From Jiang Wen to Hou Hsiao-hsien to First-Time Directors, He Always Finds a Way to Shoot What They Want | 100 People With Ideas

Crosscurrent won the Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution (Cinematography) at the 66th Berlin International Film Festival. We interviewed its cinematographer.

Cinematographer Lee Ping-bin was in Nice, shooting a new film by the French director Gilles Bourdos — their fourth film together. In 2013 the American Society of Cinematographers nominated Lee for their earlier collaboration, Renoir. A reporter asked whether working with foreign directors was hard. Lee said: "Whatever director I work with, I always find a way to understand him."

The claim sounds less like boasting once you know that Bourdos always looks first for the places in a script where Lee can do something. Bourdos has said of him: "I don't think there's another cinematographer in the world who can use film stock as freely as he does, to conjure up a dazzling, dreamlike world."

Is he the greatest cinematographer alive? Maybe. But the more exact way to put it is that Lee can always shoot what a director wants. Hou Hsiao-hsien thinks so too. Sizing up this cinematographer, 40 years in the trade and his collaborator for most of them, Hou said: "You hand it to him and he does it… one way or another he always comes back with something, and it's never a letdown."

Let the Wind Carry Me, a documentary about Lee, paints him as rough on the outside and fine-grained within. He has shot more than 70 films. Even paired with a first-time director like Jay Chou, handed a stack of unremarkable storyboards, Lee can work out what they want. And when he hands the storyboards back, he never says, "This won't work."

In February, Crosscurrent, shot by Lee, won the Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution (Cinematography) at the 66th Berlin International Film Festival. Its director, Yang Chao, has taught for years at the National Academy of Chinese Theatre Arts, but has made few films. Before Crosscurrent there were his graduation film Waiting to Pass《待避》 and Journey《旅程》, his first feature.

When Yang Chao came to him, Lee said he wanted to "show the Yangtze's grandeur and mystery through a new kind of imagery" — which meant shooting on film, ideally at 4K.

The footage was shot at 2K in the end, and even after the award Lee still regretted the resolution. But the festival trade daily Screen Daily praised Crosscurrent's images as clear one moment and wreathed in mist the next, with a rough, grainy texture. This was Lee's first European film prize. He had already won cinematography awards from the National Society of Film Critics, the American Film Institute, the Asia-Pacific Film Festival, the Golden Horse Awards, the Japan Academy Prize, the Chinese Film Media Awards, and the Golden Rooster and Hundred Flowers Awards.

Almost exactly a year earlier, Hou Hsiao-hsien had taken Best Director at Cannes for The Assassin. Lee shot that film too, but their history goes back much further — A Time to Live, a Time to Die, Dust in the Wind, Flowers of Shanghai.

Lee's knack for reading directors may date from then. Hou's scripts were often "a few sheets of paper, or a book," and he never talked about the people in the story. Instead he would tell his cinematographer, "I want it to feel like an oil painting." In that situation Lee's habit was to "try things from many angles, to get hold of the scent the director wants."

From Yang Chao, Lee caught the whiff of the literatus. In an interview after the award he said: "This director has a literatus's ambitions, and a literatus's baggage." Yang, sitting beside him, did not argue.

Lee had to turn that literati air into images of the same cast. "Next to Director Hou, Director Yang is weaker in experience and in what he asks for." Both directors like long takes, but Lee said: "I'd be at [Yang Chao's] side offering a lot of suggestions, telling him what to give up, trying to keep his long takes from being long and empty."

The advice did not always take. Crosscurrent was shot in two stages. After the first, Yang wanted to go to Qinghai for an extra "backstory" sequence. Lee thought from the start it wasn't needed — the story was already complicated enough. Yang shot it anyway, ten more days of it. Because the dates clashed with The Assassin, Lee sat out the second stage and the crew switched to a digital camera. He heard that the final cut used very little of the Qinghai footage.

Lee always hopes a director can drop the "formula." The opposite of that word might be called the ability to adapt. Lee believes he picked it up working with Hou Hsiao-hsien: unlike conventional filmmaking, it does not depend on good weather, and it is worth most when money and time run short. The Assassin was the other extreme — with a budget of 90 million yuan they could stop and wait for a gust of wind, for one angle of light. But most of the time they would find a way to use whatever the weather gave them.

"Yang Chao and I talked a lot about the feel of the images, but even so, in the end you take what the sky gives you," Lee said. During the Crosscurrent shoot the weather and the water were both unsteady, and Lee often worked out with Yang which scenes did not need a particular place — only a mood.

