As she swivels and strikes poses in a flowing red dress and shiny heels for a photographer on a Cannes backstreet, Wu Ke-xi looks every bit your typical film star who descends on the southern French city to promote their latest work. But there is more to the 36-year-old Taiwanese actor than meets the eye. Wu didn’t merely star in Myanmar-born director Midi Z’s thriller Nina Wu (2019), she also penned the original screenplay.
“It’s a fascinating, interesting feeling, as I’ve mostly travelled as a performer,” says Wu, after the photo shoot, one of many during the run-up to the premiere of Nina Wu in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival. “I’ve been watching all these movies over the years, absorbing things and being inspired by them. It all helped me in getting the drive to write this script.”
A graduate of the Department of Turkish Language and Culture at Taiwan’s National Chengchi University, Wu counts Austrian art-house icon Michael Haneke, British auteur Andrea Arnold and Romanian New Wave stalwart Cristian Mungiu as her idols.
“Their films are very real and very powerful,” she says, citing Haneke’s brutal Funny Games (1997), Arnold’s gritty broken-family short Wasp (2003) and Mungiu’s communist-era abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007) as personal favourites. “What’s most important, however, is that they reflect on human nature.
Wu’s screenplay for Nina Wu is partly inspired by the Harvey Weinstein scandal and the #MeToo movement. The script revolves around a bit-part actress struggling with a role – which includes explicit sex scenes – that could propel her to stardom.
Wu says Nina Wu should be viewed as a metaphor rather than a commentary on the film industry: “The actress [Nina] could be seen as a proxy for all women working in any profession and business.”
Wu’s screenplay partly mirrors her own struggles in a career that began with unpaid performances in theatre, sporadic appearances in commercials and student shorts, and a two-year spell as a poorly paid extra.
After earning critical acclaim for her work in Midi Z’s earlier films, including low-budget productions such as Poor Folk (2012) and Ice Poison (2014), Wu’s patience seemed to have finally paid off when, in 2016, she received a best actress nomination at Taiwan’s Golden Horse Awards for her turn as a Burmese-Chinese migrant worker in the Taiwan-based filmmaker’s mainstream breakthrough The Road to Mandalay .
She didn’t win – the prize was shared by mainland actors Zhou Dongyu and Ma Sichun for their roles in relationship drama Soul Mate – but Wu recalls being more disappointed about what followed, and how it revealed the shortcomings of casting procedures in the mainstream film industry.
“Until then I had built a reputation for playing Burmese women on screen, and I thought this would be the point when I could get to try something else,” she says. “What came after were offers asking me to play migrant workers – from Myanmar, or Indonesia, or Vietnam. But I didn’t want to repeat what I had already done again and again.”
In 2017, when she was cast to play a scheming, seductive scion in Yang Ya-che’s period drama The Bold, the Corrupt and the Beautiful, she experienced a sense of déjà vu.
“This time there were all these offers to play venomous women that required flashes of full nudity,” Wu recalls. “I don’t want to repeat myself – what’s interesting about being in this business, for me, is to explore my potential.”
The actor turned down all these roles and, slowly, the offers dried up, leaving her practically unemployed. That left her time to reflect on what had happened and what she should do with her life – and that’s when she was commissioned to write a biweekly column for Taiwanese magazine Ming Weekly.
The gig lasted just six months but its impact on Wu was immense. She began to think about writing something longer. The logical next step for her, Wu says, was to work on a screenplay. She wrote two, one of which would become Nina Wu.
Having just taken her bow at Cannes, the actor-screenwriter – who recently signed with Los Angeles-based Creative Artists Agency – is considering projects in the United States and mainland China. “They come to me with some very different roles – so I’m happy about that,” she says.
The writing, then, might have to wait.
