FRESH-FACED FILMMAKER Lee Kang-sheng is best known for appearing in front of the camera, not behind it. Over the past 14 years, he's starred in a series of critically acclaimed works by the darling of Taiwan's art house Tsai Ming-liang. Movies such as Vive L'Amour (1994), The River (1996) and What Time is it There? (2001) have toured international film festivals, making the quiet and somewhat delicate Lee one of the few recognisable Chinese stars for international audiences.
Now Lee has chosen to step out from behind his friend and mentor's shadow and become a director in his own right. On the strength of his debut feature The Missing - which has no connection to the recent US film of the same title - it was a good decision. The film may feature many of Tsai's hallmarks, but Lee has shown just enough originality to make it his own, foreign critics believe. It picked up three prizes at the prestigious Rotterdam International Film Festival in January and is now set to screen at the 28th Hong Kong International Film Festival, which starts on April 6.
The Missing is a thoughtful story of a woman searching for her lost grandson. The grandmother, who is still grieving for her husband, searches for the child in a small walled park, and becomes increasingly frantic when nobody has seen him. The story is open-ended and there's not much plot. It's the woman's interaction with people she meets during her search which makes the story so compelling.
Like Tsai, Lee focuses on the urban alienation and loneliness of modern Taipei. Thirty-five-year-old Lee is happy to acknowledge the influence of Tsai on his work. After all, it was Tsai who spotted him walking down the street and offered him a role in a television drama, even though he had no acting experience. 'Working with Tsai was like taking a director's course for me,' he says in Rotterdam. 'I have, of course, been very influenced by the way he works. He's my teacher and mentor. But I think my style of filmmaking is different. I've tried to find my own ways and methods to make a film. I try to make my shots a little more powerful - that's what I was aiming for.'
Lee is well-known as a quiet, well-mannered actor. The first time I interviewed him, in 1995, he blushed a lot and hardly said a word. He is boyish and agile, and fashionably dressed in an understated manner. It's often been said that Tsai chose Lee as his leading actor because he was so silent and easygoing that he would do exactly what he was told. Sometimes it seems like he's simply a stand-in for the director himself.
But Lee says that, underneath it all, he was tough enough to rise to the demands of directing his own film. 'I think the biggest challenge for me was sorting out the 50 or so problems that arose every day,' he says with a grin. 'All of those problems had to be solved right away, otherwise the filming would have been delayed too much. I had to work hard to come up with an immediate solution.'
His acting experience helped, he says: 'I'm an actor, so I'm aware of all the problems that an actor faces. That helped me a lot. The most important thing for a director is to communicate with his actors. If he knows how they think and work, then sparks will fly, creatively - if not, they won't.'