Even so, Lee describes shooting Crosscurrent as "out of control." An actor had to fall into the water at night, and Lee had to figure out how to light a river's surface after dark, a problem new to him. On top of that, Crosscurrent started with a budget of only $800,000. The crew had no professional generator and could not afford to light the whole scene.

Lee keeps insisting that "the film belongs to the director, I'm just passing through," and that "in the end it's the director's film, and I don't think it has to go any particular way." Still, this cinematographer's pull on directors should not be underrated. Jiang Wen asked Lee to shoot The Sun Also Rises. They had planned quiet, talky scenes, and then ran into heavy snow in the desert. "Snow like this you couldn't buy for a fortune," Lee told Jiang Wen. They had to keep shooting.

Something similar happened on Xu Jinglei's Letter from an Unknown Woman. The follow focus broke during the last shot. Since it was a memory, Lee suggested letting the image stay blurred. The two later worked together again on Somewhere Only We Know.

In 1977, aged 23, Lee was taken on as a reserve candidate for a camera assistant's job at CMPC (Central Motion Picture Corporation), one of Taiwan's big film companies. CMPC's veteran cinematographers then followed the principles of Western film textbooks to the letter, preferring full, lustrous light and shadow to anything that looked real.

Lee saw it differently. This was the eve of the 1980s, when the Taiwan New Cinema wave was rising, realism was gaining ground, and film style broke with what came before. In 1985 Lee won Best Cinematography at the Asia-Pacific Film Festival for Wang Toon's Riding into the Woods《策马入林》. A few years later he was loaned out to Hong Kong. "If all you can shoot is art films, you're not fit to call yourself a cinematographer" — that was how he thought when he first arrived, so he turned nothing down, and from the classic Hong Kong films he learned a moving, kinetic camera and a more dramatic sense of rhythm.

As Lee went on to work with more directors from the mainland, Taiwan and Japan, the question of whether he had "gone commercial" followed, more or less inevitably. His answer sounds like the same adaptability he brings to the camera: "I don't go out of my way to pick famous directors. It's mostly a matter of timing — sometimes I say yes before I've read the script."

You might not guess that Lee shot Wang Leehom's directing debut, Love in Disguise. That was 2010. Wang wanted to make a comedy and came to Lee. Lee was, it seems, moved by Wang's determination, and agreed to the film quickly — though not long before he couldn't even get Wang's name right.

We talked with Lee about more:

QDaily: Word has it that when you accepted Yang Chao's invitation to shoot Crosscurrent, you told him you wanted to "break new ground in imagery together." What did that mean?

Lee Ping-bin: What I meant was that I wanted to find a new kind of imagery for the Yangtze's beauty, its grandeur and its mystery. I don't really know the river myself, since I grew up in Taiwan, but when people speak of the Yangtze you think of the river that nourished Chinese culture. So I was thinking about how to shoot its mystery so that it felt like Chinese landscape painting, like poetry made visible. The final aim was that sense of a poem inside a painting and a painting inside a poem. My ambitions were large. The shoot itself turned out to be very hard, with a lot beyond our control. We couldn't change the boat's heading whenever we felt like it, for one thing, and the river was wrapped in mist and its surface kept changing, so I could never tell in advance what I would get on any given day. Those were the difficulties in practice.

QDaily: You had shot at Wushantou Reservoir in Taiwan before, on Dull-Ice Flower. How was this different?

Lee Ping-bin: A reservoir is no comparison to the Yangtze — the weather there is fairly settled and the water level doesn't move much. As a subject, water is the thing with the least density, the fewest layers. The sea at least gives you differences of color and tone, but the surface of the Yangtze is often murky. These days, if nobody told you, you'd think it was the Yellow River, the water is that turbid. So I did what I could to give that thin, colorless surface some depth. And a shot often needs water, sky and people all at once, which you can't attend to one by one — in that situation you correct on the spot, according to the light of that moment.

QDaily: People always talk about how well you use light and shadow. Which cinematographers or directors shaped your taste there?

Lee Ping-bin: When I was young I studied under some older masters, and back then the light and shadow we shot were full and lustrous, not after realism. Every kind of lamp was used: hard light, top light, side light, background light. The reason for all that fuss was that the whole system came from the West. Whatever the Western film textbooks said, everyone followed those principles to get the result.

