Bringing a Wealth of Cinematic Knowledge to the Screen in 3-D
By JOYCE HOR-CHUNG LAU
Published: July 11, 2011
HONG KONG — Tsui Hark may be a 61-year-old industry veteran with more than 60 films under his belt, but he still has the heart of a young fan.
Comic books, figurines and action figures crowd Tsui Hark’s Hong Kong office.
Crammed onto his neat office shelves are Godzilla figurines, comic books, action figures, Asian deity statues and books on everything from Stanley Kubrick to Chinese travel.
It was a busy morning at Film Workshop, the production company he shares with his wife and longtime collaborator, Nansun Shi, at the Innocentre, a sleekly modern building dedicated to promoting Hong Kong’s creative industries.
A staff member handed him a sample poster for “Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame,” a costume drama that was nominated for a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival last year. Another assistant set down a bowl of candy, which Mr. Tsui ate absentmindedly while he worked.
He had just flown in from the Shanghai International Film Festival, where he was the jury chairman for a festival of “mobile phone films” or super-shorts that run under 8 minutes and can be viewed on a cellphone.
He has also been jetting between Hong Kong and Beijing to finish post-production work on “The Flying Swords of Dragon Gate,” a 3-D action film that was promoted during the Cannes Film Festival in May, and is due for worldwide release at the end of the year. He will be working again with the action star Jet Li, who first gained wide attention through Mr. Tsui’s six-part “Once Upon A Time in China” (1991-1997) epic.
He is at the 10th New York Asian Film Festival, which gave him a lifetime achievement award on Monday.
“No other director combines his technical mastery, his passionate desire to do something new every time he rolls film, and his intellectual curiosity,” said Goran Topalovic, a co-founder of the festival, who added that one of his organization’s first events was a Tsui retrospective in 2001.
The festival highlighted some of his older films, like the original “New Dragon Gate Inn” (1992).
Some news reports have hyped the new “Dragon Gate” (2011) as the world’s first 3-D martial arts film. (That is, unless you count “Kung Fu Panda 2,” and most devotees of the genre do not.) But Mr. Tsui, who is known for drawing heavily on cinematic history, was hesitant to call it a real first.
“There were 3-D films around when I was a kid,” he said. “Remember those red and blue glasses? Of course, it’s very different now. The old one made you feel kind of dizzy. But I’m very careful saying that anything is entirely new.”
Most new generation 3-D films have relied heavily on animation or computer effects, but Mr. Tsui wanted to preserve the live action and outdoor shoots of traditional martial arts epics when they began shooting in Beijing late last year. The delicate new digital cameras struggled to keep up with him. “The sand storms of Northern China blew dust into the rigs and cameras. Also, the low temperatures froze up the batteries and the lubricants inside the machines.” Mr. Tsui said. “At one point, we had to wrap the cameras in layers of cloth.”
Particular attention was paid to the fight scenes. “If the action is too fast, it can look flattened on the screen,” Mr. Tsui explained. “With 3-D, it’s even more important that the action is seen moving through a particular depth and space.”
Mr. Tsui said that he did not want the technology to overwhelm or dictate the choreography.
“People say, ‘Hey — 3-D! Let’s make the guy punch toward the screen! And it’s such a cliché, kind of like the Chinese warrior girl spinning her long hair in slow-motion,” Mr. Tsui added. “Of course, we’ll still have some of that, but we will also be playing with new moves, taking advantage of how someone moves through a particular 3-D space. We don’t want it to be predictable.”
Mr. Tsui would not reveal the storyline, except to say that it will star Mr. Li as a rebel swordsman and Zhou Xun as his lover, Jade.
“It’s full of twists and turns, but I don’t want to give them away,” he said. “After all, the story is more important than the action or the effects.”
Mr. Tsui was born into a large family in China’s Guangdong Province, and lived in Vietnam as a child before moving to Hong Kong as a teenager.
“Hong Kong was opening up to foreign influences then, and I read and watched everything,” he said. “I loved comic books. My first contact was through Japanese manga and then American superheroes, like Superman, Spiderman and Batman.”
At the same time, Mr. Tsui’s mother instilled in him an interest in Chinese history, myth and folklore by taking him to traditional Peking opera performances, even when they lived in Vietnam.
“I was surprised when I came to Hong Kong, because people didn’t seem interested in their own history, maybe because it was a British colony,” he said. “It’s like people didn’t want to face their own backgrounds and roots. Copying Western culture was considered the ultimate good.”
When Mr. Tsui emerged as a leading name in the Hong Kong New Wave in the late 1970s and 1980s, he was one of the few to do historic martial arts films, like “Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain” (1983), which was also screened at the New York festival this month.
“People would ask me, ‘Isn’t the New Wave supposed to about films with modern subjects?’ But I felt that Chinese culture, art and history were amazing, and filled with wonderful stories,” he said. “Maybe some people thought I was old-fashioned, but I did it because nobody else was doing it.”
Still, Mr. Tsui directed and co-wrote an iconic work of the New Wave, which was defined by vernacular Hong Kong Cantonese slang, gritty urban backdrops and an unblinking look at modern society.
“Dangerous Encounter of the First Kind” (1980) was censored by the then-British government for its graphic depictions of youth violence. It is about a criminally insane schoolgirl and three hapless Hong Kong schoolboys who become tangled in a web of terrorism, bombings, animal abuse and a final encounter with gun-wielding Western bad guys.
“It was banned because the students did such terrible things, like bombings,” Mr. Tsui said.
More than 30 years later, the full, uncut version was screened publicly in Hong Kong for the first time on June 4, during the Noir film festival.
Censorship is a hot topic in Hong Kong, as local moviemakers increasingly work on productions on the Chinese mainland.
“There are restrictions everywhere,” Mr. Tsui said. “I was banned in Hong Kong all those years ago. Every society has its taboos. But China has more limits than most and some topics that you can’t talk about.
“The government is very sensitive about history,” he added. “Five experts look over your script, and then you have to explain your interpretation. Of course, there are things you can’t film. But this is your choice: Do you want to go where the market is? If Bertolucci could go to China to make ‘The Last Emperor,’ why can’t we?”
In November, he will begin filming “The Taking of Tiger Mountain.” He has begun to write the screenplay for another “Detective Dee” movie.
He brushed away concerns that Hong Kong’s distinct cinematic style would be lost as it integrated more with China.
“Hong Kong cinema is already a global phenomenon,” he said. “The China market is opening up. In the near future, it will be open to the world, so it’s only natural that we go there, too.”