The Ottawa Citizen, Sunday, October 23, 1997: Feature Article for "The Citizen's Weekly" Section

The following article, written by Peter Hum, appeared in The Ottawa Citizen on Sunday, October 23, 1997, in "The Citizen's Weekly" section. I would like to thank Mr. Hum, as well as Citizen Executive News Editor Don Butler, for their kind permission to archive this article at my site. Mr. Butler may be contacted at dbutler@thecitizen.southam.ca to discuss reprints.

NB: This article was illustrated with a number of cool pix, which I thought I would at least list. But I'm not always sure exactly what part of the article they were in -- take the position as approximate, please!

For more details of CYF's inescapable genius, check out my Chow Yun-Fat: God of Actors site!

Hong Kong takes on Hollywood: Asian talent brings new oomph and fresh blood to film

by Peter Hum

The Ottawa Citizen: Sunday, October 23, 1997

In his most famous role, the actor wore white, playing a honourable but doomed assassin who dispatches countless gangsters to their deaths before a storm of bullets tragically brings him down.

Today, Chow Yun-fat is wearing a white jacket again, harkening to his role in The Killer, as he gently clasps hands with his fans, striding down the aisle of the packed Cumberland Theatre to a standing ovation.

The greeting is heartfelt, yet not so striking as his reception last year in Beijing, where fans swarmed him after he cleared customs at the airport. He was forced to escape with a police escort, surrounded by cruisers, motorcycle outriders and sirens. But perhaps the adulation here at Toronto's International Film Festival is a glimpse of what awaits him in the West.

Mr. Chow, 42, is arguably Asia's greatest actor. Famous to hundreds of millions from Shanghai to Singapore, he has starred in more than 70 films -- action movies, dramas and comedies -- and played dozens of roles on television in his native Hong Kong. In North America, however, Mr. Chow is at best a cult and critics' favourite. Still, aficionados say they can't get enough of his charisma and heroic Everyman appeal -- qualities that are said, in Mr. Chow's case, to transcend the barriers of language and culture.

Whether the rest of the West will embrace Mr. Chow will soon be seen. He has been preparing for years to establish himself in Hollywood, seeking just the right breakthrough film, working on his English. He is to debut across North American movie screens next year as an action hero in a film tailor-made for him, the $24-million Columbia Pictures production The Replacement Killers, co-starring Oscar-winner Mira Sorvino.

Mr. Chow's "second career," as he calls his attempt to win Western stardom, rides on this film.

"I'm glad that I'm the lucky one, that the studio picked me up," he says. His English has come a long way in recent years, but it still falters in a charming, uninhibited way. "I'm the skinny pig to test the market for the Asian actors," Mr. Chow laughs. "I think it's the fate."

In Hong Kong, the director was an undisputed king on his movie sets, left alone by studio executives, filming scenes on the fly with improvised dialogue if necessary. But here in Toronto, at the helm of his first North American movie, he finds that everything is different. "Here, everybody tells you what you should be doing. Everybody," Kirk Wong laughs.

Mr. Wong, a veteran director of gritty Hong Kong action films, sits down at Cinespace Studios on Toronto's waterfront, taking a break from work on the $12-million TriStar Pictures action-comedy The Big Hit. His stars, Lou Diamond Phillips and Mark "Marky Mark" Wahlberg, are taking their lunch. Mr. Wong, 48, has been immersed for weeks in the rigours of movie-making, Hollywood-style: script rewrites, story boards and shooting schedules. But when the camera rolls again, he can concentrate on crafting his film his way. Today, he shoots the movie's climactic fight scene, with stunt advisers imported from Hong Kong to help him.

While Hong Kong films are a diverse lot, the movies best known in the West are mayhem-filled action films with titles like The Killer and Hard-Boiled (both starring Mr. Chow) and Gunmen or Crime Story, both directed by Mr. Wong. They are films that dazzle with frantic gun battles, jaw-dropping stunts and breakneck pacing. Feverishly kinetic, yet devoid of big budgets and glossy special effects, the best Hong Kong action movies have an excitement that some critics attribute to traditional Chinese performing arts, and others to a film industry's giddy, unrepressed, collective id. On a more poetic note, Hong Kong actor and director Sammo Hung has said: "American action pictures are really action for action. Hong Kong action films are more choreographed. There's a little bit of ballet, there is a bit of beautiful body movement. You can see it's a little bit romantic when we fight."

