Wei Te-sheng
| Wei Te-Sheng | |||||
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| Born |
August 16, 1969 Yongkang City, Tainan County, Taiwan (now Yongkang District, Tainan City) |
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| Influenced by | Edward Yang | ||||
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Awards
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| Wei Te-sheng | |||||||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 魏德聖 | ||||||||||
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| Transcriptions | |
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| Standard Mandarin | |
| Hanyu Pinyin | Wèi Déshèng |
| Southern Min | |
| Hokkien POJ | Gūi Tek-sèng |
Wei Te-Sheng (born August 16, 1969) is a Taiwanese film director and screenwriter. He directed Cape No. 7, currently the highest grossing domestic Taiwanese film and the second highest grossing film in Taiwanese film history.
Wei was born and raised in Tainan. His family ran a clockmaker's shop and attended a Presbyterian church. He spent his childhood in the Yongkang District. According to an interview, Wei watched Taiwanese films "in old, small cinema halls and at an outdoor theater near where he lived." Wei said "It was a bit like Cinema Paradiso". The first Hollywood film Wei watched was Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America while Wei was doing his military service.
Wei studied Electrical Engineering in Far Eastern Vocational School (Today's Far East University) in Tainan. In 1993 or 1994 when Wei was 26, he entered the studio of director Edward Yang as a grip assistant. Later he became an assistant director on Yang's movie Mahjong (1996). Later Wei worked odd jobs to fund the his own short films, including Three Dialogues (1996) and Before Dawn (1997), which both won a Golden Harvest Award. In an interview Wei said that Yang "taught me to be a perfectionist and not sacrifice one's vision, even on a tight budget...He also told me to use my own life experience and not copy anybody." Wei also said "Having mundane jobs that didn't require me to think allowed me to concentrate on my films in the evening".
In 1999, Wei's drama About July, won "a special mention at the Alcan Dragons and Tigers Award for Young Cinema at the Vancouver International Film Festival." He later worked on Chen Kuo-fu's movie, Double Vision in 2002. Double Vision is one of Columbia Pictures' attempts to make Asian films at the time. On this film Wei worked as an assistant director and worked with producer Jimmy Huang. Their collaboration was important to Wei's career, as Huang would later produce Wei's Cape No. 7 and Seediq Bale. In addition, the big international investment, technology and effects employed by the film impressed Wei to pursue big-budget filmmaking.
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