Andy Lau Rescues Hit Kung Fu Film
July 14, 2011
Playing kung fu master is Teddy Robin (front) in the movie by (behind, from left) producer Gordon Lam and directors Derek Kwok and Clement Cheng. (Photo: Apple Daily Publications, Hong Kong Film Festival) Playing kung fu master is Teddy Robin (front) in the movie by (behind, from left) producer Gordon Lam and directors Derek Kwok and Clement Cheng. (Photo: Apple Daily Publications, Hong Kong Film Festival)
Equal parts bone-cracking, sidesplitting and heartbreaking, Gallants is the sort of Hong Kong kung fu comedy you wish got made more often.
In fact, it took writer-directors Clement Cheng and Derek Kwok 10 years to get the movie made. It was a long journey involving countless rejections by countless producers, a breakneck 18-day shoot on a shoestring budget and a fairy godmother - okay, godfather - in the form of Heavenly King Andy Lau.
Recalling the rejections, Cheng, 36, says in a telephone interview from Hong Kong: 'Nothing was harder than this. Nobody wanted to give us the money to do this.'
The movie went on to win four Hong Kong Film Awards in April, beating the Tang Dynasty mystery Detective Dee to the Best Film statuette. Gallants will open the Hong Kong Film Festival here today.
Between its colorful, retro opening credits and greying cast, led by 1970s gongfu actors Leung Siu Lung and Chen Kuan-tai, the movie may look like a blast from the past of Hong Kong cinema. Instead, it is a timeless tale of ageing men finding they still have some fire in their bellies.
Its protagonists are two pugilists (Leung and Chen), who have been waiting for decades for their master (Teddy Robin) to wake from a coma. He awakes, unable to recognize the wrinkled pair, but agrees to train them for a boxing match anyway.
The idea for the film, Cheng says, was sparked 10 years ago by an unlikely musical jam session with Teddy Robin and his buddies - 'uncles', Cheng calls them - who arrived in Mercedes-Benzes and Porsches, in suits and with sparse hair.
At first, they droned on and on about their investments. But then 'someone played a chord on a guitar and everyone else started playing', he recalls. 'For four to five minutes, they became different people.'
Inspired by their flash of youthful passion, he sought to make a movie about ageing music enthusiasts. The producers he and Kwok pitched the idea to, however, did not think anyone would want to watch a film about old fogey and music. Even actor Gordon Lam, who produced the movie eventually, did not think much of it initially.
In 2008, Cape No. 7, the Taiwanese hit film about a motley crew of musicians, proved the producers wrong: People do want to watch a film about old fogey and music. But its success meant that 'we couldn't make a movie about music again', Cheng says.
Lam suggested they turn their movie into an action comedy instead.
He also took their project to his Focus Films boss Lau, who gave them a reported budget of HK$5 million (S$785,770).
A pittance, basically, and it meant that they had to do their shoot in 18 days.
Their fellow directors, such as Ip Man's Wilson Yip, told them they were 'dead'.
Usually, it would take 25 days to shoot the kung fu scenes alone, they were told.
But against the odds, they pulled it off.
It must have helped that they have been friends since taking the same scripting course at the Hong Kong Film Directors' Guild in 1997.
Kwok has directed more movies than Cheng, who made his directorial debut in Gallants, but they have written many screenplays together, including the one for Kwok's Hong Kong Film Award-winning crime drama The Pye-Dog (2007).
On the set of Gallants, they trusted each other and did not have to waste time checking each other's shots, Cheng says.
As for Lau's involvement in their film, Cheng recounts a 'moving' instance of the superstar's commitment. When Lau watched their first cut, he noticed an animated scene mentioned in their script was missing. When told they could not afford it, he uttered the magic words: 'Okay, I'll pay.'
It was remarkable for Lau to remember a screenplay he had read a year ago, Cheng says. 'I respect him. I was touched.'
Gallants was a critical but not a commercial hit in Hong Kong, with takings of HK$5 million. But Cheng says he felt a satisfaction whenever people told him the movie got them all fired up to do something - 'beating up people or taking up running'.
Talk turns to the future of Hong Kong films, as Chinese co-productions dominate the industry, and Cheng's own fighting spirit is unmistakeable.
When he went into the business, 'everyone told me, 'Hong Kong cinema is over. You were born in the wrong era'', he says.
But he has found that with veteran directors jumping on the China bandwagon, it has freed up Hong Kong funding for rookies. Cheng, who also directed the multi-strand drama Merry-Go-Round last year, says: 'How come things are worse and worse, but we have more and more opportunities?'
Moreover, the Hong Kong obsession with a lucrative Mandarin market is not new, he notes. In the 1960s and 1970s, the big-budget Hong Kong productions were made in Mandarin, too, for Taiwan.
Last year, he met Lung Kong, the director of Cantonese films including the original A Better Tomorrow in 1967, and Lung gave him great advice, he says.
Lung's reminder to him was: 'If you make a movie nobody watches, it isn't because it's in Mandarin, Cantonese or Hindi. It's because you didn't make a good movie.'
Publisher
Originally Posted by SimonM
Some real funny bits, good fights, and some poignancy.
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