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Features
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A Haphazard Hustle
Despite a preponderance of intricate fight choreography and wall-to-wall CGI, writer-director Stephen Chow says many of his new film’s charms were entirely unplanned.
Monday, April 18, 2005
By Todd Gilchrist, Pam Grady
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Sony Pictures Classics
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Stephen Chow, director
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At the still-ripe age of 42, Stephen Chow has starred in more than fifty film projects, written and directed seven films, and become one of the biggest box office earners in Hong Kong history. So why is it that upon the release of his latest movie,Kung Fu Hustle, almost no one in America knows who he is?
“As a filmmaker, this is always our goal, to be able to let a film go out wider and broader,” says Chow, who recently spoke in Los Angeles about the martial arts comedy. “I can’t rely on the local market, because it’s too small, so since [his last feature] Shaolin Soccer, it’s always my ambition to go international.”
Like his predecessors Jackie Chan and Jet Li, Chow does not allow his career to be restrained by the potential limitations of cross-cultural appeal. “That’s the only way to do the business for me,” he insists. “How to make it international and accepted by different kinds of audiences is very complicated. But I’ll tell you, I always intend to do something that can be accepted by different kinds of audiences.”
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Sony Pictures Classics
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Stephen Chow, actor
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In Chow’s latest movie, Pig Sty Alley is a poor, but hardworking and close knit neighborhood that comes under siege when Chow's character, Sing, arrives one day with a scheme to extort money from the residents. Sing isn't a real criminal, but a wannabe who hopes to join the stylish, top hat-wearing Axe Gang. His actions draw the gang's attention alright, but he puts the entire area at risk when three supernaturally gifted assassins are sent in to destroy Pig Sty Alley's jovial Landlord (Yuen Wah) and his wife, the fierce, chain-smoking Landlady (Yuen Qiu), leaving Sing to decide which side he is really on.
It’s all very melodramatic, with awesome fight choreography by the venerable Sammo Hung and Yuen Wo Ping, the man who made an art of wire fighting in such films as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Matrix. But this is also a comedy, so in addition to kung fu fighting that reflects every the style of every era, the gags arrive at a fast and furious pace. Chow, obviously a student of both movie history and pop culture, references Looney Tunes cartoons, Batman, classic Hollywood musicals, Buster Keaton, Chinese opera and more, through jokes layered one atop the other to generate nearly non-stop laughs.
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Fox Home Entertainment
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Inspiratinal star Bruce Lee
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Chow began his career as host of the children’s TV show 430 Space Shuttle, then graduated to the silver screen with an award-winning turn in the 1989 film Final Justice. Soon thereafter, he proved his mettle as both a comedian and action star in the Chow Yun-Fat spoof All For the Winner, and established the ‘Mo Lei Tau,’ or ‘nonsense,’ comedy filmmaking style that not only would define his career but become a full-fledged genre in its own right in the years to come. Although his success has increased exponentially throughout the 1990s, Chow says that there was no grand scheme for the trajectory his career has followed, or for that matter his latest film.
“The idea was that sooner or later I would make a kung fu film,” he explains. “To make a kung fu film is like a dream come true, because I’m a big fan of kung fu movies and [I’ve been] learning kung fu for a long time. That’s why [I picked this]; because I like this, that’s why I made it.”
Chow's childhood was spent in a Hong Kong neighborhood very much like Kung Fu Hustle’s titular Pig Sty Alley. When he was nine, his mother took Chow to see his first movie, a Bruce Lee film. "He was shocking and I felt my whole body fill with energy," Chow recalls. "I had to do something! 'I'm going to do something. I'm going to learn kung fu!'"
The Chows were poor, so young Stephen's kung fu lessons came to an abrupt halt only six weeks after they started when his parents could no longer pay for them. But he continued practicing on his own and a few years after Lee's death, Chow re-visited the kung fu star’s movies, which rekindled his original passion.
"I became the number one Bruce Lee fan of all," he reveals. "I told myself, 'No matter what Bruce Lee did, I will do. I want to be an actor like Bruce Lee.'"
