This was originally posted on blogger.

Today I had a terrific day shooting a movie! I got up bright and early and basically made it on time to Gangshan, the south-most station. I met two other foreigners there – we had arranged to ride a taxi together to the shooting site, which was a ways a way. We waited for another dude, from Morroco, but he ended up already being there so we just went. The other guys had been to previous days of filming, but this was also their first movie. They said previously, the filmmakers had them soaking past midnight, drenched under a rain machine in loose-fitting clothing. Tough life, I guess. One of them, a guy from Belgium, had just finished a year on a student visa in Taiwan. He wants to stay longer, but hasn’t found a good way to. But since Peter – our agent, I suppose – kept badgering him to show up to the filming (virtually), he went to Vietnam, got a tourist visa and re-entered Taiwan for these days of filming. It only hit him after filming how background the foreigners really are.

There were two “agents” kind of in-charge of us foreigners. One guy basically just met us, took attendance, hung around all day and then paid us in cash before we left. Another woman named Michelle was more responsible for dragging us around, making sure our bathroom breaks were quick, and that we returned the costumes and such. She was one of those brisk Taiwanese people – especially speaking in English, but I think Mandarin, too – and often snappish. I talked to her more casually before and after we left the actual scene, though, and I’m not so convinced she loves the film industry, or speaking English, or a combination of the two, but it’s more a job that she happened to land.

At any rate, I learned soon into starting filming more about the film’s location. It’s set in Japanese-occupied Malaysia, 1945. Palawa, I think. The main character is a Taiwanese administrator sent to govern the colonies. The prisoners of war – ie. me and the other foreigners – are presumably captured British and Americans (of various ethnicities) working under Japanese rule. I don’t know much more than that.

The first shot of the day involved a CGI elephant. It was really a big car covered in a blue screen pulling an artificial boulder along. One of the Japanese soldiers whipped it several times until the producer (?) says 大象倒！and everyone stops and stares. The rest of the scenes today were shot at the same location. It turns out that the elephant dies, and some of the other foreign prisoners of war start pulling the artificial boulder. Then, the artificial boulder runs over the hand of the main character – the Taiwenese guy – and breaks it, leading to an emergency situation. And that’s the extent of what I know of the plot.

The movie was really quite cliquish, and I enjoyed looking around the scene and chatting to different people. At the start, I saw a middle-aged man who looked chill enough wearing sweatpants, and as I was getting my turban put on, I said, “hey what’s your name?” in Chinese. He said, laoban. I laughed – the boss. I suppose he really was The Boss, responsible for getting investments for the film. And I suppose extra characters don’t often talk to the laoban. But he humored me, I guess curious enough about what an Indian looking American-accenting Guoyu-speaking extra was doing in Southern Taiwan.

The Boss and the Director (daoyuan) go by their titles, like I do at buxiban. The director stayed in the director’s tent a lot of the time, where he had a view of each scene as they were shot by the cameras. He would call cut when the course of a shot was done, and would decide whether a shot would be done again. He spoke through a walkie talkie to a man I’ll call the Producer. The Producer spoke to the Taiwanese actors, and to the women who spoke English, who then spoke to us. The Boss and the Director were, by the nature of their title, put on a pedestal, and certainly above us puny extra actors. Yet still, when they tried to speak English I internally scoffed, and thought how my nine-year-olds at Schoolhouse would whip them in an English contest.

There were countless others on set. The costume ladies, who put on our make-up and seemed ever amazed at how fast the water they sprayed on the actors – fake sweat – dried in the sun. The camera dudes, with their large tripods and cameras and boba tea. The sound folk, who had a muted and unmuted recorder. Then many other people – agents, the mom of a kid, assistants and I’m not sure who else – who didn’t have an obvious job related to the filming of the movie but more to do with organization and getting things for people who were.

I talked about half and half with the foreign prisoners of war and our captors, the Japanese soldiers. The Japanese soldiers were of course Taiwanese dudes. Mostly in their late twenties, they had been in many plays before and studied theater in university. They live as freelancers, and two of them told me they found the gig just on Facebook. (The one exception was a guy was playing the Japanese general, who was actually Japanese, but spoke excellent Mandarin, indistinguishable to me from a Taiwanese person).

The Japanese soldiers were incredibly fun to talk to. I had a real moment in the morning with one who used to work at a jazz bar. He said (in Chinese), “you heard about the Wynton Marselis concert?” Yes, and we both said at the same time, “in Weiwuying. Yes. Are you going? No, not this time.” We laughed at that as the Producer shouted “stand-by” and “action” and I started putting rocks in a basket again. Anyways, this guy is a real jazz appreciator; when he worked at the jazz bar, Marselis (in Kaohsiung) he would see high-quality live concerts all the time. Before he started politics and policy at university. He studied rhetoric and did his Master’s thesis about Trump’s speeches and how they appeal to crowds. Most of his classmates went on to become speech writers, but he made a turn into bartending and now movies/theater. Another guy, Little Shen, reads philosophy books in his spare time. He happened to also be headed back to the Cultural Center, so we got dinner and it turned out he is also vegetarian! Amazing. His girlfriend lives in Taipei and works at a company that makes Indian clothes for Taiwanese consumers.

I was incredibly enthusiastic at the beginning of filming, and my smile showed it. Almost excessive, but I unashamedly looked at every detail of the filming. The blue screen, the screens the Director would see, the way that they lit fire in front of the camera to emulate heat waves. I made jokes to everyone I could and soaked up the compliments on my Mandarin, which was the best of the foreigners (I was asked to translate at one point, but then they stopped, and instead just addressed me in Mandarin by my Chinese name Tianlan). I enjoyed a truly immersive experience, and I enjoyed being able to interface with the Taiwanese staff members of all types in a way the other waiguoren couldn’t. As the day wore on, I grew weary, and I began to understand the fatigue that most others had been experiencing for a couple weeks now. The filming starts early, goes consistently for 10-12 hours, and requires a lot of patience to get each shot right. The actors have to dress up in make-up each time and everyone has to be high-alert on the lookout for anything that looks out of place or inconsistent, at times very late into the night, and if something has to be done over, it would be very costly. Connections are fleeting on set – many different companies or freelancers are involved and there isn’t much team-bonding. It’s mostly people doing what they’re told to do, or people telling other people what to do. When everyone’s done with this gig, they find something/someone else to work for and don’t think about it much ever again. I was ready to go home at sunset, but like everyone else stayed until we finished the final shot.

Yet I find great comradery among the actors, and I admire the Taiwanese soldier guys for the work they put into acting. My new friend Woody (hudi) said he doesn’t get so dejected by not making an audition anymore. He’s done it many, many times. No, if he thinks his performance was bad, he’ll just go outside, smoke a cigarette, and move on to the next one. There’s a practically – and a devotion to his craft – that I admire immensely, and I said as much on the car-ride back.