Breaking The Rules

The Grand Hotel -- Taipei

First stop on our scout: Taiwan. What our entire movie is about. Not only were we going over to check out if Taiwan could be a viable place to shoot the movie but we also want to get a flavor for the history we're about to be telling.

It's quite a long flight to Taiwan from Los Angeles and when we arrived in Taipei we only had a few hours before we were to start scouting. We had to take advantage of every minute we were there! We first went to the Grand Hotel and had breakfast while fighting our jet lag. The drive up the main road revealed a majestic front that is unparalleled anywhere in the world, and the lobby was magnificent.

The Grand Hotel Lobby


Needless to say, even in my delirium I was blown away! This is truly one of the most breathtaking places you'll ever see. We had considered shooting there for Agent Kelly's hotel if we were going to shoot the picture in Taiwan...a fine choice on where the Taiwanese government would put an honored guest from the United States!

We continued on with our scout and quickly began to realize that because Taiwan had become such a developed and rich country it had continually updated it's infrastructure over the years. Our film was set in 1983; here we were in early 2008 and it looked very different! Streets were wider, buildings had been completely refaced, there was a highway that now ran through the center of Taipei that wasn't there previously...this of course was all very difficult for us as it didn't look anything like it did 25 years ago!

We continued on and went south on the train to Kaohsiung, an important location for our story.


The train ride down from Taipei to Kaohsiung took us through the countryside and farmlands of Taiwan. Not only was it beautiful, but it gave us very good references for a sequence in the movie where Jake and Ming travel via the train.





Kaohsiung, like Taipei, is also a thriving, bustling city in the south of Taiwan. Historically, Kaohsiung has been more in favor of Taiwan's independence. We spend a small portion of the movie there so we wanted to see what it looked like in modern times. Like Taipei, it was also significantly more modern looking than it had been in 1983, when our story takes place. We did see some amazing locations there we hadn't expected to see, like this modern Buddhist Temple. It was so spectacular that we wrote it into our initial production draft of the movie that Brian and Nate were working on back home in Los Angeles.





Jake finds Ming praying inside a temple and joins him.








By now our time was up in Taiwan -- we had a very fruitful journey and were now off to Bangkok, Thailand to scout as a possible shooting location. Just as we were leaving our hotels in Taipei, we received the first production draft of the script from Nate via email. We didn't have time to read it as we were heading off to the airport, so we all broke out our laptops on the plane and read our first draft of Formosa Betrayed while on the way to Thailand!

We have to make this movie NOW!

One minute I'm meeting with producers Dave Cluck and Will Tiao about coming on-board to Direct FORMOSA BETRAYED. The next thing I knew, we were in the Formosa Films office writing out a new outline for the movie!

They had several different writers work on the project previously, and I knew I would need a politically savvy writer to frame the historical context so that we gave enough information but weren't preaching nor giving a civics lesson. I called my friend Nate Goodman who had been my Camera Operator when I was a Cinematographer. Of the many talents Nate possesses (he's also a very talented Director) I felt writing was his most unacknowledged skill. A graduate from Brown University and the graduate film program at UCLA, Nate had been a Camera Assistant and then Camera Operator in the motion picture business for many years before becoming a Cinematographer on "HEROES". I had read more than a few of Nate's screenplays over the years and was impressed -- he had been one of the best undiscovered writers in the business...until now.

Nate would be coming in and teaming with fellow writer Brian Askew, who had been working on the project for several months, to work out the new direction for the script and add the new character of 'Ming'. I had pitched Will the idea for Ming in our first meeting and he had liked the idea -- I felt that we needed to get to know someone from Taiwan more intimately in order for the audience to identify with the country's conflict.

Brian was to write the first pass, incorporating some of the work that had been done in the 3 previous working drafts. Then Nate would take it over, doing another pass that was originally designed to sharpen the political and historical aspects of the movie. After 4-5 days of Brian, Nate, and myself worked out a new outline for the script that we all liked. We presented it to Dave and Will -- they liked it, and only had a few things they wanted to adjust, clarify, or change. Two days later we all agreed. Brian was to start writing immediately; Nate would take over writing approximately 3-4 weeks later and do another pass on the script. Dave and I began discussing schedule -- at this point it was already the end of the first week in February, and the Writer's Strike was still going on (by the way: none of our writers were members of the Writers Guild of America so they were not in violation of any wrongdoing by working on our project. They were considered to be 'non-union'). There were rumblings from another union, this time the Screen Actor's Guild, that they might go on strike themselves on June 30th. This WOULD affect us, as we wanted to use SAG actors in our movie.

