PLAY IT FORWARD薪火相傳

Veteran actor and director Sylvia Chang on championing young talent. By KEVIN MA

She’s known as Big Sister Chang, a nickname of respect earned over a 40-year career. A veteran actor and director from Taiwan, Sylvia Chang presides over the island’s film industry as a benevolent figure with a penchant for discovering new talent. She’s appeared in numerous films by novice directors, propping them up with her superstardom.

‘Sometimes working with new directors excites me more than working with experienced ones,’ Chang says in an interview with Discovery. ‘I think that their passion and innocence are the most important things when making a film. With them I rediscover why I wanted to do this in the first place. I hope I still have that craziness and passion even now.’

One of the young filmmakers she’s championed recently: Malaysian director Tan Seng Kiat, whom she met in 2014 at the Golden Horse Film Project Promotion (FPP), a conference in Taiwan that matches film projects with investors. At FPP, Tan won the NT$1 million (HK$258,000) Grand Prize for his film project Shuttle Life, about a young man living in poverty in Kuala Lumpur. But the meeting of Tan and Chang, who was chairperson of the Golden Horse Festival that year, proved just as important, with Chang eventually taking on a role in the film.

‘I was really struck by the Chinese title: the first two Chinese characters combined become the character for “poor”,’ says Chang. ‘It was meaningful and clever.’ Without too much expectation, Tan passed the script to Chang to consider the role of the protagonist’s mentally ill mother. It wasn’t a big part, but it was a challenging one that called for a skilled actor who could portray mental illness sensitively.

Instead of the usual script discussion, Chang acted out her scenes for him. ‘I didn’t have an actor in mind when I was writing the script; all I saw was an anonymous person’s back,’ says Tan. ‘But when I saw Sylvia act out the scenes, the mother in my mind turned around and there was Sylvia’s face.’

Shuttle Life has since played in film festivals around the world and earned two nominations at the Golden Horse Awards. Last year, Tan returned to FPP with proposed film One Fine Day and became the first director to win the event’s Grand Prize a second time. When I asked Chang whether she would participate in it, she gave an enthusiastic ‘yes’.

‘I always push new directors to make their second films,’ she says. ‘ The first film is the toughest step to take, but the second film shows how they’ll do in the future.’