Left-Handed Girl Director Shih-Ching Tsou on Collaborating with Sean Baker and Seeing the World Through a Child’s Eyes

A mother and two daughters move into a cramped apartment in Taipei, a tentative step towards financial independence. Their struggle to survive provides the backbone to Left-Handed Girl, one of the most kinetic and accomplished movies of the year.

While Shih-Ching Tsou and Sean Baker co-directed Take Out in 2004, Left-Handed Girl is Shih-Ching Tsou’s first feature as a solo director. The project began years earlier when Tsou and Baker visited Taiwan. When Left-Handed Girl was heading into production, Baker was preparing to direct what would become the Oscar-winning Anora. He wasn’t on set during principal photography in Taipei, but he co-wrote, produced, and later edited the film.

Since its premiere at Cannes, Left-Handed Girl has been honored in festivals around the world, including Taiwan’s Golden Horse awards, Zurich, Rome, Montclair, and Stockholm, among others. The movie is now streaming on Netflix.

The Film Stage: What was your visual approach to the story?

Shih-Ching Tsou: I really wanted to show this world through a little girl’s eyes. Little girls see things we adults don’t see anymore. We have our life experiences and tend to take a lot of things for granted. But I-Jing has a fresh set of eyes and a very open-minded attitude toward the world. So I think it’s really important to show the audience through her eyes.

When did you start on the script?

I took Sean to Taipei in 2010, where we stayed for a month. We went to most of the night markets and finally found the one we used in the movie. We also met a little girl, kind of a prototype for I-Jing, whose mom ran a noodle stand. 

We wrote a script together in English. Most of the time, I would narrate parts of the story and he would type them on his computer. Over the years, while we were trying to find financing, we didn’t update the script. I didn’t translate it into Chinese until I applied for a grant in Taiwan around the early 2020s. Even then I didn’t have to adjust much. It wasn’t until we went into pre-production that we started working on the dialogue. That’s when I could update parts of the script, like the news story of people changing their names so they could win free meals.

The plot is about women trying to survive in a harsh world, so it’s basically timeless. Once you had a cast, how closely did you stick to the script?

I tried to stay true to the script, but it was never locked. During the shoot, I would need to wind down at the end of the day. When I’d sit and reflect on what we shot, I often came up with new things to shoot the next day. I would make adjustments and print out the new pages. So every day we had something new to work on.

How comfortable were the actors with that approach?

Nina Ye already had years of acting experience when I cast her. Her mother is like her acting coach, bringing her to auditions and preparing her lines. They would work at home on her character. So when Nina comes to the set, she was always ready; she could also put her own spin on scenes. I would ask her to follow the script the first time, then do her own thing.

What about Janel Tsai, who plays the mother, Shu-Fen?

She’s a pretty famous TV star in Taiwan. When she won the Taiwanese equivalent of an Emmy, she told an interviewer that she was looking for a change-of-pace role. She had been playing these really sharp businesswomen, and I think she felt typecast. So I reached out to her, because Shu-Fen is a role she’s never played before.

When I first met her, she told me, “I can understand this character because I had a very similar background. I came from a very traditional family. I grew up near the night market. I can relate to her.” 

There’s an incredible close-up of Janel near the end of the film where you see her responding to the chaos around her. Her thoughts register so clearly. Did Shih-Yuan Ma, who plays her daughter I-Ann, have any training in acting?

No, but she’s a natural-born actor. When I first found her on Instagram, she had this aura that was exactly how I imagined her character. I warned her that there were two intimate scenes in the script, but she was excited about the part. I believe that, even without training, some younger actors have it in them. Shih is like that.

How do you direct someone without experience? How do you get Shih to do what you want?

For this film, I didn’t want to have any rehearsals; I wanted them to discover everything on set. The first time actors perform together, there is a kind of organic interaction. You can’t fake that. If you rehearse, you can lose that feeling. I didn’t want that, even though it can be risky with inexperienced actors. It came down to making sure they were really prepared. Because the three were all local, I asked them to put their own lives into their roles. I feel like they all went through a similar family dynamic. In Taiwan, most family members don’t know how to express love through language; they can only express emotions like that through action. Like you know your mother loves you, but she would never say that to you. Instead, mothers will scold you, or cook a delicious dinner to show that love.

I asked the performers just to bring their own experiences into the roles. If they had any questions, I was there for them. With Shih, a couple of times I would explain what was going on with her character through the dynamics of this particular family.

