Leon Dai Li-ren recalls the endless rejections he faced when he first visited film company executives in 2005 to ask for financial backing for what would eventually become his second directorial effort.
'Nearly all investors showed no interest at all in my pitch,' the Taiwanese filmmaker says. 'In Taiwan, you could apply for 'guidance funds' from the Government Information Office; even people handling that told me they didn't see a future in my idea - so it went without saying what private investors would think.'
Dai's proposal revolved around the dramatisation of a real-life incident that happened in 2003, when an impoverished, middle-aged man engaged dozens of policemen in a six-hour stand-off in central Taipei after realising he would soon lose custody of his seven-year-old daughter. 'People were saying, 'Television news show these kinds of news every day - why would anyone pay to watch a story like that in cinemas?'' Dai recalls.
Five years on, and he has proved his detractors wrong. Very wrong. Not only is it one of the most commercially successful Taiwanese films in the past year, No Puedo Vivir Sin Ti (Spanish for I Cannot Live Without You) has won awards galore at home and abroad, its achievements at the international film festival circuit culminating in a triumph in November when it won the best film, best director and best original screenplay titles at the Golden Horse Awards.
The film has certainly outgrown its humble roots, with Dai finishing the production on a minuscule NT$4 million (HK$974,000) budget. Apart from hiring a cast of non-professionals - his producer-screenwriter, Chen Wen-bin, played the lead - Dai also cut costs by filming in monochrome.
'If we had made it in colour, we would have had to spend a lot on the sets and the production design,' he says. 'That's a lot of money. And if we can't change the budget, we'd rather do something that would give us with less pressure.'
The use of black-and-white imagery also helped to deflect what Dai describes as the 'middle-class discomfort' about the squalor his protagonists are forced to live in. 'They lead a grimy existence and they're nearly always the worse for wear - if we had shot it in colour, it would have distracted people from seeing the core of the story. Audiences would have been repelled by what they saw way before they began to really engage with the emotions of the characters ... By making it bearing less of a resemblance to how one would see the real world, there was a bigger chance for the film to strike up an empathy with its viewers.'