I told Dave, "We know the scenes (even though we don't have a completed script), so we know what the locations need to be -- we need to go scout, NOW!". We wanted to fit the shoot in before the potential SAG strike at the end of June and take advantage of the fact that there were actors not working who might want to do a smart independent political thriller. Dave agreed; it was Will who was hesitant. Rightfully so -- he had raised over $5 million dollars to make this movie and he didn't want to spend money unwisely. Once we talked it over Will understood both the opportunity and predicament we were in; lots of great talent available who were not working, and another possible strike looming in the very near future that could make it impossible for us to start shooting if we waited much longer.

Will agreed. So we next did something that goes against the basic rules of the independent filmmaking business -- we started to spend money without a finished script nor any cast in place. We boarded a plane for Asia and started a 2 week scout to both Taiwan and Thailand.

Pre-production had begun!

Stay tuned...
Adam

Welcome to the world of Formosa Betrayed!

Hi Everyone --

My name is Adam Kane, I'm the Director and one of the Producers of the new political thriller FORMOSA BETRAYED.

I'm going to be posting a daily blog to tell you all about the making of the movie from when I came aboard the project in January of 2008 all the way through the shooting of the movie and then through the post production process where we edited the film together, wrote music, and completed our special effects (yes, believe it or not there are few of those in the movie!).

First, a little background on me: I went to NYU's Tisch School of the Arts where I discovered and fell in love with Cinematography. After graduating, I went on to the American Film Institute in Los Angeles where I started to shoot small music videos and commercials, and eventually shot my first professional feature film in my final year of school. I went on to be the Cinematographer on many feature films and tv shows including THE BOONDOCK SAINTS, RESURRECTING THE CHAMP, SKINWALKERS, THE MAN, "THE WEST WING", "GREY'S ANATOMY", and "HEROES". In 2004 I decided to move into Directing and Producing -- I started with a short called THE FIX, which won a bunch of awards on the festival circuit and eventually got me an opportunity to direct an episode of "HEROES" during it's first award winning season. From there, things took off for me and I was lucky enough to become the Director/Producer on "PUSHING DAISIES", a show that to this day remains close to my heart.

Unfortunately, after only producing 8 episodes of Daisies, we in Hollywood were affected by the Writer's Guild of America's labor strike action in November of 2007 and all production eventually ground to a halt. Those of us in producing jobs were out of work, and I found myself with too much time on my hands (always a bad sign!).

During Christmas of 2007, I was thinking again about the script for FORMOSA BETRAYED, which I had read several drafts of during the previous 2 years. Dave Cluck, one of the producers on the project, had been slipping me copies as it was being rewritten; he wanted some outside feedback on the script ( I was not on the project at that point; they had hired 2 different Directors during their development process on the screenplay and for one reason or another neither had worked out).

I woke up one morning during the holidays with a realization -- what the script needed, in my opinion, was an identification for Westerners with the Taiwanese. The previous drafts had been missing this emotional thread to fuse the audience's experience of watching the movie with the characters. I thought of political thrillers I admired, like THE KILLING FIELDS and THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY -- both tour de forces in filmmaking; both were films that forever shaped the way I looked at movies -- and knew without that element of humanity it would be almost impossible for the audience to identify with the plight of the Taiwanese.

I now knew that I had to Direct this movie. It's story had found it's way into my heart. I was so excited about the possibility...

I immediately called Dave and he arranged a meeting with Will Tiao, the project's originator. Will came up with the story and raised the financing to make the movie. We all sat down 2 weeks later and talked for hours; we talked tone, character, and story. We spoke about the way American audiences might perceive the film differently from Asian audiences, and why that was important. We talked about the history of Taiwan since WWII, and why putting an element of that history into the movie was necessary to help frame the story for the viewer. We spoke about my central idea; to create a Taiwanese character, Ming, who would represent the voice of the people and give Westerners a portal into the cultural concerns and values of the growing masses who believed in and wanted the island's independence from mainland China. 5-6 hours later we all agreed to work together.

What transpired next became one of the most incredible journeys of my life -- stay tuned!

Adam