Describe it how you will, Mr. Wong wants to incorporate some of that over-the-top action in The Big Hit, and he thinks that the spirit of Hong Kong films can help invigorate a stagnant Hollywood. American movies need a "tonic," Mr. Wong says, "something that stirs up some fuss, some difference." He hopes that his new film will fit that bill, with its merger of North American stars and some of his made-in-Hong Kong sensibility.

"It could be a fusion of both worlds," Mr. Wong says.

With Mr. Chow, Mr. Wong and other top Hong Kong talents making inroads in the U.S., Western and Eastern cinemas have never been closer. An increasing number of distinctive Hong Kong directors and actors are jetting to Hollywood, some permanently, so that more than a few film enthusiasts now speculate about the enduring mark the imported talent might make.

"Hollywood's movie moguls are ever on the lookout for new talent that will boost studio revenues," Matt Miller wrote this month in the Far Eastern Economic Review. "The latest industry buzz is that Chinese directors have what it takes to make profitable movies with universal appeal. What began as a ripple could become a wave."

That ripple began most noticeably several years ago with director John Woo's North American debut. Since leaving Hong Kong in 1992, Mr. Woo, a veteran filmmaker, has risen to Hollywood's A-list, directing the John Travolta blockbusters Broken Arrow and Face/Off. His success prompted U.S. studios to search for "the second John Woo," says Mr. Woo's Toronto-based business partner Terence Chang.

Several of Hong Kong's best directors followed Mr. Woo's path although, as acclaimed as they were at home, they often began modestly in Hollywood with films destined for derision. Tsui Hark and Ringo Lam, both respected auteurs to film buffs, each directed a Jean-Claude Van Damme film (Maximum Risk and Double Team respectively), as did Mr. Woo in his Hollywood debut Hard Target. Ronny Yu directed the poorly received children's film Warriors of Virtue, a tale about kung-fu kangaroos.

The most recent Hong Kong directors who have come west are cutting their teeth outside the action genre, demonstrating that Hollywood can rise beyond its own stereotypes. Director Stanley Tong, a former stuntman who was at the helm of four Jackie Chan hit movies, just finished filming the $30-million Mr. Magoo for Disney. Peter Chan, a director who bucked the gangster and swordplay movies that had dominated Hong Kong's box office, is to film an urban romance for a Hollywood studio.

At the head of the pack, Mr. Woo carries enough cultural imprimatur that his name is used to market John Woo's Once A Thief, the CTV television series that he helps produce. Most recently, he has been speaking with Michael Douglas, Warren Beatty and Tom Cruise about possible projects. Both Mr. Cruise and Mr. Beatty have suggested films set in China.

In front of the camera, action comedian Jackie Chan, a star in Asia for almost two decades, began carving his niche in the North American market with the 1995 U.S. release of Rumble in the Bronx. Action star Michelle Yeoh, who drove a dirt bike onto a moving freight train in Mr. Chan's movie Supercop , will be the next James Bond girl when the latest 007 film, Tomorrow Never Dies, is released this year.

So far, the impact of the Hong Kong talents shows that Hollywood, like America, is a cultural melting pot. Their experiences also prompt the questions often asked about immigrants: What do they bring to their new land? How will they change it? What hurdles do they face? How will they retain what is theirs?

"I think there's going to be a very interesting cultural battle going on in film, between the dominant mode of Hollywood representation and what other productive influences could be brought in from outside," says Tony Williams, a cinema studies professor at the University of Carbondale in Illinois and a specialist in Asian film. "Hollywood cinema does need a vital injection of talent and excellence that has been lacking now for the last 20 years. I hope that the people from Hong Kong will be contributing to the renovation of the Hollywood model."

