Producer Hsinyi Liu on Forging a Path From Taiwan to “Fleabag” & “The Ballad of Wallis Island”
Moving halfway around the world to live and work in a different culture and language presents inevitable challenges, but there is also a wealth of opportunities available to those who leave the familiar behind and immerse themselves abroad. This was the case for Taiwan-born and raised producer Hsinyi Liu, who learned the joys available to those willing to make the leap when she relocated to London more than two decades ago.
In an attempt at a compromise between her family’s expectations of a financially stable career and her own creative impulses, she earned a BA in advertising and dutifully entered the industry, but frustration soon crept in. “I realized I didn’t want to spend my whole life watching soy sauce commercials,” quips Liu.
Choosing the UK over the US partly because of the lighter financial burden of being able to complete a post-grad course in one year, as well as thinking London was “really cool,” Liu took an MA in Film Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. Being alone in a new country was daunting, but it also gave her the freedom to define herself. “It was liberating because I realized I could be anyone I wanted to be.”
But there was an unexpected linguistic hurdle. Liu had grown up studying American English, but she struggled to understand the locals in London, which made her wonder, “Did I learn this language?” Even after a couple of years, she wasn’t completely tuned in to the various British accents and colorful, expansive slang. Drop a New Yorker into South London, and she, too, might need a minute or two to parse exactly what is being said by the folks beside her at the pub. Early jobs as a second or third assistant director involved the additional difficulty of requests coming in over a crackly radio, sometimes leaving Liu nonplussed and relying on other crew members to translate.
However, language was instrumental to one of Liu’s first big breaks. Mandarin fluency helped land her work on Nick Broomfield’s 2006 film Ghosts (Cannes Directors’ Fortnight and Sundance nominee), based on the story of 23 illegal Chinese immigrants who died picking shellfish on the English coast. “I had to pretend to be an illegal immigrant and go into massage parlors, nightclubs, gangster hangouts, Chinese churches, everywhere, to cast real people for the film,” Liu explains. That was followed by giving instructions and translating on set, as well as working on the editing and publicity. “It gave me a full view of the filmmaking process.”
With no industry connections, Liu adopted the approach of trying her hand at nearly everything that she could. Bilingualism was again a boon for her work on Asif Kapadia’s Far North (2007), a thriller starring Michelle Yeoh and Sean Bean set in the Arctic Circle. Despite the pleasure of working closely with Yeoh, it was a fairly tough shoot. “We lived on a ship for two months in Svalbard, north of Norway. I’ve never been that cold in my life. We were seeing the Northern Lights every night, and by the end of it, I got tired of it,” she recalls with a laugh.
Casting duties on post-apocalyptic horror 28 Weeks Later (2007) were followed by AD work on She, A Chinese, filmed in London, and City of War, the Story of John Rabe, shot in China and Europe. Both released in 2009, Liu got acting credits for both films, being asked to appear by the respective directors after working on rehearsals, and got to appear opposite Steve Buscemi in the latter. Another memorable project with a distinctly British flavor was The Inbetweeners (2011), a hit spinoff from a successful TV comedy that set a UK comedy opening weekend box office record. Based on four teenagers’ Mediterranean holiday, Liu found herself casting hundreds of Essex partygoers, even spray-tanning the extras after they’d been flown out for the shoot. “I’m this Taiwanese woman walking into Essex nightclubs [Essex is to London as New Jersey is to New York], and people were just like, ‘What are you doing here?’”
Asked to stay on as a production coordinator after her casting duties, the film proved a career turning point. Liu wondered if she had spread herself too thinly by taking on so many different jobs but believes it ultimately worked to her advantage. “At the time, I worried that I hadn’t worked my way up in a single discipline, but now I see that understanding how people are thinking in every department has made me a better production manager.”
She began working as a freelance line producer in 2012, with her career shifting towards television, much of it for the BBC and Channel 4. It was in 2016 that what Liu says is “probably my favorite script of all time” landed on her desk in the form of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag. It also punctuated her life outside work, with the series arriving around the same time as her daughter and season 2 coming shortly after maternity leave. Another high-profile project she worked on during that period was Stephen Frears’ Amazon/BBC series A Very English Scandal, starring Hugh Grant and Ben Whishaw.
Juggling motherhood and freelance producing had Liu longing for a little more stability. When that arrived in the form of an offer to join leading UK independent production company Sister as a production executive in 2019, she jumped at the chance. There, she was responsible for projects including acclaimed true crime black comedy Landscapers for HBO/Sky and BAFTA-winning hospital drama This Is Going to Hurt starring Ben Whishaw for BBC/AMC. That was followed by her appointment as head of production at Steve Coogan’s Baby Cow Productions, where she worked on the hit comedy Changing Ends and the upcoming feature The Ballad of Wallis Island starring Carey Mulligan. In 2023, Liu took on the same role at Me & You Productions, where she now manages multiple high-end TV dramas, including I Am Ruth, the BAFTA-winning drama starring Kate Winslet, and its upcoming sequel.
Returning to the country of her birth, Liu joined the pitching conference at the Taiwan Creative Content Festival in November as a panelist and mentor. Having grown up on the cinema of Wong Kar Wai and Ang Lee, she enjoyed reconnecting with Asian filmmaking sensibilities. “What I love about Asian storytelling is that it allows for more breathing space. It’s not always about moving the story forward with every scene. The industry there also feels more genre-fluid, mixing family drama with sci-fi, comedy, and mystery in ways you don’t often see in the West. There’s a freshness to it.”
Being back in Taiwan also reminded Liu of its potential as a shooting location and for bringing Chinese-language stories to a wider audience, unencumbered by the creative constraints that can hit productions on the mainland.
Other formative influences during her younger years in Taiwan were Japanese manga and anime, particularly Studio Ghibli. Animation is one of the few things Liu hasn’t tackled, and along with “a VFX-heavy production,” it remains on her bucket list.
Television production in the UK is currently experiencing a slowdown, redolent of the pandemic, which brought mental health issues among industry folk to the fore, notes Liu. Having made her own way in London, far from her family and with little guidance available, she understands how challenging life in the business can be. “I’m glad to see the change in the industry in terms of the emphasis on diversity and inclusion, which didn’t exist when I started. I’m getting to a point where I could probably help people. If I can, I’d be very happy to give back.”
Featured image: L-r: Phoebe Waller-Bridge in Fleabag, courtesy Amazon Studios; Hsyinyi Liu; Carey Mulligan in The Ballad of Wallis Island, courtesy Focus Features.
