Part One - Preface Text by Rocky Pan
While you are sitting in your comfortable office, you start to think about the traffic jam and polluted air that you have to face after work. Walking through the crowded subway station, and watching the insane prices of food, body lotion, shoes, and countless artificial products. Perhaps all you get is only a sense of fashion, and nothing more. Everything around you is full of materialism. Gradually, you are looking forward to running away from the big city that is surrounded by steel and cement, wanting to be naked and run in a green forest without the tight bra and uncomfortable suit, enjoying the absolutely natural world.
Meanwhile, in the sparsely populated wild, roosters’ crows wake you up at four thirty in the morning. In the evening, mosquitoes buzz like military planes in the forest. At midnight you fall asleep to the sounds of crickets and frogs. You can look up at the immense starry night, and it’s beautiful. However, day after day, you feel life is lack of something that you are not sure what it is about. Thus you are confused about what you really want. Wearing a cute suit and taking the subway without any muddy road suddenly come up to your mind. You don’t have to escape from the crazy barking dog and the weird insects anymore! All you have to do is enjoying your colorful parties, rock concerts on the weekends, sitting in a bar and looking for your big game. You are not alone; you have a fantastic big city that is never lack of interesting things.
When did people start to feel unsatisfied with their own space? People don’t enjoy what they have and where they live.People from countryside seek for the prosperity and the convenience like a city, and people from big cities always long for a natural world. Why is that? This question seems to exist in every kind of lives.
I feel very honored to have a chance working with a Taiwanese female director, Chen-ti Kuo, and learning from the making of her new film. This is absolutely a wonderful opportunity to interview director Kuo.
Director Kuo can stand in the top of Taipei 101 and still be able to observe a little caterpillar in the forest, which means Director Kuo’s insightful thinking dose help her a lot. She works back and forth between the city and the country, she knows well about the cultural difference between two different spaces.
In her streams of consciousness, the city and the country, there are many cultural rivers under these two apparently different spaces.
Director Chen-Ti Kuo’s latest movie, The Boar King, will be released in 2014. It’s a story about love and regeneration. Most of the scenes are shot in the mountain and forest, but the view is not as green as you imagine, it’s a broken mountain after a huge typhoon’s attack. This story is about how people rebuild their home and their heart. They have to find a way to face the future in such a dilapidated environment, and also find the healing power from the big nature again.
A-Ying is Mei-Cho’s husband, A-Fen’s father, A-Nan’s best friend, he thought he was going to leave this world and started to think about the meaning of life. He grabbed a DV and started to record everyone and everything he loved. Unfortunately, he really died during a serious attack of typhoon. The typhoon drove everything in the mountain to despair, people and the land. Watching the video tape that left by Ying, his daughter and wife, A-Fen and Mei-Cho gradually realized Ying’s love and also the spirit of the boar king, which is tough and brave. Therefore, the journey of regeneration has begun.
"The Boar King" also concerns the issues about difficulties in the young and the middle-age generations, those who grew up in the mountain village, whether they should stay in their home town or just leave for the city and find a better job. Director uses her exquisite style to express the dilemma between staying and leaving, hope and helplessness, which always exists in our life.
However, the most impressive part is how do the characters eventually stand up and peacefully accept the truth, and, stay.
I grew up in southern Taiwan. I found no sense of belonging in Taipei since I moved to this big city. The financial pressure has eroded my interest to have a colorful life. Because of many reasons, I gradually feel city is too cold for me. I found no passion and no warmth.
Luckily, during the production of this film, I saw many people in the city working so hard in order to create films or literally works with more cultural concerns.
While you are sitting in your comfortable office, you start to think about the traffic jam and polluted air that you have to face after work. Walking through the crowded subway station, and watching the insane prices of food, body lotion, shoes, and countless artificial products. Perhaps all you get is only a sense of fashion, and nothing more. Everything around you is full of materialism. Gradually, you are looking forward to running away from the big city that is surrounded by steel and cement, wanting to be naked and run in a green forest without the tight bra and uncomfortable suit, enjoying the absolutely natural world.
Meanwhile, in the sparsely populated wild, roosters’ crows wake you up at four thirty in the morning. In the evening, mosquitoes buzz like military planes in the forest. At midnight you fall asleep to the sounds of crickets and frogs. You can look up at the immense starry night, and it’s beautiful. However, day after day, you feel life is lack of something that you are not sure what it is about. Thus you are confused about what you really want. Wearing a cute suit and taking the subway without any muddy road suddenly come up to your mind. You don’t have to escape from the crazy barking dog and the weird insects anymore! All you have to do is enjoying your colorful parties, rock concerts on the weekends, sitting in a bar and looking for your big game. You are not alone; you have a fantastic big city that is never lack of interesting things.
