. That is just how he is as an actor – he just observes people and thinks of funny things to say or do, based on the observations of the character.
CV: And it also raises questions about the process of your screenwriting. I heard that you wrote in English and translated the screenplay in Chinese and then rewrote in Chinese. Would you please talk about this translingual practice?
AC: It’s funny because I write in English first but when we translate into Chinese, a lot of the things that we wrote in English can’t be translated directly, so usually it takes a little bit of time to find a different way to get it right – especially if a line that’s supposed to be funny. Finding the humor in Chinese is sometimes kind of difficult and so by the time it turns into a Chinese script it’s not exactly the same as my original English script.
CV: Do you have a team that helped translate the script?
AC: No, it’s just usually when I translate it I have a friend or a couple of friends. Usually it is someone that I know who does a lot of translating for a place. He is very good at doing language and dialogues so we translated it together then after it was translated, I worked off the Chinese script, mostly. And then sometimes the lines are improvised by the actors – a lot of lines are not exactly as said as they are in the script. You know sometimes they on the set will change lines too. So the scripts don’t have to be so perfect. They don’t have to be something you have to follow exactly especially since they started it in English then they were turned into Chinese. The time we shoot it I also know that we may leave a lot of room for the actors.
CV: You’re working with the cinematographer Shao-yu Hsia who also worked on RETURN TICKET. It appears to me interesting that in MEI and AU REVOIR TAIPEI you worked with American cinematographers, but those two films have a lot if outdoor scenes that requires a good knowledge of the city scape; Hsia in RETURN TICKET adopted a more documentary style but this film is primarily set in the interior spaces. What was the collaboration like?
AC: It is interesting, because my first short MEI and AU REVIOR TAIPEI feel very, very similar in terms of the style. But this movie was supposed to be different, a little bit simpler, a little bit lighter, a little bit more controlled. RETURN TICKET is very different; that is almost more like a documentary with the style of shooting. This movie we really wanted to be like very everyday life and very simple, so I think the style becomes a little in between. You notice those little elements of his style, simple, elegant, and everyday life, but we also have these fantasy scenes where we went a little bit crazier. He is a very good DP because he can do both: he likes to shoot stuff like RETURN TICKET but he also does commercials; he can capture very light reality but he can also do the fantasy stuff.
CV: In the scene of Weichung making the confession the camera was hand-held. The shots before that were stable, but at that moment it becomes hand-held and more intimate.
AC: Yes it’s more of the DP style. He likes doing that kind of hand-held.
CV: And we have to talk about Edward Yang and YIYI. The framing, the domestic space, the secrets suppressed by the characters and the color palette are just reminiscent of YIYI. Did you feel his influence when creating the story and making the stylistic decisions?
AC: I didn’t purposely, but of course I like YIYI. Edward’s movies and him as a person have such a big influence that I think a little bit of the tone of the movie comes just from – yeah of course – his influence. I was not trying to make a homage to YIYI or anything like that. It’s just that there’s certain things about the middle class family in Taipei that I will always think of YIYI, even if I was not trying to. But then again I guess the other part is trying to make it unique and make it in a more western style, almost like the old 1950s American style. So it is a weird mix because a lot of it does feel like the everyday life of YIYI and then it has this more American style, fantasy sequences or comedy sequences.
CV: Two scenes worked for me really well: when Sansan watches his newly made gay friends play badminton everyone is playing in slow motion and it is a humorous play with the gaze of a supposedly straight man at homosexuality and finding it attractive.
AC: I have never been able to make a movie with just one plot and I always like to put side characters in. Also something interesting to me is that you have a gay character that’s trying to be straight but cannot help but fall in love again; then you have a straight character who has been heartbroken and some gay men are trying to help get his Beyoncé back. These two stories going at the same time makes it funny. You have a straight character, distracted by gays and a gay character who wants to be straight but cannot repress himself anymore. So it was more just to have a balance in it, one being a romantic storyline, the other more of a comedy storyline. I always like to have more than one story line balanced in; I can never make just one story ending.
CV: The other is when Feng delves into her world of imagination and starts to sing. In the story we don’t get to see much from Feng’s subjective perspective, but this fantasy scene explains. When in your writing did you decide that she should be the one to let go?
AC: I realized her story she was the one that really has to deal with this issue because her husband might not really deal with it. And I thought that at her saddest moment you should give her a moment of a fancy singer, a scene of a fantasy where she can convey her emotions. Part of it was to find a balance with the sadness of what she is feeling at that moment but then also her feelings for love and romance, and doing it in a way that is not too heavy or dramatic. So that is why there is this fantasy karaoke sequence. Then I realized that movie is more about her than his story because in the end she is the one that saves her husband; she is the one that makes the decision, not really him.
CV: How did Mavis feel about this scene?
AC: This was her most natural scene since she is a singer. All the scene was okay expect the argument scene; I think that scene was really hard for her. The argument scene and the wedding scene at the end; both were pretty difficult for her to do. But when it comes to singing and performing, I think that is where she is most comfortable.
CV: Could you also talk about Lee Lieh as a producer?
AC: She’s like a godmother and a big sister to everyone in Taiwan. She’s very supportive, She has got a good taste. All of her movies are very different. She has done 5 or 6 movies now. None of them are the same. She’s just so interesting. I don’t know how she picks projects, but everything she could do, she tries to do.
CV: How is it going with your next project?
AC: I’m still not sure exactly which one will be my next project because I am still working on a couple of scripts. But probably the most likely one would be the one set in the US. The main character is Chinese but there is also an American character and then a side character is Taiwanese. It’s kind of a amalgam of different things. I don’t know if it will work yet but I think it is interesting because a movie it is kind of like is WEDDING BANQUET which takes place in America but has Asian and American characters. It will take some time to make it work. It’s a tougher script to write.
CV: Any advice you would like to give to film students from cross-cultural background? How would you suggest them to navigate, or even better, take advantage of the multiple systems they work with?
AC: Well I think it is an advantage because increasingly movies are pretty much cross cultural and especially for art house movies. When you try to make a movie outside of the US you realize that there is this whole world of Asian filmmakers, European film makers, Middle Eastern filmmakers, etc. And everyone has studied in the US or studied in the Europe; someone is from here and studies over there. And more and more you see movies with a lot of cultural influences. To be from two different cultures is quite an advantage if you are trying to make movies other than Hollywood/American films. Some of the very famous Taiwanese filmmakers are so influenced by European films. Tsai Mingliang makes films in France all the time. Hou Hsiao-hsien has made movies in France. Edward has shot in Japan. So I think except for being in the Hollywood, it’s a really great advantage that you have the cultural background. And as a younger filmmaker, you also think that you will have more places to be, more stories to tell from different places. I think that even though I grew up in the US and came back to Taiwan to work in Asia, because it does offer different perspectives.
Interview record transcribed by Ofure Oviawe.