Director goes extra mile to make audience fall for his plots

Normally, directors invite the principal members of the cast to a read-through shortly before shooting to help them explore the script and fully understand their roles.

Veteran director Chen Ming-zhang, however, who is known for popular romance dramas like My Lucky Star and Fated to Love You, takes a more unique approach. He gathers the main cast members together for three consecutive days of improvisation sessions, which allow him to observe the performers' characteristics, and help them adjust to their respective roles.

Chen recently spoke of this method during an interview with journalists while promoting his new series, My Boss, a 36-episode romance that was released earlier this month on the streaming site Youku.

Starring Chen Xingxu and Zhang Ruonan, the series is about an established lawyer struggling with insomnia who discovers that he can only sleep soundly in the small, cheap apartment he lived in at the start of his career. However, due to an unexpected turn, he is forced to share the apartment with a woman lawyer recently recruited by his firm. The arrangement leads to a series of embarrassing moments and sparks a romance between the two.

The director said that the younger audience nowadays is more inclined toward short videos, adding that the television industry is facing a significant challenge in keeping audiences engaged with the plot lines of regular length series.

His approach involves investing time in making the audience fall in love with his characters so that they come to care about their destinies. "It's a traditional, difficult, and time-consuming method, but I have continued to work hard at using this approach to create quality work," the director explained.