Hollywood has had a history of drawing from abroad since its silent-movie days. During the 1920s and 1930s, Hollywood borrowed from German expressionists and invited such German directors as Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder to cross the Atlantic. Britons such as Charlie Chaplin, Bob Hope and Alfred Hitchcock also made an easy leap to Hollywood. More recently, such Europeans as Luc Besson (The Fifth Element), Wolfgang Petersen (Air Force One) and Jan De Bont (Speed 2) have directed U.S.-made blockbusters. However, they do not carry with them the same sense of a distinctly foreign film industry or concentrated film style as do their Hong Kong counterparts. Now, the strongest discernible foreign influence comes from Hong Kong, which ranks, after Hollywood and before Bombay, as the world's second largest exporter of movies.

[Photo of Bruce Lee: "Martial arts movies starring Bruce Lee, were the staple of Hong Kong's movie industry in the1970s. The fan support built by Lee was developed through the 1980s as a new wave of Hong Kong-directed movies arrived."]

Hong Kong's movie industry dates back to the early 20th century. After the Second World War and the Communist takeover of China in 1949, Hong Kong became the main supplier of Chinese-language movies for all of Asia. In the 1970s, the industry's staple offerings were the martial arts movies of Bruce Lee and his imitators. In the 1980s, a "new wave" of Hong Kong directors, including Mr. Wong, Mr. Tsui, Mr. Yu and Ann Hui made more contemporary films that were technically refined and informed by world film history.

Hong Kong's film industry, to be sure, took much of its early inspiration from Hollywood and it continues to borrow Hollywood plots, just as Hollywood remakes La Femme Nikita or La Cage aux Folles. But in the Hollywood of the East, movies have been made differently, in line with the hyper-capitalist, get-ahead ethic that as helped Hong Kong prosper. Budgets have generally been puny by U.S. standards, usually a tenth or less of what might be spent on comparable productions in Hollywood. Until recently, many films were shot without sound, so that they could easily be dubbed into Mandarin for Taiwanese audiences and into Cantonese for Hong Kong and South China crowds. (Films in Hong Kong are also routinely released with English and Chinese-character subtitles, to reach all the local language groups.) Shooting without sound also allows filmmakers to shoot more quickly and reduces production costs. There's no money for computer-generated special effects, so that action sequences rely on spectacular performances and smart camera work to generate excitement.

While the movies are heavily marketed and bankrolled on their stars, the actors are hardly pampered on the set. Cantonese pop star and actor Andy Lau averaged a film a month in 1991, and at one time was shooting four movies at four different locations, sleeping in his car. Mr. Chow has spoken of actors as "merchandise," and of himself working three days straight without sleep on one project.

Yet in spite of the assembly-line mentality, the best Hong Kong films exhibit an exuberance and inventiveness that Hollywood orthodoxy drove away long ago.

There are as many explanations -- technical, cultural and political -- for the style of Hong Kong's films as there are commentators. Berenice Reynaud, a film historian at the California Institute of Arts, contends that shooting without sound has liberated films visually. Freed from the need to synchronize sounds and images in real time, filmmakers can go wild with the "swift, imaginative change of camera angle (and) the breathtaking editing of action sequences with slo-mo and sped-up movements" typical of Hong Kong film.

There's also the ancient-culture argument. In the summer 1997 issue of Film Comment, Ms. Reynaud adds that Hong Kong film style draws upon Chinese cultural tradition for its quality and excitement. Citing film scholar David Bordwell, she writes about the cinema's "gestural clarity ... emphasis on the movements of the whole body, their interaction and/or impact with other bodies and the physical reality, and the expressive quality of the acting. This depends not on speedy camera movement and quick cutting, but rather on a Peking Opera-inspired sense of timing and pause."

Some writers say that political uncertainty energized Hong Kong's films thematically and dramatically. Since 1984, when the agreement that led to Hong Kong's return to China was signed, Hong Kong's "crisis cinema" has generated films marked by "very much of an apocalyptic intensity," says Mr. Williams. While films are rarely overtly political, analogies and subtle references are sometimes intended. Mr. Woo has said that Bullet in the Head, while set in the Vietnam War, was meant to address the Tiananmen Square massacre as well as his apprehensions about Hong Kong under China.

