The master of Taiwan's New Wave Cinema, Hou Hsiao-hsien, was a juvenile gang member who got into fights and as a young man he was a gambler who stole the household food money. His family despaired.

Guangdong-born Taiwanese Hou said his life experience contributed to his film style - long, slow takes about difficult ordinary lives- and gambling taught him to be single-minded.

"Gambling needs your focus, so does work. You need to put all your attention into it," he said recently at a retrospective of his work in Hangzhou, marking the 30th anniversary of Taiwan's New Wave Cinema (1982-1990).

Hou mortgaged his house and borrowed heavily to make films for years but wasn't able to pay off the huge debts until he made his 10th film, "A City of Sadness" (1989), the first Chinese-language film to win the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival.

"What kind of person you are determines what kind of films you make," Hou told a gathering. He also spoke to Shanghai Daily.

"I used to be a box office flop. But what can I do? My films are from my life," the art house director added.

But the auteur is venerated today, making new and different films.

His upcoming work is "The Assassin," his first martial arts film, expected to be released next year. It stars veteran actress Maggie Cheung in a return to the screen, Hsu Chi, Chang Chen and Tetsuya Komuro. Observers are watching to see how he will make the transition to a US$10 million blockbuster (it is hoped) from grindingly slow and poetic art house films.

"In the next decade, one of my strongholds will be in Hangzhou. Maybe I will come in fall and winter to see if I can make a film in the city," he said.

Hou is generally considered the central figure in Taiwan's New Wave, which rejuvenated Taiwanese cinema in contrast to melodramas and kung fu films of the past. New Wave films told genuine stories of people in rural or urban Taiwan and they were told in realistic, gritty but sympathetic portrayals. Traditional narrative structure was often abandoned and stories progressed in real-life time, slowly - too slowly for many tastes. Hou and other directors tackled important issues such as poverty, changes brought about by urbanization, conflicts between generations, conflicts between tradition and modernity and conflicts with political authority.

Hou's "A City of Sadness," his 10th film and the one that put him on the map, addresses the conflicts and strained relations between indigenous Taiwanese and the newly arrived Chinese Nationalist government that fled the mainland after 1949. It had been a taboo topic.

Many of his early films were about his experiences of growing up in rural Taiwan in the 1950s and 60s. He generally makes rigorously minimalist dramas dealing with upheavals of Taiwanese history of the past century by viewing their impact on individuals or small groups.

Besides "A City of Sadness," representative works include "The Puppetmaster" (1993), "Good Men, Good Women" (1995), "Goodbye South, Goodbye" (1996), and "The Flowers of Shanghai" (1998) about "flower girls" or high-class prostitutes in old Shanghai.

Hou's films have been awarded prizes from prestigious international festivals such as the Venice International Film Festival, Berlin International Film Festival and Hawaii International Film Festival. He was voted "Director of the Decade" for the 1990s in a poll of American and international critics by The Village Voice and Film Comment.

But his work is rarely seen in the West outside the film festival circuit.

Family flight to Taiwan

Hou, a Hakka or Hakka Han Chinese, was born in Mei County, Guangdong Province in 1947. His father was a Kuomintang official and moved the family to Taiwan for work in 1948 as the Chinese Civil War was raging. The family lived in Fongshan City in coastal Kaohsiung, but was unable to return to Guangdong Province for decades.

Hou grew up in an atmosphere of impermanence and insecurity.

"My father thought he would go home soon, and all the furniture he bought was cheap and simple make-shift pieces," Hou recalled in a documentary about him, "The Portrait of Hou Hsiao-hsien" (1996). "So from boyhood I didn't feel that I belonged, and the fact that there's no family graveyard in Taiwan made the feeling stronger."

His father was in ill health and his mother was under great stress. "… My values were established then, somehow pessimistic," Hou told the meeting in Hangzhou. "… The background color of a film always reflects the directors' experiences and formation of values," he said of his films that are often sad and pessimistic.

As a boy and young man he was an avid reader of Chinese and foreign literature and loved martial arts novels. He loved local opera and movies, which he often saw by sneaking in or by counterfeiting tickets.

He got into trouble. His semi-autobiographical documentary "The Time To Live, the Time To Die" (1985) tells the story of Ah-ha (Hou's nickname) growing up from 1947 to 1960. After leaving his homeland, the boy adapts to his new home in Taiwan, putting him at odds with his more traditional family. He belongs to a gang and fights, sometimes with weapons. Once he smashes a police club's windows.

"Those are true stories," Hou told the audience in Hangzhou, saying he even triggered a gang war in which many young men were jailed. He ran off to a small island, hiding in a friend's house.

After high school, he was drafted into military service for two years. "I made up my mind to be a brand-new me," he said.

After leaving the army, he returned home and one day watched a film that fascinated him. He decided to get into the film industry.

Hou worked on an auto assembly line and prepared for the college entrance examination. In 1969 he entered the Taiwan Academy of Arts, studying film for three years. He did well but was quarrelsome. He read existentialism. He later worked as a computer salesman, then a script boy, then assistant director, script writer and director.