My generation happened to coincide with the birth of Taiwan New Cinema. New Cinema had no textbook — a hundred flowers bloomed, and everyone did as they liked. I, for instance, very much like keeping my mistakes. Back when I was a camera assistant I took a lot of notes, and later, looking at the finished work, I'd ask whether the result was good or bad and whether it could be changed. But even when something was wrong I wouldn't touch it up. I'd leave it in the film. I made it, so I own it. Of course you can make small adjustments in post, but I try to stay true to myself.

Working with Director Hou I learned a great deal from him — from his pursuit of the human, of a sense of life. He did everything he could to chase truth and naturalness in his films. We weren't shooting documentaries, of course, not using a documentary method, but remaking nature and truth. I feel I gained a lot from him there. But most of it still comes down to what you build in yourself.

QDaily: On The Sun Also Rises with Jiang Wen you hit a snowstorm in the desert; on Letter from an Unknown Woman with Xu Jinglei the follow focus broke on the last shot. Did anything like that happen on Crosscurrent?

Lee Ping-bin: I want to stress that when things like this happen it isn't bad. It's about a cinematographer's attitude to "adapting." When we were shooting The Sun Also Rises it suddenly began to snow hard. Everyone was anxious, and I said to Jiang Wen, snow like this you couldn't buy for a fortune. Once he caught that from me he relaxed and kept shooting, and the result was good. As for Letter from an Unknown Woman, I think the broken follow focus was a frame handed to me by heaven. That shot was meant to be a memory, so I went with it and let the focus rest wherever it stopped, and kept the image blurred. Honestly, if the equipment hadn't broken I would never have thought of shooting it that way.

So I believe a bad thing, seen in the right place, becomes good — the bad thing becomes the fitting thing. There's no fixed rule; put anything in the right place and it has expressive power. This habit of adapting also comes from Director Hou. Early traditional Taiwanese films usually wanted good weather and would prepare a lot of backup call sheets. But shooting with Director Hou we often met bad weather — a typhoon halfway through. Were we supposed to stop? We'd weigh whether we could afford not to shoot, or to wait. Grumbling doesn't help; better to turn the bad into the good. That's the adaptability I built up with Director Hou, on very little money and time.

On Crosscurrent the water moved a great deal — every passing boat sent different layers of ripples through the frame, and things were often unsteady. I like that feeling of instability and uncertainty, but if the whole film had been shot that way it would have caused serious problems, so we used a crane to correct the horizon and solve it. The biggest difficulty, though, was that the whole crew was on a very small boat, and I love shooting on dolly track. Laying track on a boat is extremely hard, and that part was very difficult to handle.

Beyond that, I had to keep talking with Director Yang about the weather — which scenes didn't need a clear location, where a mood was enough. I remember one scene that was very hard to shoot: night, an actor falling into the water. But how do you light the surface of a river at night? We had no proper generator, the power supply was a problem, and lighting the whole thing would have cost far too much. So in the end I let the dark parts keep their visual layers. That idea came from my love of Chinese painting, and the result turned out rather striking.

QDaily: You used dolly track on Crosscurrent too. Tran Anh Hung, who directed Norwegian Wood, once said you are especially fond of track. Why?

Lee Ping-bin: Because what I'm after is the poetry of landscape painting. The main reason I use track is that its movement lets me shift the exchange between a figure and the scenery, so the image has the quality of writing — like reading a text, letting the audience take the frame in slowly, unhurriedly. Hirokazu Kore-eda once joked that I'd lay track even to shoot a wardrobe. But I'm not stubborn about it — with Director Hou I often have to hold the camera still. It's only that if track can be used, I'll use it (laughs).

QDaily: In general, how do you talk to a director once you have the script?

Lee Ping-bin: Honestly, I don't talk to directors much. Basically I don't pick projects, I go by fate. I'm usually passive: it isn't me choosing the director, it's the director choosing me. I don't go out of my way to pick famous directors either — it's mostly a matter of timing. Sometimes I say yes before I've read the script, because to me a script is a story, and I don't need the details before shooting. I only need the essence of the story and where the focus lies. The director's angle may differ from mine, but I have to have an angle of my own, and what we discuss is really about agreeing on that angle. In the end, though, the film belongs to the director, and I don't think it has to go any particular way.

With Yang Chao, for instance, I hadn't read the script when we first talked. He mentioned that he likes reading poetry — he likes modern poetry, I like the classical — and my own impression of the Yangtze was blurred, mysterious, hard to grasp. So he and I talked a lot in the search for the feel of the images. Even so, in the end you take what the sky gives you.

