Hou Hsiao-Hsien tried to make The Assassin with a 16mm camera
Filmmaker Hou Hsiao-Hsien came into his own during the 1980s, in the midst of the Taiwanese New Wave, the renaissance period that put Taiwan on the global film map. Masterpieces like A City Of Sadness, The Puppetmaster, and Flowers Of Shanghai established Hou as a major and influential figure on the international film scene, while subsequent projects found him delving into drug-fueled club culture (Millennium Mambo) and working in homage to his favorite filmmakers from Japan (Café Lumière) and France (Flight Of The Red Balloon). And then, he stopped directing.
In the eight years that followed, Hou turned his attention back to Taiwanese film culture, chairing both of the country’s major festivals and opening a small chain of arthouse theaters. Now, he’s returned with The Assassin, an adaptation of a story by the 9th-century writer Pei Xing that Hou first encountered as a film student in the 1970s. The winner of the Best Director prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, The Assassin is a staggeringly beautiful and idiosyncratic re-imagining of the classic martial-arts drama. A week before the movie’s Stateside release, Hou briefly spoke to The A.V. Club over Skype with the help of an interpreter.
The A.V. Club: You took a long break before making The Assassin.
Hou Hsiao-Hsien: It was actually eight years, but it was wasn’t because I wanted to take this time off, but because I was the chairman of the Taipei Film Festival for three years and of the Golden Horse Film Festival in Taiwan for five years. And it wasn’t until the last two years that I started thinking about coming back into making another film.
AVC: The idea for this film came earlier than that, though.
HHH: I actually read the short story back in college. It was always in the back of my mind as a story I wanted to shoot, but after eight years as the chief of two separate film festivals, at the tail end, I was really thinking about what I wanted to do next and so the idea of shooting this Tang dynasty short story became the front-runner. I thought, “If I’m not going do it now, I’m not going to do it ever.” I am reaching a certain age, and needed to get this out of my system.
AVC: The technology of film changed a lot during those eight years—the big switch over to digital.
HHH: I’m not very familiar with digital formats, and I would have needed to do tests and learn. Actually, I originally wanted to shoot with a Bolex 16mm camera. I wanted to try short shots and to maybe try to do more close-ups and quick edits, because there are limits on how much film you can put in that camera and for how long you can shoot. I even brought two of them to Japan, but when Mark Lee Ping Bin, the director of photography, looked through the viewfinder, it was too small for his eyes. He turned around to me and he said, “I just can’t shoot with this camera.” So we went to 35mm.