Romantic mockumentary Break Up Club marks the fourth collaboration between Barbara Wong and Lawrence Cheng. They tell Edmund Lee how it all began.


In his deadpan, wisecrack manner, writer-producer Lawrence Cheng says of his filmmaking partner, “We are growing tired of each other with every passing day.” Director Barbara Wong Chun-chun, as she often does, responds by bursting into hearty laughter. “We’re like the married couple who don’t look at each other when they talk,” she says, “but can nonetheless finish each other’s sentences.” In the two’s latest film project, actors Jaycee Chan and Fiona Sit demonstrate great screen chemistry as a couple on the verge of breaking up; in our interview, Cheng and Wong prove themselves a match of their stars – at least in bantering skills. It began like this.

Lawrence Cheng: Our first encounter dates back to 1990. I was the programme director of Commercial Radio Hong Kong’s channel two, and you were a nobody in channel one.
Barbara Wong: I was a little DJ.
LC: You’re some nobody that I didn’t give a damn about: petite and anonymous and always wandering about. So all in all, just a remote colleague.
BW: We were not close at all.
LC: Then we went our separate ways swiftly afterwards: you went to the US to study film, and I emigrated. After I came back to Hong Kong in 1998 to take up a new senior post – meaning my successful career was taking another step up – this lady Wong Chun-chun gave me a cold call.
BW: It’s not exactly a “cold call”; I thought you would at least have some impression of me. [Laughs]
LC: I did. And you were giving me a copy of your first documentary, Women’s Private Parts, hoping that our radio station could promote your film for sentimental – not financial – reasons. I was thinking to myself, “But you’re just a nobody!”
BW: [Laughs] Yeah, I wanted some help with the promotion.
LC: But there was nothing we could do, because the film was rated Category III. Well, the truth is that you had no money. We didn’t really care if it’s Category III as long as we’re paid. Just look at the DAB [the unpopular political party who recently paid the channel a HK$600,000 fee for air time]! [Laughs] After another while, you again came to persuade me to be your producer, because you wanted to make a fiction film.
BW: A film for young people.
LC: About a few young people living under the same roof [which turned out to be 2003’s Truth or Dare: 6th Floor Rear Flat]. I looked at the script and made an appointment intending to reject you – gently. And you were too silly to recognise my intention.
BW: I actually recognised it, but I wouldn’t let you reject me so easily.
LC: So I gave you a lot of explanations why the story was un-filmable. It wouldn’t make a good movie. After my speech, you turned serious and asked for my advice on the right way to make the story work. I thought to myself, “Bitch, are you daring me?” It so happened that the scriptwriters of the project were just passing by the café we were at. And I said, we should film these people – the fresh graduates who refuse to grow up, who are kings in their little apartment and nobodies when they are working in a radio station. Go for that, I said. And there we began our long-term collaboration.
BW: After all these years, it came to a point that I thought I should try to make something other than a comedy, having made so many of them after my first documentary. The fact is I’ve been searching for a topic that allows me to combine fiction and reality. It eventually became Break Up Club.
LC: The whole premise originated from my wish to make a version of [Japanese manga-turned movie trilogy] Death Note, about love instead of death. As I’ve been looking for an angle to tackle the topic of love, I thought, “What if we look at it from the perspective of a break-up?” Because from my experience… [Long pause]
BW: You’ve never broken up.
LC: I’ve never broken up.
BW: [Laughs] Just kidding.
LC: It’s possible that a person has never had a relationship, but it’s impossible for anyone to have never experienced heartbreak. I was inspired to tell a story about breaking up – with a new twist: if you could magically have your girl back by making another merry couple break up, would you do it? We wanted to get naughty with this project.
BW: As young people nowadays are very much used to filming themselves, I thought about a way to frame the movie so that it appears to be shot not by a director, but the characters themselves. This framing device is really important for the narrative here. Without that, Break Up Club would become a very ordinary romance story.
LC: The thing I want to emphasise [as a producer] is that this is “A Barbara Wong Film”. Why aren’t we ending the movie at the conventional concluding point, where we had everyone in tears? That’s because we’re intentionally disobeying the rule of the game. This is a director’s film. We like to play it like this. Why can’t we?

Break Up Club opens June 16.