Tigertail’s Production Was Skirting Disaster From Its Very First Scene

The opening shot of “Tigertail” depicts a boy running through a rice field in an image reminiscent of Terrence Malick. This scene seems to represent the verdant and lush life of a youth; a pleasant memory into which the Ma character could be rooted. Yang’s location scout found just the right rice field in Taiwan, but it came with a caveat. Says Yang: 

“He said, ‘Just to let you know, these will be entirely yellow in a week. They’ll all be yellow all around the country’ … “We scrambled. We didn’t have our cameras from America.”

The Fast Company article points out that, in order to capture the green rice field before it turned yellow for the season, Yang had to push up the film’s shooting schedule by a month. The scrambling Yang refers to involved going to commercial and music video studios and assembling a crew, catch-as-catch can. He scooped up some 16mm film cameras, ran out to the field, and managed to get the shot he wanted. But, in Yang’s words, the story doesn’t end there. Although Yang had cameras and a crew, there was something wrong with the camera lenses: They were designed for shallow focus. That means they would only sharply photograph objects up to five feet away, leaving everything in the background blurry. Because they were shooting on film, Yang was unable to review the footage, and feared that what ended up in the can would not be useable. 

“It was incredibly scary. I told my DP [Nigel Bluck] this has never happened on anything I’ve ever worked on. And he said likewise — in his 20-year career.”

So, for safety’s sake, the scene would need to be reshot, and they were still fighting against the timing of nature. Then the typhoon hit.