Giant Robot Store and GR2 News
Nearly four years after making the award winning horror film Silk, Taiwanese director Su Chao-Bin returns with a fantastic swordplay film called the Reign of Assassins. With the support of producers John Woo and Terence Chang, Su manages to weave an elaborate story about a desperate search for the mummified remains of the famed Buddhist monk Bodhidharma. The film is filled to the brim with plot twists, secret identities, and physics bending martial arts. Similar to his other films, the director skillfully blends many different genres such as action, romance, and comedy.
GR: You have taken a highly unusual path to a film career. You started out as a high tech engineer who became a screen writer and a director. Can you describe your path to cinema?
Su Chao-Bin: First of all, I’m very lucky. At the time, I had a masters [degree] in computer science, and Taiwanese guys have to take two years of military service. When I left the army, I was already twenty-six or twenty-seven that was already pretty old. I also worked in the high tech industry for a year. At the time, my life looked the same as my years in school. So, I thought it was time to make a change. Movies were still a dream… a far and away distant dream.
That’s why I consider myself lucky because at that moment I applied for a website job at Music Television (MTV) in Taipei. It was a pretty popular website. They hired me because I drew a comic introducing myself and sent it along with my resume. In the end, they didn’t hire me as an engineer but as a copywriter. The opportunity put me in touch with the business. Music Television still isn’t the movies, but the television business. After three years, I felt a little bored with TV.
So, I decided to apply for school in the states and continue my studies. I applied for a program called interactive cinema in the Media Lab of MIT. That’s the only way I could get connected to the cinema. Just before leaving for the states, the president of MTV Taiwan called me. He said, “I have a friend who is planning to shoot a movie and he’s looking for a screenplay. Do you think you can write it.” I said, “of course, I can write it.” But I’ve never written a screenplay before that moment. So, I locked myself in my apartment for two weeks and came out with the screenplay for The Cabbie. It was made, and that’s how I started my career. That’s why I say that I’m very lucky.
GR: At the time your career started, Taiwan cinema was mainly limited to small art house films. Did you fit into that environment?
SCB: At that time, the Taiwanese film industry was at their lowest point. The number one box office for a local film was one million Taiwan dollars. That’s roughly like thirty thousand US dollars. The business, at that time, was really bad. Maybe they were looking for new voices. When the Cabbie came out, I got a lot of attention especially from Sony/Columbia. They hired me to write Double Vision. Actually it was a spec screenplay. They liked the story and said, “You can do it.” That’s how I got further into the business.