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How did you decide on the three years in which the stories are set? To what extent did you want the stories to reflect the larger social and political realities of those years?
- The original idea had nothing to do with politics. I simply wanted to tell three love stories, each
set in a different time. I was interested, precisely, in the differences between them. I chose 1966
because it’s a story drawn from my personal memories of that time. Before I went for my military
service, I used to chase the so-called ‘pool-girls’ around the pool-halls. I chose 1911 because that historical moment was ideal for showing the gap between the desires of the man and the desires of the woman. He longs for revolution, and for the recovery of Taiwan from Japanese rule, whereas she longs for emotional security. And I chose 2005 because the story is based on the real life of a young woman in present-day Taipei.
Why did you decide to focus on love stories?
- At the outset, this was to have been a film by three directors. The idea was that each director
would use his or her own experience of growing up – and his or her specific musical memories
- to produce a point of view of love. We felt that the contrasts between the different directors’
visions would be interesting. We took this project to the PPP project market at Pusan International
Film Festival, where it won a prize. We’ve also received some financial support from the Taiwan-
ese government’s Information Office, but it turned out to be very difficult to finance a film with
three directors, and we eventually gave up the attempt. And so I decided to make the film by my-
self. We kept to the original ideas for Parts 1 and 2, and looked for a new story for Part 3. The
concept evolved a bit: I decided to show how the expression of love has been different in dif-
ferent periods of modern history.
You haven’t tried to pastiche the style or film grammar of silent movies in the 1911 episode, but each episode does have its own look and timbre. Can you say something about the stylistic choices behind each episode?
- To make a film in Taiwan has become very difficult. If I have any skill, maybe it’s in the area of
problem-solving. It’s when I’m confronted by the physical realities of the location and the actors
themselves that I start to have ideas. The biggest challenge in shooting the 1966 story was find-
ing locations: there’s almost nothing from the mid-1960s left in Taiwan’s cities now. For the 1911
episode, we were lucky enough to find an old house in an almost perfect state of preservation,
which we could use as our setting. For the 2005 episode, we had the opposite problem: too
many scenes and too many choices. The shooting of the present day episode took much longer
than the other two, and it was far more difficult.
Was it important to you to have two stars in the lead roles throughout?
- Shu Qi was decided at the very beginning. I’d worked with her on Millennium Mambo, of course,
and she was interested in the stories for Parts 1 and 2. The idea for Part 3 came from another
director who was working on his film in my office; he was working with an actress, and she
inspired the character in our Part 3. This actress has her own website, and I showed it to Shu Qi. She found it interesting too, and so we decided to go with it for our third story. The decision to cast Chang Chen came later. He’d just made a film with Tian Zhuangzhuang, about a famous Chinese player of the board game go and his friendship/rivalry with a famous Japanese player.
I felt that his current situation made him a good match for Shu Qi.
Do you see this film as an extension of what you’ve done in previous films or as a new beginning?
- More as a new beginning, especially Part 3, which takes off from what we did in Millennium
Mambo. It seems to me that by contrasting love stories from three different times, we can feel
how people’s behaviour is circumscribed by the times and places they live in. For me, the film’s
Chinese title has a very specific resonance. If we speak of 'the best of our times', as invoked in
the Chinese title, it’s not that we have wonderful memories as such. What makes times 'best' is
that they’re lost and gone: we’ll never have them again.
Interview by Tony Rayns, Taipei/Seoul, May 2005.
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