Award-winning filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang says it may be time for him to bow out

BAKING HOT IN COSTUME as a human billboard, a character in his upcoming film, isn’t  strange at all to auteur Tsai Ming-liang. In fact, Tsai might well be the only Golden Lion winner having to hawk tickets on the street to extend his movie runs. 

Though Tsai enjoys the reputation of an internationally acclaimed filmmaker – winning prestigious awards in Venice, Cannes and Berlin – his slow-paced, realism films have not done as well as one might hope at the box office.

“Sometimes I give two talks a day at schools or galleries so I can sell tickets,”  says the Malaysian-born, Taiwan-based filmmaker. “I need to sell 10,000 tickets before the movie opens to ensure it will run in the cinema for at least two weeks.”

Having been in the industry  for almost 30 years,  the 56-year-old filmmaker – one of the godfathers of Taiwan’s New Wave Cinema alongside the likes of Edward Yang De-chang and Hou Hsiao-hsien  – is ready to retire from the silver screen.

“I’m not getting any younger,” says Tsai, whose Homegreen Films produces and distributes films independently.

“Making movies is not the same as manufacturing products in a factory. All my stories are original and I feel perhaps I’ve said enough.”

For what could be Tsai’s swansong, the working-titled The Diary of a Young Boy unmistakably has the filmmaker’s signature all over it. The story follows a jobless father, whose wife leaves him and the children because of poverty. Failing to pay the rent, the father is on the verge of being evicted.

The underdog takes on the minimum-wage job  of a human billboard advertising  luxurious condos. During his daily eight-hour stint, his children spend the day in a nearby shopping mall  filled with scrumptiously packaged products.

“I won’t regret it if this ends up being my last film. I’d rather it  be my last because I’ve never been freer,” Tsai says. “We wrote eight versions of the script and made changes on set every day during  filming to avoid conventional storytelling.”

Tsai first got the idea to develop the story about 10 years ago, when he noticed the emergence of the so-called “sandwich men” bearing advertisements on their bodies.