With Director Hou, the script is often a few sheets of paper, or a book. And he doesn't discuss the characters at all; he'll tell me instead that he wants it to feel like an oil painting. Given that kind of exchange, I have to try many things to get hold of the scent he wants. When we shot The Assassin, for example, Wong Kar-wai's The Grandmaster and Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon had both already succeeded, and Director Hou and I were thinking about how to find a look unlike anything before.

At the time I loved Fu Baoshi's landscape paintings, so I gave one to Director Hou. He didn't even look at it properly. He told me to handle it myself. That is what communicating with Director Hou is like. But a painting is only one way of communicating; you shouldn't be bound by your first thought about it, since it isn't a template either.

QDaily: After the Taiwan New Cinema wave of the 1980s, you went to work in Hong Kong in 1987, for close to ten years. What was different about the two places' film industries then?

Lee Ping-bin: Taiwanese films then were mostly art films or slapstick comedies. Hong Kong was an accident for me: a film called Heir to the Jianghu《江湖接班人》 came looking for me, and it had a huge amount of action. That's when I understood how hard action films are to shoot, and came to believe that if all you can shoot is art films you're not fit to call yourself a cinematographer. You need range. It doesn't matter what you end up choosing to do; the point is you should be able to do it all. And in that era there was no computer animation to paint out the wires, so a cinematographer's technique mattered a great deal — how you used lighting and camera to hide things.

Hong Kong cinema was booming; the scripts were wild, conjured out of nothing. Taiwanese films, by contrast, would revise a script to make it easier to shoot, whereas the Hong Kong way was: however wild the content, use every technical means to pull it off.

Working in Hong Kong also taught me an important skill, the moving camera. Take a scene where police break in and find the suspect gone. A Taiwanese film of that era might simply show the police entering an empty room. A Hong Kong film would have the suspect still there when the police come in, then have him jump out of the window, followed by a whole fight and chase. The outcome is the same; the tension along the way is not. Neither is better or worse — Taiwanese and Hong Kong films are two different structures, and Hong Kong film goes after market appeal and dramatic tension.

I do think Tsai Yueh-hsun's Black & White has had a bit of that spirit in recent years — wild ideas, and every effort made to realize them. And Taiwan's younger directors now remind me a little of the attitude I saw in Hong Kong cinema then.

QDaily: In 2010 you shot Wang Leehom's Love in Disguise, and after that you began taking on commercial films more often. Why did you take that one?

Lee Ping-bin: How I met Wang Leehom is a funny story. One year I won a Golden Horse Award, and he was there for Lust, Caution. He came over backstage to say hello. I knew who he was, but I got his name wrong for a moment and called him Wang Lixing — I'd mixed him up with Stanley Huang.

Later he came to see me about working together. I knew he wanted to make a comedy and I tried to talk him out of it. Comedy is extremely hard, and you can count the comedy directors in the Chinese-speaking world on one hand: Wong Jing, Chu Yen-ping, Stephen Chow. But I was moved by that willingness to take on something difficult, so I helped him do it. I'll say it again: I don't go out of my way to pick big directors or big scripts. I only want every film I work on to turn out as well as it can, and to deserve its audience.

QDaily: You've worked with many directors. Which ones marked you most?

Lee Ping-bin: Working with Jiang Wen, I think his commanding air rubbed off on me. I can't learn to be like that, but that spirit of nothing being impossible, of chasing an opportunity on conviction alone, is a fine thing. Gilles Bourdos gives me a lot of room — he lets me boldly attempt experiments nobody else will touch, and he's the only director who fits the script around the places where I can contribute. Then there's Tran Anh Hung, gentle and refined in person but utterly dogged in how he goes after things. Different cultures, and yet we became good friends, and that has shaped my camerawork to some degree. Invisible, but strong.

Still, the person who has marked me most is Director Hou. There is so much between us that resonates. He gives me room, and we strike against each other. When I'm back in Taiwan, between jobs, he'll tell me about whatever he's been reading — that's often how we trade our sense of beauty.

QDaily: You keep saying your camerawork draws on Chinese landscape painting. What form does that reference actually take?

Lee Ping-bin: "Landscape painting" is really a loose way of putting it. What truly shapes me is the detail inside history and culture. What feeds my camerawork goes well beyond landscape painting — it includes poetry, calligraphy and painting more broadly. But take landscape painting: different inks give different layers and different moods, and I love that. That is also the spirit within the culture, carrying weight, layers and detail, which is the substratum of Chinese painting. Beyond that there is "artistic conduct" — I think that is the heart of it.