PrintWith the recent incidents surrounding China’s turbulent political relations with Taiwan and the continuation of its economic reliance on the US, it is clear that the Chinese-Taiwanese-American relationship is a tenuous yet critical one. Will Tiao, a graduate of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, has made his way into the film industry, where he is working to publicize these political issues through creative means. With his new feature film, Formosa Betrayed, Tiao tackles the controversial issues of Taiwanese independence and Chinese-American relations through a thrilling espionage tale starring himself and James Van Der Beek.
What brought you to the movie industry after graduating from Columbia’s SIPA and working in international politics?
After SIPA, I got a job at the Clinton administration working for the Department of Labor and was an international economist. I took an acting class on the side, and it kind of ballooned from there. I went from a class to a play, where an agent saw me and put me in a commercial. Then it was a TV show, then a film, and it just kept growing until pretty soon I was coming back to New York to do auditions. I thought, “Wow! Who said this acting thing was tough?” … When President Bush came into office … I took a leave of absence and moved up to New York and started studying with a very famous acting coach named Susan Batson. She had a studio out in Los Angeles, so I flew there and that was it. I started working pretty steadily in commercials, television shows, and feature films.
What was your inspiration for writing and producing Formosa Betrayed?
As an Asian-American actor, I found very quickly in Hollywood that there aren’t very many great parts, sadly, for us. … They always say, “Write what you know,” and what I know, because of my background, is … a lot about the U.S.-Taiwan-China relationship. My parents are political dissidents from Taiwan, and I thought this was a story few people knew or understood: the concept behind Taiwan independence and democracy.
How does the film exhibit the issues you set out to publicize?
Basically, there’s an FBI detective who’s investigating the murder of a Taiwanese professor in the early ’80s. It turns out the professor is being spied on by the students, who are hired by the government of Taiwan. Through a series of events, he chases the killers to Taiwan, where he finds out they’re Chinese mafia hired by the government to kill political dissidents in the U.S. Then it moves to Taiwan, where the U.S. government knows about it but doesn’t want to do anything because of the U.S.-Taiwan-China relationship. It’s all based on actual events—everything we researched. The characters aren’t fictional, but are composites of real people and real events. This area of the world, Taiwan and China, most Americans hear about a lot on the news but don’t really know much about it. Film—I think it resonates culturally with most people. That’s the power of film. A good film, I think, has universal qualities.
What does the movie mean for the portrayal of Asian Americans in the media today?
This is in many ways an Asian-American film. I’m one of the writers, an executive producer, and a co-star. The film has a number of Asian, Taiwanese, Chinese, and Thai Americans, and I think we were actually probably the largest independent Asian-American film last year. We employed a lot of people and have both actors that are well recognized and up-and-coming. We are really proud of putting Asian Americans and humanizing them. The characters are multifaceted—we have characters from killers to professors, to generals, to my character, a political dissident. That’s one of the things I really wanted to do as an Asian-American filmmaker, was to help promote Asian Americans in the media.
What does the movie mean for Taiwanese-American or Chinese-American politics?
There are some people who will argue that China will never become a democracy because it’s culturally different, but Taiwan shows that this is not true. You can have a Chinese culture that has a full and functioning democracy. I think that is what’s so important for people to know, understand, and protect. There are over a thousand missiles pointed at Taiwan right now, as we speak, and it’s one of the most heavily armed areas of the world. In the last week, Taiwan and China were in the news a lot, because the United States gave a huge arms sale to Taiwan—$6.41 billion worth. This is the most sensitive aspect of the United States-China relationship. Most people don’t understand it, and I think the film directly addresses the historical reasons for that.
We just want to start the dialogue, because frankly, it’s one that’s underrepresented right now. This issue gets less talked about, and we want to put a spotlight on it so people remember that it still exists and hasn’t ended. Americans need to think about it. It’s a question of whether or not we back up our own words: Do we really support democracies? We talk about spreading and promoting democracy around the world. Well, here’s a democracy, Taiwan, but we don’t recognize it as a country. It’s not a member of the U.N., and it’s not allowed international standing because China says Taiwan is a part of it. Why? Why does it say that? That’s what we explore in the film. Our goal is that after you watch the film, you want to learn more. That’s a win. If you, after this film, have been entertained and are interested and want to learn, we did our job.
How did SIPA equip you with the skills necessary to make such an influential film?
To make a film is a huge operation. There are thousands of people involved, and I believe that SIPA gave me the skills to be able to handle it. We were shooting on different continents and had people all over the world working on this, so SIPA gave me the personal skills as well as analytical skills to deal with different cultures bumping up with each other, which often did happen during the making of the film. I found those skills to be so invaluable, frankly. I realize, obviously, that most people from SIPA don’t go into film—that’s not really what they train you for specifically—but strangely enough, the skills that I learned there and in international politics were key to the making of this film.