Others stress that Hong Kong films, generally bereft of art-house aspirations, simply and shamelessly put immediate audience gratification first. "There is the feeling in Hong Kong that the audience gets bored very easily, very quickly," says Roger Garcia, a Hong Kong ex-patriate who has directed the territory's international film festival and is co-producing The Big Hit. "The action's got to be fast or you'll lose your audience."

Almost 30 years ago in the West, the first wave of Hong Kong movies, including Bruce Lee's martial arts films, found a small, core audience by winning over underground movie fans and would-be martial artists.

But as Hong Kong's movies diversified, so did their foreign following. By the late 1980s, Hollywood cogniscenti such as Martin Scorsese were taking in Hong Kong films, often thanks to their exposure at the Toronto International Film Festival. Mr. Woo emerged as the territory's cinematic standard bearer between 1986 and 1992, when he made his first noble gangster epic A Better Tomorrow 1 and 2, The Killer, Bullet in the Head, and Hard-Boiled, considered among the best action films ever made. Fans coined the phrase "heroic bloodshed" to describe a Woo-inspired genre -- ultraviolent cops-and-gangsters stories often grounded in old-fashioned themes of trust, brotherhood and self-sacrificing heroism. Mr. Woo has acknowledged a wealth of influences for his vision: French director Jean-Pierre Melville's crime dramas starring Alain Delon, Japanese samurai movies, ancient Chinese stories of chivalry, the life of Jesus Christ.

[Photo of Quentin Tarantin: "Hollywood critics accuse film director Tarantino of vulgarizing Hong Kong-style movie violence and of plundering both Hong Kong and other forms of film."]

Hollywood's increasingly gory depictions of violence may owe much to the flamboyant bloodshed of Hong Kong movies. Such directors as Oliver Stone, Sam Raimi and especially Quentin Tarantino are high-profile boosters of Hong Kong filmmaking. Mr. Tarantino in particular has worn his influence in full view. His debt to Hong Kong is blatant in a comparison between his breakout film Reservoir Dogs, and Ringo Lam's dark and gritty 1987 film, City on Fire. "The jewelry heist gone bad, the doomed retreat to the warehouse, the undercover cop who gets wounded, the Mexican standoff, the declaration of truth between friends -- these are all present in both films," wrote Jami Bernard in her book Quentin Tarantino: The Man and His Movies.

[Still from Desperado: "The choreographed firepower of Hollywood-produced blood-spiller Desperado, starring Antonio Banderas, points to the overt influence Hong Kong films have over American movie directors."]

Other American directors have drawn less overtly upon Hong Kong films, but commentators feel that the influence is still there. They point to the choreographed firepower in Desperado, starring Antonio Banderas, and From Dusk To Dawn, starring George Clooney and Mr. Tarantino (both directed by Mr. Tarantino's friend Robert Rodgriguez) and the surreal, fast-motion fights in Batman and Robin as inspired by Hong Kong film. If you see a gunfighter with two pistols blazing, that image plucked from vintage Hollywood Westerns was first revitalized in Mr. Woo's Hong Kong films. So too was the classic standoff scene in which multiple gunmen have pistols trained at each others' heads.

But it is one thing for Hong Kong filmmakers to have their own esthetic sense and signature visuals, and another thing for others to copy them.

"There's a complexity and a particular finesse to the stylistic works of these directors in Hong Kong cinema. Most American directors who try to copy it really do not reproduce it very well. What they generally do is ... reproduce the violence in a gratuitous manner," Mr. Williams says.

While Mr. Woo and his colleagues infuse their bloodiest scenes with often melodramatic emotional content (the hitman's death in The Killer, or the villain's death in Face/Off), death is cheaper for their U.S. devotees, steeped in their trendy irony.

The violence in Hong Kong films "is very much brought down to a vulgar form of representation. And that's particularly the case with the films of Tarantino. He borrows from a number of different films. He's been plundering Hong Kong films for years," says Mr. Williams.

"I think that Tarantino's star is waning because he's very much a derivative director," Mr. Williams adds. "Whereas the Hong Kong directors, over here, if they're allowed freedom to develop their talents and make the films the way they want to, they'll go from strength to strength."

It is just past 10 a.m. and the crew filming The Big Hit has been at work for hours in an overheated Toronto studio that smells of sawdust and artifical smoke. The set reproduces a giant video store, and Mark Wahlberg and Lou Diamond Phillips are limbering up, waiting to duke it out. First, the stunt advisers imported from Hong Kong must choreograph how they come to blows.