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Sony Pictures Classics
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Yuen Qiu as The Landlady
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Ironically, Chow’s success now eclipses that of his idol Lee. At a time when the Hong Kong film industry is in a steep decline, thanks to receding box office receipts and rampant piracy, Chow's is a success story. His last film, Shaolin Soccer, broke box office records in Asia and went on to win awards all over the continent, including six Hong Kong Film Awards, among them Best Picture and acting and directing honors for Chow. Kung Fu Hustle has demonstrated similar box office muscle and made good on six of its 16 Hong Kong Film Award nominations, including Best Picture.
Chow pays tribute to Lee's films and other movie classics of Hong Kong cinema by filling his Kung Fu Hustle cast with legendary actors. Yuen Wah, the Landlord, was one of Lee's stuntmen and fought against him in a pivotal scene in The Chinese Connection. Leung Siu Lung, who plays the fearsome killer The Beast, was once one of Hong Kong's beloved "Three Little Dragons," along with Lee and Jackie Chan, but had been kept off movie screens for over fifteen years, after his films were banned in Taiwan. Fung Hak On, playing another of the assassins, is another hero of Chow's, whose career stretches back to the 1960s.
Even Yuen Qiu, the Landlady, is a Hong Kong cinema veteran, a pioneering stuntwoman and an actress who enjoyed a brief moment as a Bond girl in 1974's The Man with the Golden Gun. But she retired from the screen after her 1975 marriage and Chow did not think of her as he began to cast the film. But she accompanied a friend to an audition at Chow's office where he spotted her reading a newspaper, a cigarette dangling out of the corner of her mouth, exactly the way he always envisioned the Landlady.
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Arun Nevader/Wireimage.com
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Sony Classics exec Tom Bernard
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"I said, 'Who is that lady?'" he recalls. "She was exactly what I wanted."
Now that he has had the chance to work with so many of his heroes, Chow cannot wait to it again. He is already looking ahead to what possibilities may lie ahead. "I hope I can make a sequel, so I can bring back more [veteran stars]," he says.
While much of the film is a traditional coming-of-age story for Chow’s character, Sing, the director includes numerous stylistic detours that keep the audience on their toes. Describing just one such example, a choreographed dance sequence that comes at the beginning of the film, he says, “It was an accident to have the dancing sequence in Kung Fu Hustle. The actor who played the boss of the Axe gang is a dancer, [and] when I thought about how to present how tough the Axe gang was, I took a long time to try to figure out how to make it tougher, and different from normal gangs.”
“I saw that he danced, and I thought, ‘Why not? Let’s dance,’” he continues. “I know it sounds ridiculous to have dancing scenes to represent their toughness, but for me it makes sense, because I just tried to go another way around, like not directly describe how cruel they are, but the dancing sequence, but at the same time we intercut some [violent] incidents that they have made.” He casually adds, “and it’s funny.”
Farfetched as it might seem, even the film’s elaborate homage to Looney Tunes and The Shining were improvised on the set rather than written into Chow’s initial treatment. “It was all accidental,” he insists. “The chasing sequence was not originally in the script, the Roadrunner [scene where] the legs spin like a wheel. During the shooting, the idea came up. And also the sequence [that references] The Shining; in that sequence, I was trying to build up a horrifying atmosphere in that situation, and The Shining is one of my favorite horror movies, so the idea came up during shooting.”
“All of these things were not in the script originally,” he contends.
| Though Chow takes credit for designing many of the film’s fantastical sequences, he says that he would not have been successful without the right actors in the role. “Sometimes you have some reference for your characters, like the Landlady in the movie,” he reveals. “I have some similar image in my mind at the beginning, and then I look for someone who can fit into the role - someone fat with all of these curls, and with a cigarette in her mouth.”
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“I can’t remember when and how this image came up in my mind, but I just have this image,” adds Chow. “But like the tailor, the kung fu master who acts like a gay guy, I just created [him] because [the actor’s] own personality instructed me to follow in this role, because he gave out vibes that he had some feminine side, and I wanted to make use of his feminine traits.”
In Kung Fu Hustle, the Axe Gang's musical theme is based on western music, but the rest of the score is based on traditional Chinese opera. While he was in post-production, Chow says there were suggestions that he score the entire film more like the Axe Gang's theme, so that the music would sound more familiar to Western ears.
| But Chow refused to entertain any such idea, adamant that traditional music was the appropriate aural accompaniment for the action in Pig Sty Alley. Besides, he maintains, "Western people go to Chinese restaurants,” he exclaims. “They don't need to have steak and burgers; they need dim sum and spring rolls." | |
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