When did people start to feel unsatisfied with their own space? People don’t enjoy what they have and where they live.People from countryside seek for the prosperity and the convenience like a city, and people from big cities always long for a natural world. Why is that? This question seems to exist in every kind of lives.
I feel very honored to have a chance working with a Taiwanese female director, Chen-ti Kuo, and learning from the making of her new film. This is absolutely a wonderful opportunity to interview director Kuo.
Director Kuo can stand in the top of Taipei 101 and still be able to observe a little caterpillar in the forest, which means Director Kuo’s insightful thinking dose help her a lot. She works back and forth between the city and the country, she knows well about the cultural difference between two different spaces.
In her streams of consciousness, the city and the country, there are many cultural rivers under these two apparently different spaces.
Director Chen-Ti Kuo’s latest movie, The Boar King, will be released in 2014. It’s a story about love and regeneration. Most of the scenes are shot in the mountain and forest, but the view is not as green as you imagine, it’s a broken mountain after a huge typhoon’s attack. This story is about how people rebuild their home and their heart. They have to find a way to face the future in such a dilapidated environment, and also find the healing power from the big nature again.
A-Ying is Mei-Cho’s husband, A-Fen’s father, A-Nan’s best friend, he thought he was going to leave this world and started to think about the meaning of life. He grabbed a DV and started to record everyone and everything he loved. Unfortunately, he really died during a serious attack of typhoon. The typhoon drove everything in the mountain to despair, people and the land. Watching the video tape that left by Ying, his daughter and wife, A-Fen and Mei-Cho gradually realized Ying’s love and also the spirit of the boar king, which is tough and brave. Therefore, the journey of regeneration has begun.
"The Boar King" also concerns the issues about difficulties in the young and the middle-age generations, those who grew up in the mountain village, whether they should stay in their home town or just leave for the city and find a better job. Director uses her exquisite style to express the dilemma between staying and leaving, hope and helplessness, which always exists in our life.
However, the most impressive part is how do the characters eventually stand up and peacefully accept the truth, and, stay.
I grew up in southern Taiwan. I found no sense of belonging in Taipei since I moved to this big city. The financial pressure has eroded my interest to have a colorful life. Because of many reasons, I gradually feel city is too cold for me. I found no passion and no warmth.
Luckily, during the production of this film, I saw many people in the city working so hard in order to create films or literally works with more cultural concerns.
Part Two - The Interview Interviewer Rocky Pan │ Interviewee Kuo Chen-Ti
What is the core concept of your latest film ‘The Boar King?’ What do you want to tell people who live in the country and the city through this story?
A young boy, who is not good at hand writing, starts to write his first love letter. On a big piece of paper, he writes “LOVE”. Then he sends it to his beloved girl. The girl opens the letter, she reads it, and she understands.
I also imagine that `The Boar King’ is a love letter, a clumsy and over romantic love letter. I want to show it to everyone who is also walking through the dark forest of his/her life.
I am surrounded by the darkness on the mountain roads. My flash light is dim; all I can see is the small ground under my feet. I feel lonely, and I am afraid. But there’s a little light spot in front of me; I know I am not the only one, I am not alone. I am experiencing the same dark road that others had experienced. The one who is in front of me had experienced, the one just walked through, just got hurt. But she isn’t defeated, she keeps moving. Finally I realize I am not the first one, and won’t be the last one. I won’t be left in the darkness. I keep walking. I hope those who behind me can also see my light spot.
This love letter is about that, whether you are smiling or crying, you are not alone. Even though we don’t know each other, we are all walking through the difficulties and darkness. We are all on the same road.
Why did you choose the boar as the symbol of this story? What is the meaning of the boar in this story?
Story-telling is also a form of writing a love letter; we write story for a particular or general audience. Every village has their own legend, for people to write down their story. The characters in this film are trying to express and write their own story through the magical yet realistic boar spirit.
You mention the difficulties in choosing to live in the city or in the country. What are your points of view?
From the values of life, the space is fixed, but the time is fluid. Young people are always moving. It’s because they want to follow their current living situation and their current mind. Moving from one place to another is very natural. Every stop may be temporary. The so-called “destination” is very possible to become a beginning of another journey.
But in terms of Taiwan’s society, it is a fact that many young people moving from the countryside to big cities for jobs.
As you can imagine, in 60s, 70s, or even 80s, young people from the countryside usually had big dreams and longed for the happiness. They moved to the big city without hesitation.