Wang Chun-Kang lies on the floor amid a clutter of video boxes while Lau Chi-Ho wields a pair of gleaming, albeit rubber, knives. Mr. Lau lunges and Mr. Wang parries with a kick. They practise their motions, conversing in Cantonese, and the scene they create appears to be more acrobatic dance than violent brawl.

With the camera ready to roll, Mr. Phillips and Mr. Wahlberg step in. They try a take. Mr. Phillips, the goateed villain in black, loses his footing on a video box. With the next take comes advice. Mr. Lau steps in, demonstrating his moves for Mr. Phillips. He moves quickly and fluidly, his arm and body describing large, smooth arcs. "Longer. Faster," a translator says. From beside the camera, Mr. Wong surveys the scene.

This is what Hollywood hopes will appear fresh and interesting to audiences.

"Kirk Wong is deliberately using a lot of Hong Kong kind of action, which is kind of unique," says Mr. Chang, the film's executive producer along with Mr. Woo. "The action is a little bit larger than life, a little bit surreal. If you're doing a realistic, straight drama or action film, that might not work. But for our film, I think it worked really well."

"It's just a totally different style," says John Stoneham Jr., the Canadian stunt co-ordinator for The Big Hit. "The reality thing is a bit different."

While Mr. Stoneham Jr. might have advised his stuntmen to grapple with each other like wrestlers, the Hong Kong advisers favour faster, sweeping movements with a dance-like quality. The advisers are also coaching stuntmen to fall differently after pretending to be shot. Instead of crumpling to the ground, staggering back or spinning forward, "we've had some of these guys flying back 10 feet, 15 feet," Mr. Stoneham Jr. says. "It's movieland. You can do what you want. Depending on how it's cut, it could look pretty wild. Certainly no lack of energy."

Action aside, the movie is something of a departure for Mr. Wong. Some of his other films are "almost like documentaries,'' he says. His 1993 movie Crime Story, which starred Jackie Chan in a rare non-comedic role, fictionalized a famous case, while his earlier Organized Crime and Triad Bureau also focused on a police investigation. The Big Hit is more of a black comedy with exaggerated action, following the professional and romantic misadventures of a suburban hitman played by Mr. Wahlberg.

Face/Off or Broken Arrow it's not. But Mr. Woo's first U.S. film, the Van Damme movie Hard Target, received mixed reviews at best. "We jumped at it, even knowing that it's a Van Damme picture," explains Mr. Chang. "We thought, `Why not do it, just as an exercise or something? It's not the greatest project in the world, but it's just one picture.'"

Mr. Chang says that it has been difficult to convince Hollywood studios that people from Hong Kong can make Western films. And it's well known that the studio and the star of Hard Target made Mr. Woo rein in his visual and narrative style considerably.

"Hard Target was severely compromised by editorial interference, as well as that of the star," says Mr. Williams. "Broken Arrow was a compromise film ... They (Mr. Woo and Mr. Chang) wanted to show that John (Woo) could do a popcorn movie along with any other American director." He adds, however, Mr. Woo was given more control on Face/Off, and was able to address favourite themes such as the twinning of good and evil.

[Black and white pic of the movie poster for City War: "MEATIER ROLE SOUGHT: Chow Yun-fat, shown in this bullet-riddled poster for City War, wishes he could land a meatier role in an American-made movie -- `something more than carrying two guns,' as he did in The Replacement Killer."]

Kirk Wong says that in his case, "it's a matter of me adapting to the way they (Hollywood studios) make movies, and bring a particular style, or way of thinking, or mentality of what a movie should be."

Mr. Garcia says that the directors from Hong Kong who can fit into the more formal Hollywood system will gradually sort themselves out.

"The thing that characterizes a lot of Hong Kong action movies is that they kind of go over the top and the pacing is very fast. Also, they don't pay too much regard for plot, on the basis that fast and furious action can cover a multitude of script sins.

"I think he (a Hong Kong director) has to adjust to the idea that there is a very strong narrative drive in all Hollywood films, that the story is paramount and the action fits into that, rather than the action determining the story."

