Director Dante Lam is on the highway to becoming Hong Kong’s next action auteur.  Expect more gunfire in his hard-hitting latest, The Viral Factor

Words EDMUND LEE  Portrait CALVIN SIT

You don’t get second chances often in show business and Dante Lam Chiu-yin is grasping his as if his life depends on it. After nearly a decade of making everything from entertaining police and triad comedies (1998’s Beast Cops, 2000’s Jiang Hu: The Triad Zone) to forgettable Twins and Ronald Cheng vehicles (2003’s The Twins Effect, 2006’s Undercover Hidden Dragon), Lam took a two-year hiatus from filmmaking before returning to make The Sniper (completed in 2008 and shelved for a year following its star Edison Chen’s scandal), a hyper-macho firearm showcase that marked what can now be seen as the birth of Hong Kong’s latest action auteur.

Rekindling the kind of explosive filmmaking rarely seen in our cinema since Ringo Lam unleashed his classic cops-and-crime melodramas in the late 1980s, Dante has been making a series of intense police thrillers – with a fatalistic spin! – about once a year, including Beast Stalker (2008), Fire of Conscience (2010) and The Stool Pigeon (2010). What’s perhaps less predictable is the veteran director’s knack of extracting award-winning performances from his actors in what are essentially slam-bang actioners, with Nick Cheung and Liu Kai-chi respectively named Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor for Beast Stalker at the Hong Kong Film Awards, and Nicholas Tse also getting his Best Actor recognition for The Stool Pigeon.

Lam may already be an expert in letting loose chaos in Hong Kong’s claustrophobic urban setting, but he’s not content just yet – thus his latest effort, The Viral Factor, whose foreign setting (in Malaysia and Jordan) has allowed for such extravagant weapons as rocket artillery. The film stars Tse (yet again) and Taiwanese pop star Jay Chou, and represents the director’s most action-packed outing to date.

How does the action component of The Viral Factor compare with your previous movies?
The density of action sequences is very high this time: the story is driven by action scenes throughout. You could say that about 70 or 80 percent of the film is action-based. For Beast Stalker and The Stool Pigeon, I’d say only 30 or 40 percent of them consist of action scenes. Those are, at the end, not action-orientated movies, whereas The Viral Factor is definitely one.

Would you describe the new film as your attempt at an ‘ultimate action movie’?
It is, it is. At this moment, it is. The entire film is shot in other countries, like Jordan, where Hong Kong movies have yet to set their foot in, and Malaysia, which hasn’t seen such large-scale action [filmmaking] before. So, in a way, the new film is a huge challenge. About one-fifth of the film was set in Jordan, and the rest of it was in Malaysia – apart from a very small portion shot in mainland China.

Does it mean that you’re using a predominantly foreign crew this time?
Of course we need to get some help from those countries; but we’re maintaining a fundamentally Hong Kong crew. From experience, if you depend too much on the foreign staff then you lose the overall control to them as well. We want to keep the flexibility and be able to tackle problems by ourselves – and not wait for others to settle for us. For instance, we’ve brought our own people even for the location scouting. You know, Hongkongers have a different way of working from the foreign people: we’re really good at pestering people to get what we want; whereas they just take it as a ‘no’ when they get the answer ‘no’. We don’t take ‘no’ for an answer.

Was it actually dangerous to shoot in Jordan?
There’s some risk involved, of course. We were accompanied by the army and were advised not to go to certain locations. If there’s no danger, they probably wouldn’t have to give us protection. But still, maybe because we were there only for work and had no time to wander around, we didn’t see the really dangerous side of it.

So there wasn’t any trouble?
No, there wasn’t. Then again, there were actually some disturbances in the country, and when we were shooting in a hospital we did see people coming in with gunshot wounds.

You’ve collaborated with Nicholas Tse on several films now. What’s your working relationship with him like?
I’d say that he’s very willing to be tortured by me – whether emotionally or physically. He’s the type who says ‘please leave me alone’, but, at the same time, secretly enjoys [the hardship]. He’s a bit of a masochist. [Laughs] At least when he works with me. Another reason that I really enjoy working with him is he doesn’t take much persuasion. Actors sometimes struggle for a sense of security or confidence; he doesn’t have that problem with me. We can speak our minds without hesitation.

