Interview: Let the Wind Carry Me

 

Let the Wind Carry Me (乘著光影旅行) is Kwan Pun-leung’s moving portrait on the preeminent cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-bing. He tells Edmund Lee about shooting his cinematic mentor. Portrait by Calvin Sit.

There doesn’t seem to be a more fitting person to document the idiosyncratic ways of Mark Lee Ping-bing than his younger counterpart, the Hong Kong-born, Taiwan-based Kwan Pun-leung. The former is a hugely acclaimed Taiwanese cinematographer behind such visual feasts as Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, Tran Anh Hung’s Norwegian Wood, and a career-long screen collaboration with the auteur Hou Hsiao-hsien. The latter, meanwhile, is behind the cameras for many familiar titles from the last decade of Hong Kong cinema, most notably Wong’s 2046. Having made his feature-length documentary debut in 1999 with Buenos Aires Zero Degree (the making of Wong’s Happy Together), Kwan will next hit our screens with his co-directorial effort with Taiwanese filmmaker Chiang Hsiu-chiung, Let the Wind Carry Me, which spends more than three years tracking the life of Lee, both on and off the movie sets.

How did you come to know Lee at the beginning?

I’ve known Lee Ping-bing for a long time. We first met at the set of In the Mood for Love, for which he was the cinematographer, and I was in the second unit. He’s been having a reputation in the Taiwanese film circle that he’s always happy to share his experience with the younger filmmakers – he doesn’t hide [his secret tricks]. From the time I spent with Lee, I’ve realised that he’s indeed both generous and sensitive, and I wanted to make that the focus of the film.

What was your most memorable experience in the making of this film?

The film has much to do with how Lee works with nature, to interact with nature. Towards the end, [we realised that] it’s how things truly work. Things happen in unpredictable ways. Take, for an example, the last part of Let the Wind Carry Me, [which] consists of Lee’s acceptance speech [for Taiwan’s National Award for Arts in 2008]. As Lee was talking about a white desert that he did a location shoot for [Gilles Bourdos’s] Afterwards, there should be no footage that we could possibly run with that scene. However, it so happens that I’ve visited the same American desert – of all places – about six months before, so I had the footage to [match his speech]. You can never plan things like this.

I think the film title has really captured the filmmaking philosophy of Lee.

There’s a section [in the film] that I like a lot: it’s a montage of many of the train sequences in Lee’s films. It’s really ‘a journey of light and shadow’, as the Chinese film title says. From our interviews, it’s become clear to us that life is a journey for Lee. He’s forever away from home, drifting around the world to work on his film projects. So from the movie you do get the feeling that Lee is a lonesome traveller, who encounters a range of people and incidents that would in turn change his course.

As a cinematographer yourself, you must have found a lot of similarities between the two of you.
We’re kind of similar, except that Lee has three times my salary. No no no, I mean [three times my] experience. [Laughs]

I think it’s really interesting for the audiences to see how Lee incorporates wind into his method of choreography.

Yes, he’s explaining the tracking shot in the sense that the camera is carried by the wind. Most cinematographers tend to speak in strictly technical terms, but Lee uses wind as a metaphor. He’s a romantic carried around by the wind.

What was Lee’s comment upon seeing your film?

Initially, he was reluctant to see the film; he only gathered together his courage to finally see it at the [Taipei] Golden Horse Film Festival [at which the film was nominated for Best Documentary and Outstanding Taiwanese Film]. Lee’s first comment was, “so that’s my voice!” He’s always only filming others – and not himself – so he never quite knew his own voice. He’s appreciative of what we did – although, later on, I saw another media interview in which he expressed regret that he’s somehow brought his family into the conversation. [Laughs] Oh well.

Let the Wind Carry Me is on limited release starting May 12