BUSAN 2011 DIRECTORS


TSUI HARK BIFF’s Asian Film-maker of the Year, Tsui Hark, talks to Liz Shackleton about the frontiers left for him to conquer after 3D


Whether working as a director or producer, Tsui Hark is a film-maker who is constantly re-inventing Chinese cinema. From The Butterfly Murders, which helped kickstart the Hong Kong New Wave in the 1980s, through the world-renowned Once Upon A Time In China series to more recent work, such as last year’s hit thriller Detective Dee And The Mystery Of The Phantom Flame, he imbues classic genres with dazzling images and his own imaginative twist. Tsui’s next project, Flying Swords


Kevin Spacey and Dayyan Eng on the set of Inseparable


DAYYAN ENG Inseparable, starring Kevin Spacey, is premiering in BIFF’s Window on Asian Cinema section. Its Chinese director, Dayyan Eng, reveals to Sen-lun Yu the pleasure of working with a US star


Inseparable, written and directed by Dayyan Eng, is the Beijing-based film-maker’s second feature film. Starring Kevin Spacey, Hong Kong’s Daniel Wu and Chinese actress Beibi Gong, the film is the first fully China- financed production to tap a major Hollywood actor.


Shot in Mandarin and English,


Inseparable follows a burnt-out engineer in China (Wu), with problems at work and at home, who is befriended by a US expat (Spacey) and taken on a journey that changes his life. Gong plays the engineer’s investigative-reporter wife. The comedy drama’s distinctive


narrative style combines drama, psychological suspense and dark humour. Eng says Spacey was the obvious choice for the role because “he’s a terrific actor and he totally got the quirky sense of humour the story called for”. “Working with Kevin was a great


experience. He’s known for being very serious about his work, and we were pleasantly surprised how easy- going he was, especially considering that he had never worked in this part


of the world before,” says Eng. Daniel Wu shows a different side


to the gun-toting action characters portrayed in many of his Hong Kong movies. In Inseparable, he is an introverted character unable to solve the problems in his life. “His character’s issues are drawn from common ones of the so-called post-’80s generation in China, who were all confident in college, but a few years working in the world and they realise it’s not as easy as they thought. Many tend to run away from their problems instead of facing them,” explains Eng. The Chinese-American director’s


credits also include romantic comedy Waiting Alone (2005) and short film Bus 44 (2001), which won awards at both the Venice and Sundance film festivals. Waiting Alone, starring Li Bingbing, Xia Yu and Beibi Gong, won best first feature and best actor at the Beijing Film Festival and was nominated in three Golden Rooster categories. Eng is now preparing a heist


movie which will be the first time he has tackled an action film.


Of Dragon Gate, is also expected to set a new benchmark: the first Chinese martial-arts film to be shot entirely in 3D with Red cameras. He describes this deployment of cutting-edge technology as a search for realism rather than fantasy. “I always compare 3D to other


developments in film history,” Tsui says. “Sound came to the screen because it brought realism to the projected world, then came colour, and now stereoscopic imagery. All these exist because they brought us closer to the experience of real life.” Born in Vietnam in 1950, Tsui moved to Hong Kong when he was 13, studied


in the US and made his directing debut with The Butterfly Murders in 1979. He showed an early interest in technology — his Zu: Warriors From The Magic Mountain (1983) was one of the first Hong Kong films to use SFX. In 1984, Tsui and his wife Nansun


Shi founded Film Workshop, which produced iconic films such as A Better Tomorrow and A Chinese Ghost Story, and is still one of Hong Kong’s leading production houses. After a stint in Hollywood, Tsui


returned to Hong Kong in 2000 to make films such as Detective Dee, which recently had a successful run in both the US and France, and Flying Swords Of Dragon Gate, due for release in December. The $35m epic reunites Tsui with Once Upon A Time In China star Jet Li. Are there any frontiers left for Tsui


to explore? “I have always wanted to re-interpret Chinese mythology. I’m curious to see what would appear if my interpretation is realised on the big screen,” Tsui says. “Other than that, documentary is something I’ve always wanted to do. I want to record the lives of important people of our times and the people I care about.”


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October 2011 Screen International 13 n


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