When people think about action movies, they don’t necessarily think about great acting; but your recent films have produced a few
Best Actors at the awards. What do you make of that?
Actually, it was never my initial intention to let the actors express their talents [and win Best Actors]; it was about me. When I make action films, I focus my attention on the action sequences. My objective is to find a way to combine the drama with the action. From the period that I grew up in, we saw that action movies were very much about showing off the action, whereas the stories and characters were… [pauses] … were considered good enough just by following the norms. There was this way of thinking in the past, and it weakened the way we communicate with movies. But it’s actually my aim to strengthen this part, as I’ve shown from The Sniper and Beast Stalker onwards. I’ve been paying more attention to the actors and the stories, which may not be the usual case in action cinema.

Apart from the action, I notice there are several recurrent themes – like family, fate and conscience – that appeared in every one of your recent films. Was it an intentional decision to maintain this thematic consistency, or was it mostly by coincidence?
It wasn’t a [coincidence]; it was definitely what I wanted to achieve from the start. There was a time when I was absent from my own movies… how should I put it? I mean, [the movies didn’t reveal] my existence and my way of communication [as a director]. In other ways, these recent films have been redefining many aspects [of me].

You made a dozen or so movies in the decade before you found your new direction. How do you look back at those early years now?
There were several stages: there was a time when I was in a daze [laughs], and there was a time when I found myself at a loss. There was also a time, memorably, when I was quite audacious, such as [when I made the offbeat gangster comedies] Jiang Hu: The Triad Zone and Runaway (2001). It was quite a positive and stress-free period for me.

Can you tell me a bit about the beginning of this latest phase of your career?
Before The Sniper, I’d stopped making movies for a couple of years. Those two years were very important to me: I thought a lot during that period; I wanted to quit making movies; I didn’t know what I was doing. I looked back at many of my life experiences from the past, and [realised that] these are what belong to me as a person. This idea came to me at that point, and I began to put my [experiences] into my films.

How involved have you been in the scriptwriting part of your films?
I’ve been very involved. The stories are all from me. To a certain extent, I have my strong views on people and their life philosophies – which is why my characters can’t escape the misfortunes that I’ve created for them. [Laughs] Each character has his fair share of misfortune. This is also [representative of] what I encountered in my own life journey.

I realised just now that all action films must start with misfortunes, otherwise there wouldn’t be a story.
Start with misfortunes… [laughs]. But life’s full of them. It’s just that different people view their misfortunes differently. It’s like, you think
you’re in deep shit? It’s nothing when you compare with me! Everybody will come across those kinds of experiences.

Your obsession with firearms is well-known. I know you have a habit of firing a gunshot – instead of simply shouting ‘action’ – before
each take.
Actually, I’m not the only one doing it. There are other directors doing it. It’s just that when you’re making a movie with such a predominant action element, the actors will sometimes get tired or numbed from their heavy daily workloads. Their pulses may have stopped; so this is just to give them a jolt.

From your knowledge, which other directors are doing this as well?
I don’t know, but I don’t think it’s possible [that I’m the only one]. [Laughs] Maybe I’m the one who does it most frequently.

So when did your interest in guns begin?
It dated all the way back to the time we made Fight Back to School (1991, which Lam served as assistant director). You could say that it began with Stephen Chow’s looks in that movie, which were arranged by me. It has developed into a long-term interest, as I noticed that much of our cinematic expression had been standardised in the past. We followed whatever our predecessors did and nobody tried to actually understand it. For example, the [Hong Kong] Special Duties Unit in the old movies must be wearing a pair of white gloves and a vest that people wore in garages, sometimes with a mask and always carrying a gun. But the world had moved on! Why did they keep doing that? This inspired me to do something about it, and what I did ended up giving me great satisfaction: [because we show that] we have the knowledge. Filmmaking is about knowledge. I hope to demonstrate some new knowledge with every new film I make.

In that regard, can I say that your action movies are more authentic than most other filmmakers’?
Yes, you can say that. You can simply look at The Stool Pigeon: the informant characters in cop-and-crime dramas have been very commonly portrayed as either junkies or the easily bullied. It’s always been like that, but why? That’s not the reality of our world. We talk about reinventing ourselves, but many things are still hopelessly outdated.

How do you learn about all that?
There are many channels. Indeed, if you like something, you must be able to find ways to learn about it. It’s easy. You can read books, for instance, and when you flip to the end of the books, there are tons of videos that you can order and watch. You will inevitably learn new things if you’re interested enough.

From The Viral Factor, we can see that your interest isn’t only restricted to firearms but the military in general. 
Perhaps the audience will tend to classify my interest through the hardware – but what I really like, in the end, is the strategic part of it. I like to think about the technical aspect, like, what should I do if I want to ambush somebody? What are the considerations involved? It’s through these questions that a scene takes shape.

The Viral Factor opens on Jan 21.