However, in order to improve our economic, our land policies unlimitedly sacrifice our agricultural industry. People no longer settle in where they are; people’s lives are getting further away from the nature. The worst is that big cities dump lots of polluted garbage to the country. Therefore, happiness is unknowingly disappearing from the country and also vanishing from the city.
The young girl in this story moves to the edge of a big city where she can’t understand why dose a cup of latte need to be three layers. She changes her mind and moves to a smaller town where she works in a supermarket. When she realizes that she can’t rule her own life even when she leaves the mountain. She feels that the mode of her living becomes robotic day after day. She can’t feel her energy and can’t find the value anymore. In the end she goes back to the country, to the mountain.
P.S. : A-Fen, the character worked in a coffee shop. A customer blamed her for not knowing a latte needs to be three layers. It makes her confused about people’s thought in the big city.
Cities and countryside are two entirely different spaces. In the creative area, how do these two spaces influence your works?
I moved to the city since I was five. But in the city, it still took 15 minutes walking to a grocery. In high school, I started taking the bus to school, which gets me carsick for a semester. When I was in University, drinking coffee, shopping and watching movie are like special events for me, not so often in my daily life. Living in a big city, I feel I am just a girl who is huddling up in the edge of this world. I gradually forget how my hometown looked like. I belong to nowhere.
While I was studying in the U.S., I lived in a black neighborhood. Sitting in my apartment, I watched the juicy fruits on a tree through the window, listened to the argument from my neighbor, and heard the howl from a teen who was bumped by a dog. Because of a gun sound, I move out that neighborhood.
I was 26 when I came back to Taipei. I still thought I don’t belong to anywhere. However, I started to shoot documentary films. I wanted to find a place where is able to provide me a sense of belonging. I walked and stopped, again and again. I moved back and forth between cities and countryside.
But Taiwan is actually not too big. I found that no matter where I go, I am an involved outsider. For instance, a wrong project may harm the village near by the upper part of the river. During the construction, it harms more seriously in the middle or even the lower part. I live near by the lower part, and I have to bear the damage of the construction. To sum up, the fates of cities and countryside are connected.
Is an involved outsider a good character to create? I am still figuring it out.
Where does the characters’ regenerating power come from?
Director Kuo:A-Nan, a boar hunter in this story, his regenerating power comes from his belief and respect toward the big nature. Mei-Cho, Ying’s wife, she was reborn because of she accepts the misery in her life. Her daughter, A-Fen, she accepts her father’s wishes after his death during the typhoon; she decides to come back to home in the mountain and expend her emotions to the land. Ying figures out the meaning of life before his death. However, the rebirth power of grandpa in the story comes from the original situation of life – to live. Anyways, they see and understand each other’s misery and pain, and also give each other the warmth and energy.
There are not only broken mountains and many scenes of landslide in this story but also the healing power of nature. They are extremely different power, destroying and healing. Is this a kind of metaphor to describe our life?
There are some fruit trees that never grow fruits, but after some big storms, the fruits grow and even blossom. Maybe it’s just like human’s life, the more tears you shed the more you can feel the meaning of life.
As I mentioned before, people are usually blind pursuing many things, but always forget we already have everything we need. So how do you seek a balance in your life?
One day, I wanted to open a bottle of honey. I even hammered at it, and used the towel to twist the bottle top. I failed and couldn’t get the honey. Suddenly I understood, the story of Winnie the Pooh is very literary. The bear experiences the process I had just been through. We wanted to get the honey, but we failed. Even if I got it, it would be gone immediately. I think my life probably will be like Winnie the Pooh, always looking for something between losing and obtaining.
What is the core concept of your latest film ‘The Boar King?’ What do you want to tell people who live in the country and the city through this story?
A young boy, who is not good at hand writing, starts to write his first love letter. On a big piece of paper, he writes “LOVE”. Then he sends it to his beloved girl. The girl opens the letter, she reads it, and she understands.
I also imagine that `The Boar King’ is a love letter, a clumsy and over romantic love letter. I want to show it to everyone who is also walking through the dark forest of his/her life.
I am surrounded by the darkness on the mountain roads. My flash light is dim; all I can see is the small ground under my feet. I feel lonely, and I am afraid. But there’s a little light spot in front of me; I know I am not the only one, I am not alone. I am experiencing the same dark road that others had experienced. The one who is in front of me had experienced, the one just walked through, just got hurt. But she isn’t defeated, she keeps moving. Finally I realize I am not the first one, and won’t be the last one. I won’t be left in the darkness. I keep walking. I hope those who behind me can also see my light spot.
