Mermaid Whispering
Mermaid Whispering is an ocean film that generated considerable buzz in the diving community in 2017. What made it particularly special is that it was not a documentary, but a commercial feature film weaving together romance, environmental conservation, and the culture of the Tao people of Orchid Island. In Taiwan's less-than-hospitable filmmaking landscape, choosing the ocean as a central theme makes the undertaking all the more remarkable. Director Tiger Yuan poured every resource he had into returning to the Orchid Island he knew so well — all in pursuit of the mermaid at the heart of his screenplay.
On the day of the interview, Director Yuan warmly invited the Editor to his home in Beitou. From the outside it looked like an ordinary older public housing complex, but the moment the front door swung open, an unmistakably artistic atmosphere revealed itself — in the furniture, the décor, every corner of the space. A hand-drip coffee in hand, we sat by an open-plan balcony that looked out onto an endless expanse of green forest whispering its quiet, natural secrets. Yuan's two mischievous young sons darted around the apartment, every so often dashing to the balcony to peek out and trying, quite eagerly, to join the conversation.
A Connection with the Ocean
Director Yuan's encounter with the ocean happened almost by accident — a friend wanted to learn scuba diving and invited him along to sign up. That simple decision opened the door to everything that followed. Thanks to a flexible work schedule, Yuan — fresh out of his Open Water Diver (PADI/SSI cert) course in 2000 — was in the water nearly every day, running through five scuba tanks / cylinders a day and becoming a regular fixture on Taiwan's Northeast Coast. In just his first year, he had racked up an astonishing record of over 300 dives. That same passion led his instructor to encourage him to pursue his dive instructor certification.
Teaching was never about income for Director Yuan — what he loved was the people it brought into his life, fellow ocean enthusiasts who gradually became a loyal, close-knit circle around him. With a professional background in film production, his experience as a dive instructor also gave his career an unexpected new dimension. More than a decade ago, the concept of commercial underwater cinematography barely existed in Taiwan. Productions would typically hire a dive instructor to give a camera operator a crash course in scuba diving, then hand them the camera — or simply discover mid-shoot that a younger camera assistant happened to be a stronger swimmer and swap them in on the spot. The learning curve was steep, and the differences between above-water and underwater environments (light refraction, buoyancy, and so on) constantly undercut the visual results. Underwater sequences required enormous amounts of communication, and more often than not the footage audiences saw was the product of happy accidents rather than deliberate craft.
Director Yuan's first complete underwater cinematography project came in 2010. A director wanted to shoot mermaid scenes and asked Yuan — by then a director himself — for advice. The timing was fortuitous: the Canon 5D Mark II had just hit the market, offering an alternative to traditional film cameras. The team invested in an expensive metal underwater housing and Yuan's underwater filming journey began. He recalls that at the time nobody on the crew had any idea they needed underwater strobes for lighting; they simply brought the camera and housing into the water and relied entirely on studio lights set up on shore. The workflow meant surfacing after every take to discuss lamp positions and brightness with the lighting director, then diving again to reshoot. Looking back, Yuan says he's genuinely impressed by how patient he was.
Numerous underwater projects followed — commercial advertisements, documentaries, and feature films — each one pushing the possibilities of underwater cinematography further. But what is it that draws Director Yuan so deeply to shooting beneath the surface?
Because underwater you're in a state of weightlessness. You can achieve camera movements that are simply impossible on land — but that also brings a whole new set of challenges.
As an example, Yuan describes shooting a drowning scene: tiny custom pockets had to be sewn into the wetsuit, with weights distributed according to the actor's buoyancy to create the authentic sensation of a body floating just at the surface. Every fabric has a different buoyancy, which changes how things look on camera, so a host of small mechanical tricks — fishing line being a perennial favourite — are needed to achieve the desired effect. Yuan is quick to point out that his real strength lies less in the act of shooting itself and more in organisation and planning: using storyboards to nail down every detail before a single frame is shot, designing and building beautiful underwater sets, coordinating professional diver safety teams, and managing both surface and underwater equipment logistics — all of it invisible to the audience but essential to what ends up on screen.
The biggest risk-management challenge, however, is working with actors who are not comfortable in the water. Here, his years as a dive instructor have proven invaluable in quickly reducing that risk. An actor's behaviour underwater is completely different from on land — those without any dive training tend to freeze up from nerves, their bodies going rigid. The first step is always working on facial expression; once the face relaxes, the body naturally follows. When an actor still cannot overcome their fear of the water, Yuan turns to the storyboard and methodically works through the shots to explore whether camera angles or stand-ins can solve the problem.
Which brings us back to where this article began: Mermaid Whispering. The film did not start out as the story it became — the original protagonist was male. On a dive trip to Orchid Island, Yuan encountered an activist known as Chì Wán holding an anti-nuclear banner underwater, and was struck by the conviction that this "angry young man" was destined for something significant. Chì Wán became the inspiration for a male character trying to change the ocean's fate. After years of reflection, discussion, and substantial rewrites, the final script took shape in 2015, born from an ocean cleanup dive Yuan joined off Orchid Island. On board that cleanup vessel, he found himself thinking about how reducing ocean debris and cutting plastic use are ultimately a way of life. With environmental awareness on the rise, Yuan wove that philosophy into the story of Mermaid Whispering, hoping to use an underwater mermaid as a vehicle for making the often dry and difficult topic of conservation feel human and accessible.
Filming Locations for Mermaid Whispering
The entire film was shot on Orchid Island — Taiwan's most remote outlying island, and the one that has most faithfully preserved the traditional culture of the Tao people. Every scene, every camera movement, every piece of blocking was planned in precise detail before filming began, and aside from a typhoon throwing a wrench in the schedule, production proceeded largely without incident. But what Director Yuan most wanted to share was the warmth of the people of Orchid Island. The Tao themselves often say that a village is its own nation — so how does an outsider manage to make a film there? Beyond building genuine, deep relationships with local community members, understanding and respecting the local culture is the bare minimum that any visitor owes the place. In one scene, a distress flare is fired from a boat; the actor playing the male lead's father, Uncle Nawey, shared that the traditional Orchid Island method of calling for help was to burn cloth and signal with smoke. The community's support extended beyond performing on camera — their local perspective helped the film feel authentically rooted in Orchid Island life.
Those who know Director Yuan well are probably aware that Mermaid Whispering was an extraordinarily difficult journey. After the outline was written, five years passed searching for funding. Even with a partial production subsidy from Taiwan Indigenous Television, Yuan ultimately had to mortgage his Beitou home to the bank to complete the shoot. Once finished, the film — a commercial feature exploring ocean culture — was shelved due to circumstances beyond his control, leaving it unseen by the wider audience it deserved. When the Editor asked Yuan whether he would ever want to make another ocean-themed commercial film, he answered without a moment's hesitation: "Absolutely. I already have something brewing — a story told from a male perspective, set against a backdrop of pirate history, exploring the idea that Taiwan's blood is really the blood of a seafaring island people." Perhaps it is precisely that love of the ocean that keeps carrying him forward, one step at a time.
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