Veteran Taiwanese actor John Chang Kuo-chu, father of actor Chang Chen, is returning to the screen with Freddie Wong's new movie The Drunkard, an adaptation of Liu Yichang's novel of the same name. In the movie, which has screened at international film festivals in Vancouver, Pusan, Beijing and Taipei, the 62-year-old plays a disconsolate writer who emigrated from Shanghai to Hong Kong during the 1960s.
Chang made his movie debut in 1979, playing a tennis player in the Taiwanese romantic film Your Smiling Face, co-starring Taiwanese actress Sibelle Hu Hui-zhong. He went on to make several Hong Kong movies such as Tsui Hark's The Butterfly Murders and Tony Au Ting-ping's The Last Affair. He was nominated for best actor at the Golden Horse awards alongside his son for his part in Edward Yang's epic A Brighter Summer Day. For the past decade he has worked in television dramas.
How does it feel to be back in movies? What led to the comeback?
It is a very special feeling. I hadn't played a main role in a movie for years. I'd been waiting for this chance for ages. I met director Freddie Wong 27 years ago. We met when I was filming The Last Affair with Chow Yun-fat, Dodo Cheng and Pat Ha in Paris. Norman Chan, the producer, introduced us. He was a film student at that time. We hadn't seen each other since then. One day, Chan gave me a call and asked if I would be interested in Freddie's new film. They sent me the script and I looked at it. I didn't take the offer straight away because most of my lines were in Cantonese, and some were in Shanghainese. I was worried I wouldn't handle the character well because of the language problem.
The director then sent me the original novel. I suggested changing my lines into Putonghua. He took my suggestion and changed the script. I took another look at the revised script. It's a great novel. It was published in 1962, but the ideas and values aren't outdated at all. Good literature is timeless.
Did you really drink on set to help your performance?