This love letter is about that, whether you are smiling or crying, you are not alone. Even though we don’t know each other, we are all walking through the difficulties and darkness. We are all on the same road.
Why did you choose the boar as the symbol of this story? What is the meaning of the boar in this story?
Story-telling is also a form of writing a love letter; we write story for a particular or general audience. Every village has their own legend, for people to write down their story. The characters in this film are trying to express and write their own story through the magical yet realistic boar spirit.
You mention the difficulties in choosing to live in the city or in the country. What are your points of view?
From the values of life, the space is fixed, but the time is fluid. Young people are always moving. It’s because they want to follow their current living situation and their current mind. Moving from one place to another is very natural. Every stop may be temporary. The so-called “destination” is very possible to become a beginning of another journey.
But in terms of Taiwan’s society, it is a fact that many young people moving from the countryside to big cities for jobs.
As you can imagine, in 60s, 70s, or even 80s, young people from the countryside usually had big dreams and longed for the happiness. They moved to the big city without hesitation.
However, in order to improve our economic, our land policies unlimitedly sacrifice our agricultural industry. People no longer settle in where they are; people’s lives are getting further away from the nature. The worst is that big cities dump lots of polluted garbage to the country. Therefore, happiness is unknowingly disappearing from the country and also vanishing from the city.
The young girl in this story moves to the edge of a big city where she can’t understand why dose a cup of latte need to be three layers. She changes her mind and moves to a smaller town where she works in a supermarket. When she realizes that she can’t rule her own life even when she leaves the mountain. She feels that the mode of her living becomes robotic day after day. She can’t feel her energy and can’t find the value anymore. In the end she goes back to the country, to the mountain.
P.S. : A-Fen, the character worked in a coffee shop. A customer blamed her for not knowing a latte needs to be three layers. It makes her confused about people’s thought in the big city.
Cities and countryside are two entirely different spaces. In the creative area, how do these two spaces influence your works?
I moved to the city since I was five. But in the city, it still took 15 minutes walking to a grocery. In high school, I started taking the bus to school, which gets me carsick for a semester. When I was in University, drinking coffee, shopping and watching movie are like special events for me, not so often in my daily life. Living in a big city, I feel I am just a girl who is huddling up in the edge of this world. I gradually forget how my hometown looked like. I belong to nowhere.
While I was studying in the U.S., I lived in a black neighborhood. Sitting in my apartment, I watched the juicy fruits on a tree through the window, listened to the argument from my neighbor, and heard the howl from a teen who was bumped by a dog. Because of a gun sound, I move out that neighborhood.
I was 26 when I came back to Taipei. I still thought I don’t belong to anywhere. However, I started to shoot documentary films. I wanted to find a place where is able to provide me a sense of belonging. I walked and stopped, again and again. I moved back and forth between cities and countryside.
But Taiwan is actually not too big. I found that no matter where I go, I am an involved outsider. For instance, a wrong project may harm the village near by the upper part of the river. During the construction, it harms more seriously in the middle or even the lower part. I live near by the lower part, and I have to bear the damage of the construction. To sum up, the fates of cities and countryside are connected.
Is an involved outsider a good character to create? I am still figuring it out.
Where does the characters’ regenerating power come from?
Director Kuo:A-Nan, a boar hunter in this story, his regenerating power comes from his belief and respect toward the big nature. Mei-Cho, Ying’s wife, she was reborn because of she accepts the misery in her life. Her daughter, A-Fen, she accepts her father’s wishes after his death during the typhoon; she decides to come back to home in the mountain and expend her emotions to the land. Ying figures out the meaning of life before his death. However, the rebirth power of grandpa in the story comes from the original situation of life – to live. Anyways, they see and understand each other’s misery and pain, and also give each other the warmth and energy.
There are not only broken mountains and many scenes of landslide in this story but also the healing power of nature. They are extremely different power, destroying and healing. Is this a kind of metaphor to describe our life?
There are some fruit trees that never grow fruits, but after some big storms, the fruits grow and even blossom. Maybe it’s just like human’s life, the more tears you shed the more you can feel the meaning of life.
As I mentioned before, people are usually blind pursuing many things, but always forget we already have everything we need. So how do you seek a balance in your life?
One day, I wanted to open a bottle of honey. I even hammered at it, and used the towel to twist the bottle top. I failed and couldn’t get the honey. Suddenly I understood, the story of Winnie the Pooh is very literary. The bear experiences the process I had just been through. We wanted to get the honey, but we failed. Even if I got it, it would be gone immediately. I think my life probably will be like Winnie the Pooh, always looking for something between losing and obtaining.