Wu Nien-jen (Industry)

Born: 1952, Taipei.
Prolific screenwriter, who wrote many of Hou Hsiao-Hsien's films in collaboration with him. He has also had acting roles in major Taiwan New Wave films, such as Taipei Story, A City of Sadness (which he co-wrote) and most notably as the central character of Yi Yi.


A local-born Taiwanese and son of a poor miner from a mining community north of Taipei, Wu
had to struggle harder than the postwar mainlander generation to which most literary, arts, and cultural elites belonged. Wu joined Taiwan’s literary establishment in 1976 by winning awards in major competitions held by the Literary Supplement of United Daily News, a hotbed of literary discovery and talent. In 1978 he started writing scripts and was hired as a production assistant at the CMPC studio in 1981, during the times when the 'newcomer policy' was first implemented to give a chance to younger filmmakers.

Many of Hou’s most famous films, along with those of Edward Yang, Wang Tong, and Ann Hui, were scripted or co-scripted by Wu. He prefers collaborative, improvisational composition, calling himself more of a “facilitator” than a scriptwriter, finding the actual writing stage to be mechanical and anticlimactic. Wu also discovered that directors rarely made good storytellers, especially when sitting in pitch meetings with executives. As a charismatic raconteur, Wu performed as go-between, eliciting story ideas and striking images from young directors, and then enticing CMPC accountants into releasing funds to go into production.

Wu  has an affinity with nativism connected to language, ethnicity, style, and gender. As a gifted writer, Wu incorporates Taiwanese dialects and expressions into his compositions. In his stories and scripts, he uses bits of slang and colonial residues (such as Japanese loan-words). Wu’s use of the Taiwanese language relishes its cadences, its salty expressions, its non sequiturs and specificity in a way that normalizes it. In other words, He draws on the example of nativist writers before him in employing Taiwanese as a robust, living language rather than a dialect.

Long after Wu left CMPC, he gained wide acclaim for his television series on Taiwan’s native cultures, Wu Nianzhen’s Taiwan (Taiwan nianzhen qing, 1997–1999; TVBS network). In the mid-1990s Wu directed two films, Dou-san: A Borrowed Life (1994) and Buddha Bless America (Taiping tianguo, 1996). Both of these films explored aspects of colonial Taiwanese ethnicity.