Always a long shot

His storytelling is elliptical and his style is marked by extremely long takes - for instance, there are only 222 shots in the 157-minute "A City of Sadness," which keeps the audience emotionally distanced from the characters and the action. The films are often criticized as boring.

But at his best, Hou can provoke overwhelmingly intense emotions precisely, and his films offer a generous store of images and feelings. There's minimal camera movement but intricate choreography of actors and space within the frame.

He encourages low-key, natural acting and uses extensive improvisation. Unlike many directors, he only repeats a scene one or two times and if it doesn't work, he usually calls it off since he says more practice makes the performance unnatural.

The first feature Hou directed was the comedy "Cute Girls" (1980) that demonstrated his style - long shots and poetic touches that drew big audiences. He also directed "Cheerful Wind" (1981) and "The Green, Green Grass of Home" (1982), which both did well.

But when he wrote and made his own less commercial films, they generally flopped. In "Boys from Fengkuei" (1983), Ah-Ching and his friends finish school in their peaceful fishing village, Fengkuei, and spend their time drinking and fighting. They go to the port city of Kaohsiung for work, and face the harsh realities of big city life and growing up.

It's slow moving and was screened for just one week. That was the first flop.

Hou persisted. "The most important thing that influences a movie's making is your life. I make those movies because I had that background," he said.

Since then his stories, often written in collaboration with scriptwriters Chu Tien-wen and Wu Nien-jen, depict the complex intertwining of the different strands that shape the lives of individuals. The style is poetic, relaxed and sympathetic. It's also emotional, filled with nostalgic images and beautiful compositions; their power lies in his total identification with the past and the fate of families who suffered through difficult times.

Though he was in debt, he bought the most advanced equipment and didn't stint on film. In making "The Sandwich Man" (1983), Hou only had 12,000 feet of film, but he used 400 feet a single magic scene that only lasted a couple of seconds.

"I deliberately used up film. You must make things you want, otherwise you make nothing," he said.

Despite its noncommercial nature, "A City of Sadness" brought Hou attention. "After that, people started to develop different styles of film and there was a boom in the Taiwan film industry," Hou said in the documentary. Foreign investors arrived.

Hou shows little concern for an overarching plot with clear goals. On the surface his films are about everyday life - eating, reading, cleaning the floor, washing the dishes. But there's a sense of a much greater world beyond the horizon of the story, whatever that story is. This focus on the mundane can make it difficult for viewers to understand.

In "Goodbye South, Goodbye," Hou finally sets an entire movie in the present day but he maintains a snail's pace and his rigorous, meticulous, though admittedly stunning, aesthetic approach.

The Taiwan director finally returned to the Chinese mainland when he shot "Flowers of Shanghai," about the struggles of "flower girls" or prostitutes in a 19th century brothel in Shanghai. The film is considered exquisite, but some critics say it's less than the sum of its parts. Hou goes from flower girl to flower girl, reporting their constant bickering about status and petty jealousies. He draws a picture of a vivid, miniature community.

In 2006, the Taiwanese master took inspiration from Albert Lamorisse's 1956 classic "The Red Balloon" and made "The Flight of the Red Balloon." telling the story of a French family as seen through the eyes of a Chinese student. It's Hou's first "Western" film and has an ethereal quality. It was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007.

His latest film and first martial arts movie, "The Assassin," is expected to be released next year. "It is about an ancient assassin who can kill people freely without caring, which made me think about why," he told ifeng.com.

"Martial arts must be my background," he said, "I can't compete with Hollywood."


Director Hou is a sensitive person, but a rational creator. As a viewer, I think his films look warm, but are, in fact, lonely. But I think loneliness is part of the human condition and he is strong enough to embrace that loneliness.

- Annie Yi, Taiwan actress who starred in several of Hou's films, including "Good Men, Good Women" (1995), "Goodbye South, Goodbye" (1996) and "The Flowers of Shanghai" (1998).

Hou Hsiao-hsien, always energetic and pleasing, gives us confidence. In the weak and complicated environment of today's film industry, he never grimaced and was never cynical... Often he falls, soon he gets up and delightedly moves on.

... He is famous for his signature fixed camera position and the aesthetics of long shots ... Friends once joked that 100 (long) shots could be seen as photos in an album, turning page by page ... Hou is the initiator of overuse of long shots in Taiwan's New Wave films.

- Chu Tien-wen, Taiwan author and script writer who has cooperated with Hou on many films for more than 10 years.

Hou Hsiao-hsien focuses on the villages in southern Taiwan and the remote parts of Taipei. From extreme realism at the very beginning to today's poetic modernism, his works discuss the lives of nobodies. They often conclude with natural compromises, which approaches the Taoist concept of 'governing by doing nothing that goes against nature.'

- Peggy Chiao, renowned Taiwan film critic, playwright and film producer.