I just read something about Jennifer Lawrence. She said male directors tend to over-direct actors compared to women. Women will give actors more freedom, let them do their own thing. That really spoke to me, because I grew up in such controlled situations where there was only one way to do things. I didn’t want to be that way with anybody else. I wanted them to express themselves; I think that’s the best way to bring out a good performance. What’s really important is to build out the world around them. Like in the night market, we built an actual noodle stand, so when they come there to work, it is a real environment. They don’t need to act because they feel they are in that world already.

Well, they’re in the environment and they’re so comfortable with their roles that they don’t need to act. But you still need to do more than one take.

Of course. But normally, never more than five takes. I’m very laid-back. When Sean was editing, he would call or text, “How come you only have two takes?” And I’d answer, “The first take is really good.” But Sean’s a director who likes actors to do ten takes.

How does that help?

He came from film school. That’s what film school teaches you, right? But I didn’t go to film school, so I didn’t have that mindset. I never learned that you have to make films a certain way. My process about filmmaking is finding a solution. It’s all about problem-solving. So I don’t have that feeling of like, “Oh yeah, you have to do the thing like 10 times, show it 10 different ways.” My approach is, “Okay, let’s do it right the first time, and it is perfect. There’s no reason to try it again.”

That brings us to the production. You made a decision early on to shoot entirely on iPhones. How did that affect how you made the film?

During prep, I had extensive meetings with Ko-Chin Chen, the main DP. Later he brought in his partner Tzu-Hao Kao because we realized we would need a second camera, especially in the night market scenes. 

At first we were told we would never be able to shoot in the night market—it would have been prohibitively expensive to build our own night market set—and we wouldn’t be able to use ordinary cameras in the night market because they would take up so much room and attract so much attention. So by necessity we used iPhones, which have improved dramatically in quality over the last few years.

Ko-Chin and I broke down the script, went through every scene. We decided that if we wanted to see through I-Jing’s point of view, we would go down to her level and focus on what she’s doing in each scene. Ko-Chin reduced the script to this little book of visual notes, very specific as to what we needed to catch, what the look would be, what we needed to see in each scene.

So you would agree on framing and composition?

I’d say it was more organic than that. There’s a scene at breakfast where I-Jing is drawing on the table, and I-Ann has to come out of her room and cross to the fridge. Ko-Chin and I agreed we needed to focus on I-Jing. That determined how the camera would move, how the characters would interact, so we had very detailed visual notes before shooting.

I’m asking for specifics because I’m trying to understand the manic energy you achieve on those long traveling shots through the night market.

We knew from the very beginning that you can’t really control anything in the night market. So we agreed to take a documentary approach, use a documentary style—follow I-Jing’s character instead of trying to control the market. 

Ko-Chin needed to practice a couple of days because he never really shot with an iPhone before. He’s got a stabilizer to keep the image steady and then it’s just a question of practice to get that sort of seamless movement. Especially when I-Jing is running through that dark alley. Before we got Nina on the set, we used my daughter to follow through the alley, so we knew exactly how we wanted to do those shots.

How difficult was it to shoot the birthday banquet at the end of the movie, which you said was inspired by Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies?

That was the toughest scene to shoot. It took three days. We had four cameras. It’s the only time we used extras. We hired a second AD to help orchestrate all the moving parts.

Was this difficult to edit?

Oh my God, the editing was so natural. I completely trust Sean’s abilities. On top of that, he was a co-writer, so he knew the characters and story arc inside out. The main issue for editing is the timing, finding a rhythm for the story—especially in the night market—then being able to intercut with the three main characters.

Sean used very fast cutting to represent a child’s point of view, because children don’t have long memories. Their memories are short, sort of like fragments of everything. 

When we spoke in Busan, you said he brought a different gaze to the editing.

I think it’s also the color. When Ko-Chin saw the film for the first time at Cannes, he was blown away by the color. Non-Taiwanese people see Taiwan in a very different way. It’s like Sean helped put a different lens on the story.

It’s fast-paced and immersive, but I also think it’s important that you’re depicting women who are barely hanging on—they’re one step away from catastrophe. Often their only choice is to submit to exploitation. It’s so important to see characters like these on the screen.

It’s important to see how the family struggles to survive, but at the same time we wanted to show how they have fun. We tried to put some comedy into the script.

You’ve been attending festivals around the world. What has the reaction been?

We opened in Taiwan on October 31st, and I’ve been so gratified by the response. For the Taiwanese audience to embrace the film was really important for me.

Left-Handed Girl is now streaming on Netflix.