The Ballet Lesson with YC Tom Lee and Patricia Lopes
The Ballet Lesson captures the deep intimate bond between a mother and daughter’s love that transcends time. The film has picked up several awards, including Best Directing, Best Cinematography, Best Storytelling, and the Gold Dolphin in the Health, Medicine, and Life Sciences category. Directed by YC Tom Lee (member of the Directors Guild of Taiwan), the film was captured by DOP Patricia Lopes SBC.
Lopes first got involved with the project after being contacted by a close friend. “Tingyao reached out because he was looking for someone who he could trust to make a film to create awareness for cancer. He had contact with the client, who is based in Shanghai and Ghent,” begins Lopes. “It was very important for them to break stereotypes in terms of how Chinese culture perceive knowing that you are sick. They wanted to try to portray that it’s better to know about it, than not to know and to be able to have control of the diagnosis. They were looking for someone to make a story like this and I thought of Tom.”
Lopes and Lee originally met at Series Mania 2023. “Tom is a great storyteller,” adds Lopes. “He can also speak fluent Mandarin. I knew it was going to be the perfect match, not only because of the obvious cultural and language advantage, but also because of his passion and dedication to his own stories. It’s not an easy campaign to make. It was also very personal to myself, so it’s very important to the client and I believe Tom had the necessary experience and the eye to make this possible.”
After an initial zoom call with client, Tom came onboard the project. “Six months after Patricia and I exchanged emails about my pitch for project, she called to say she would connect me with the client. It all started at a film festival where we first met, which I thought was great. It’s one of those pieces that you can’t stop thinking about,” he says.“We were just really focusing on the story and it just kind of falls into place where everyone is sort of the unspoken understanding of what we’re trying to achieve. The client also gave us time and space to figure it out and I’m very grateful to them. It’s a very compelling story from the client side to begin with because her and her husband were Chinese researchers in Belgium for medical research. They both taught at university, but after her husband passed away to cancer, she founded a biotech company that is dedicated to early cancer detection. In a way, her son also took part in this project and he had also been diagnosed with cancer and has been battling it.”
Lee understood it was important for this project to resonate with the audience on a very personal level. “It’s a very personal project to start off with,” he explains. “From our first talks, I realised it wasn’t so much about showing a cancer patient, rather it was about those who are left behind. It can be as simple as a mother and daughter’s love. One of my close creative writing partners lost her mother at a very young age. Her mother was the one who was able to plant the seed of the of arts and writing that is blossoming years later. Same thing with the client’s husband, almost as if he planted the seed in a way where something else is blossoming. So, they can still live through us. The story organically formed and that was more or less the core of the story.”
Lopes and Lee decided early on that they wanted the piece to feel cinematic and would take a narrative approach, rather than a commercial feel. Figuring out where to shoot the project also proved to be a challenge. “Do we bring it closer to the client?” says Lee. “It should be in the Asian setting, obviously as it is for the Chinese audience. Before long, we realised we had to shoot in either Taipei or Shanghai, which are two of the main production hubs. I’m based in Taipei and I frequently shoot in Shanghai, which made Taipei an obvious choice for me as I could better tap into my network to get the additional support the project needed. We didn’t have much time for the shoot either. We had maybe one week to prep as soon as Patricia got to Taiwan. From a director standpoint, it was my job to prep the Taiwan side, the production heads and the actors and everything.”
Regarding the experience of working on an international production, Lopes explains that she has already had the privilege of working on a couple of projects abroad. “Of course it would be very different from working here in Belgium,” says Lopes. “I had worked in Japan before, though of course Taipei is not Japan and there’s a different way of working. At the same time, I knew I would have to prepare in terms of working with a local group.”
Lee connected the client with one of the best production houses in Taiwan, Palace Production. “I’ve known their founder and executive producer, Philip Chen, for nearly a decade, and we are close friends,” says Lee. “I specifically chose Palace Films because I knew Philip would fully support me as a director and his company had the capacity to provide the support the project needs.”
“I am very thankful to Phillip Chen, who was very hands on in the entire process. From the first week when we arrived, he made sure we were welcomed and I couldn’t thank him enough for approaching this commercial as a real narrative project, allowing us to be real creatives and focus on the story. I had the opportunity to then meet with my gaffer and first AC. It was very intense and we had a short time to come up with locations and casting,” adds Lopes.
Lopes also wanted a specific look for the film. “The light in Taipei is very different from what we experience in Belgium and the way that people perceive light and colours is also different. When I’m in Taipei, or in Japan, or in Hong Kong, I can see the differences and that’s very interesting. I wanted to make some LUTs in advance with my colourist, so I could use these on set. I talked to colourist Tom Mulder at a very early stage and I shared a couple of analogue pictures I took in Taipei. He quickly developed a LUT, which I tested during the camera test and eventually he made a minor adjustment after the morning of the first day.”
What was important to Lopes as a cinematographer was Lee telling her how he wanted things to be felt. “There was this urgency on camera that was very important and I think you can feel it as well when you look at the performances the actors gave on set,” Lopes continues. “I remember after our actor takes her hair off in that iconic scene, I was holding myself back from crying. It was perfect for me as a cinematographer and was technically amazing. We did two takes for that specific scene. The preparation was mainly about the emotions that Tom wanted to transfer onto the screen. I remember telling Tom that I’m very specific with my filters and I like to create as much as possible in camera. Tom really wanted to be close to his actors, so that’s the reason we decided on anamorphic lenses. They left us space to have different depth fields that we could play with it and we could close this depth when we think it was necessary. I also want to give a shout out to the Steadicam operator.”
“The level of trust we had for each other in hindsight is crazy,” admits Lee. “Palace Films actually won a Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions in 2021 and are used to big productions, but they also trusted us and gave us the space we needed. You want everyone in the right zone and that’s how trust is established. We watched the film unfold on set. It might not look like it, but there’s lots of technical and Steadicam set ups. Every set-up needs to be on point, as does the acting and the focus. It wasn’t until the Steadicam Operator came to myself and Patricia after the shoot to say thank you as they didn’t feel any mistrust or anxiety. You have to try some things a couple of times to get it and he really acknowledged that. There was that trust between filmmakers and that was the beauty of this shoot.”
Lopes also acknowledges the support they received from the film’s producer. “I felt that the communication on this project was similar to what I have experienced on a feature film or a TV series. We were almost like a family and were spending most of the time in the production office. We also had meetings every day. Tom gave me space and freedom to do my job, but he also has these magical ideas in terms of storytelling. It was a very personal project for myself and the client as well,” concludes Lopes.
By Oliver Webb