One had a job and the other didn’t. That was the assumption I took into a dinner party with Hong Kong film directors Johnnie To and Ringo Lam in attendance. Hosted fabulously by the Consulate General of France at his 110-year-old residence on the Peak, the prestige of the occasion was only eclipsed by the improbable sight of two filmmaking legends smoking cigars on opposite sides of the table. Everybody else looked on, while none broke the spell to also request for a smoke. It certainly fitted the mood, considering To had just curated a nine-film screening programme for Le French May’s noir-themed retrospective. Lam’s reassurance that cigars are “healthier” than cigarettes – scientific as it was – didn’t change the mise-en-scène.

Born in the same year and looking every bit like the closest of pals, To and Lam have been enjoying the greatest contrast in profiles these past few years. Widely regarded as one of the best filmmakers working in Hong Kong today, To has steadily built his global status as an eminent auteur, and was most recently spotted as part of the Cannes Film Festival jury. “I did see him for a little bit towards the end,” To said of the ultimate auteur, Terrence Malick, when the film nerd (that’s me) asked if he had met the notoriously elusive director behind the Palme d’Or winner The Tree of Life. (Strangely though, he had no idea his fellow jury member and long-time acquaintance Olivier Assayas started out as a critic.)

Lam, on the other hand, seemed to have disappeared down the rabbit hole following a very successful spell, serving up one engrossing action thriller after another throughout the 1980s and 90s. While his iconic 1987 film City on Fire has found a new life through Quentin Tarantino’s shameless knock-off in Reservoir Dogs, Lam’s only directorial effort in recent years was a 30-minute segment in Triangle, the 2007 three-part crime thriller he collaborated with To and Tsui Hark, who narrowly missed our dinner due to his hectic schedule. For that matter, my film-loving friends at the Consulate were as curious as me about Lam’s employment status; and I, being a journalist and what not, was implicitly tasked with the embarrassing mission to find out the answer.

Looking even more gangster than To at a press conference earlier that day – showing up in a seersucker jacket and dark glasses – Lam was thoroughly poker-faced when the questions touched upon the current film business, only raising his eyebrows for a split second when To described City on Fire as a “groundbreaking film.” (The next day, Lam was reduced to an afterthought in the local newspapers, which focused solely on To’s views on Sammi Cheng’s marriage rumours.) As for Lam’s filmmaking future, I can summarily confirm here that the veteran was completely put off by the unavoidable complications involved in any Hong Kong-China co-production nowadays. Indeed, when I enquired about his next project, To couldn’t help but chip in. “Excellent,” he said, chuckling. “This is an excellent question.”

For those of us who live and breathe cinema, the dinner conversation turned out to be the wettest of dreams. I was sitting across from To, whose random chatters practically covered the entire scope of European film history – from 1895’s Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, allegedly the first motion picture ever made, to Lars von Trier’s latest Melancholia, which To claimed to be “very, very, very good.” The table was momentarily bewildered when To claimed that his favourite film is a Jean-Paul Belmondo-starring crime drama called Borsalino. None of the dinner guests, of which one third were French and one half were professionals in the film industry, could name the director – until one of them suddenly remembered something. “Let’s check with the phone,” said the guest. (The answer: Jacques Deray.)

More confusion arose when Lam recalled a “more than sexy” Jean-Luc Godard movie called ‘One for Oneself’, which is in fact much better known as Slow Motion. Soon after he cracked a dick joke on the film, Lam touched upon another topic we presumed to be taboo. “Anyway, I’m already out of a job for 10 years, so I’ve gotta ask for a cigar from my friends here,” he joked. Or maybe – just maybe – he’d finally relayed the truth in the good spirit of jest. In any event, he did take a cigar.

Edmund Lee