Mr. Garcia says that the influence of movies on Hollywood will not be so strong as its fans might wish. "I don't know if a hybrid product can actually exist," he says. "I think that Hollywood as a system exists to absorb influences and fashion them into something the world wants."

There's a famous scene in Chow Yun-fat's 1986 starmaking film A Better Tomorrow, in which Mark, his gangster character, looks down from a hill at the glittering lights of the city and says: "I never realized Hong Kong looked so good at night. Like most things, it won't last. That's for sure."

The line has often been viewed as an ominous reference to Hong Kong's return to Chinese sovereignty. But in recent years, Mr. Chow and many others have admitted that the glory days of the Hong Kong film industry have been similarly eclipsed.

A huge downturn has occurred in the 1990s. The quality of films dropped as studios, anxious about the impending return of Hong Kong to China, went into take-the-money-and-run mode, cutting corners to maximize profits. Hong Kong filmgoers noticed. Last year, for the first time, five Hollywood blockbusters, including Independence Day, Mission: Impossible and The Rock, made the top 10 box office list in Hong Kong. Overall box office receipts have dropped too, as laser discs, videos and other media have eaten into the moviegoing market.

"You can see the Hong Kong market right now is dying," Mr. Chow says. "That's why I have to move, to look for a new way to support my career in the future."

Mr. Chow had initially resisted the idea of coming to Hollywood, says Mr. Chang, who also manages the actor's career. "He said, `I'm the King in Asia. Why would I come to Hollywood? My English is not so good. Why would I have to go through all this?'"

Mr. Chow has been absent from movie and TV screens for several years (except to hawk products in commercials) while some of his fellow actors have made strings of rushed films. The Hong Kong media spoke of Mr. Chow as being in semi-retirement, but he has simply been biding his time, wanting his North American debut to be just right.

Today, the Bloor Street Diner is filled with images of Mr. Chow as guests arrive to celebrate his Toronto film festival appearance. Televisions are scattered throughout the restaurant and bar, showing a succession of clips from The Replacement Killers: Mr. Chow, in a stylishly monochromatic ensemble, stares down a discotheque filled with lowlife thugs before stylishly blowing them away; Mr. Chow, an assassin with a conscience, opts not to shoot his family-man victim after all; Mr. Chow confers with a friend in a Buddhist temple. Friends of Mr. Chow, fans who have wangled their way into the party and a pack of reporters, both English- and Chinese-speaking, are transfixed.

"When you look at the image that's up on the screen right now," says Barbara Scharres, director of the Art Institute of Chicago's Film Centre, "when he's playing a role, something very special happens. There are lots of good actors, but Chow has something that's extraordinary."

That on-screen presence must come with an on-off switch, for in person the photogenic Mr. Chow is no grim-faced, conflicted killer. He has considerable presence, but above all, he is easy-going and unpretentious.

In Asia, part of Mr. Chow's success depends on who he is off-screen. His fans admire him as a star who does not act like a star. They know that Mr. Chow grew up a country boy on Hong Kong's Lantau Island, and that he left school at 17 to support his widowed mother and his siblings, working as a postman, bellhop, office boy and camera salesman. He became an actor in his early 20s after enrolling in a TV company's training program. Despite two decades of success, Mr. Chow's homespun ways remain in the public eye thanks to a Hong Kong media that delights in celebrity gossip.

Ms. Scharres has visited Mr. Chow and his wife Jasmine in Hong Kong, and she says that he interacts with strangers as if he were the guy who lives down the street, not one of the continent's biggest box-office draws.

"He doesn't have a driver. He just drives himself. He just puts his car in a parking garage like anybody else and walks around on the street," she says. "People can come up to him when he's sitting in a restaurant with food in his mouth and he's totally gracious.

"He'll pick up the babies, he'll kiss the grandmothers. He projects such a heartfelt attitude that it's no wonder that people think he's their friend. He truly acts like a friend. There's no cynicism under it. You don't detect any impatience or that he's doing it because it's his duty. He seems to truly love his audience and remember every moment that's who put him where he is."

"The people in Hong Kong are very strict," Mr. