Hou Hsiao-hsien sits at a table beside the window, gazing out at the narrow street. He has a bottle of water and a packet of lozenges for his throat. His baseball cap is pulled so low that his eyes are in shadow. Jessica the translator says: “Look at the man looking out of the window. Look at the man looking out at the road. Is he suffering from worry, fear or joy of life?” I stare at the director. I stare at the translator. Is the question rhetorical or are they expecting an answer? This interview is not quite five minutes old and I feel we have already wandered some way off the path.  Feted by the critics, lauded by his peers, Hou makes films that pride themselves on being more poetry than prose, more fugue than symphony. He wants to kick away the bricks of conventional narrative and ride the thermals of a purely visual language. “Plot,” he says and shakes his head dismissively. “I don’t think that plot is the only way to appeal to an audience. The audience can catch the message of a film through landscape, character, details.” Then he sneezes like a thunderclap and turns his gaze back to the glass.  Hou’s latest film may well stand as his ideal expression, in that it possesses the weightless, shimmering quality of a dream. Adapted from a ninth-century Tang dynasty tale, The Assassin stars Shu Qi as Yinniang, the “woman in black”, scampering over rooftops and hiding out in fields of gorse. Yinniang, it transpires, is on a mission to kill Tian Ji’an (Chang Chen), the governor of Weibo province, whose very presence maintains a delicate balance of power with the imperial Chinese court. But the way ahead is murky and compromised.  The assassin and her quarry share a cherished, tangled history. And while the film’s basic outline leads one to expect a straightforward martial arts epic, Hou twists the genre into abstract shapes. He conjures up a whirl of inky blacks and midnight blues. It’s a film to get gloriously lost inside. Watching it, I suffered from worry, fear or joy of life.  The director casts an eye around his London hotel room, dabs his nose with a tissue and gently runs me through his creative process. He explains that the original story was incredibly short, about 1,000 words, but that out of this little seed grew a veritable forest. He wound up shooting 440,000ft of film (normally he shoots about 20,000) and then edited on some instinctual, semi-conscious level, pruning back and back until the motion picture emerged. He says he tried to shoot outside as much as possible (the film was predominantly shot in Hubei province), because he liked the wind, the birdsong, the way the sunlight played against the silk dresses.  All the while, Hou is directing his answers to Jessica. She laughs in delight, writes them down on her pad, then relays each response with an air of funereal solemnity. The translation is excellent; it moves at lightning pace. But some of the humour has perhaps gone missing in transit. “I like everything to follow a natural principle,” Hou explains. “People in a kung fu movie should not be able to fly around like birds. So the film should show the real limitations of this world, the real limitations of human beings. Because that, for me, is where the drama arises. It comes from limitations, not from freedom.”  He adds something further. Jessica nods her head. She says: “Director Hou excuses himself for a moment. He needs to go and use the bathroom now.”  Related: The Assassin review - enigmatically refined martial arts tale baffles beautifully  The Assassin premiered at last year’s Cannes film festival, where Hou wound up winning the best director prize. The recent Sight & Sound critics’ poll named it best picture of 2015. But where some see the film as paradise, others may balk at its lack of narrative signposts, handrails and lanterns to light the way. As such, The Assassin looks set to exasperate as many viewers as it enchants. I have a sneaking suspicion that this is just how Hou likes it. “I am not shooting a film to please an audience,” he insists, once he has resettled himself in his seat. “I don’t even make films to communicate with an audience. I am the only person who I am speaking to.”  He was born in China but effectively made in Taiwan, fleeing the Chinese civil war with his parents in the late 1940s. As a child he was obsessed with Japanese films, pleading with passing strangers to escort him into the cinema. As a young man he did national service and sold electronic calculators.  His breakthrough films established him as the leading light of the Taiwanese new wave, a master of intimate human dramas that mapped out the edges of wider social upheavals. The semi-autobiographical A Time to Live, A Time to Die (1985), for instance, details the aching nostalgia within a displaced Chinese family. The award-winning A City of Sadness (1989) viewed China’s postwar crackdown on Taiwan through the prism of an everyday household pitching towards tragedy.  He now fears that these early films were too prescriptive, too subjective. These days he is happier letting the story tell itself. He says: “Just a little earlier, we were discussing the window, we were discussing the road. Now, this scene is so ordinary that we take it for granted. But if you sit an actor at the window and have him familiarise himself with the environment, well, then something happens. Some bright, splendid, overwhelming moment that we never expected. I call it unconscious acting. And it’s the only way you can catch that precious moment.”  This can be tough for the performers – he realises that. “I give them the scripts but I provide no instructions. They have to act by themselves. I have never rehearsed. So the actors do suffer. They suffer huge pressure.”  I’m wondering, though, what The Assassin tells us about Hou’s current relationship with China. It strikes me that he has spent his career studying his old homeland from a distance, or from an angle, as though he is unwilling to confront the issue head-on. Here, tellingly, he presents it as a fabulous kingdom of the past: outside history, blanketed in myth. Presumably this reflects his own experience of the place.  Hou pulls a face; he’s not convinced. “When I was relocated to Taiwan, I was just a baby, four months old, so I have no impression of China as my home. Recently [the local Chinese authorities] found my ancestor. They found that my ancestor had migrated from northern China to Guangdong province over 1,000 years ago. So Guangdong province invited me to go back to celebrate this discovery. But I refused. Because the society across the Taiwan Strait is so very different. China is another world. I can’t comprehend it. I was editing A City of Sadness when Tiananmen Square happened. Me and my editor spent every day watching the TV news, crying. We forgot all about editing the actual film.”  Another explosive sneeze. Another glance at the window. He says: “I can take the landscapes, yes, that’s true. The clouds. The lakes. The mountains and the mist. But I can’t shoot stories about the people of China. I can’t impose my own subjective opinions on to people I don’t know. I can never make a film about the relationship between Taiwan and China. That would be too much effort. I am not going to do it.”  Our hour together is drawing to an end. We have wandered off the path and back again, circled around to the exit door. Hou likes to let his films go their own way, tell their own story. His interviews, too, can follow a curiously skittish and freestyle course. They unfurl at their leisure. They take on their own shape.  The film-maker hauls himself to his feet and holds his hand out to shake. But Jessica remains seated. She is still scanning her notepad, checking for any loose ends she has not yet relayed and ticked off. She says: “Director Hou has never ever rehearsed. He throws his characters into a situation. He has them immerse themselves and improvise. The man at the window. That fascinates him.”  • The Assassin is released on 22 January.
In his new kung fu epic The Assassin, Hou Hsiao-hsien finds new ways to tell a story. He explains why he doesn’t care about pleasing his audience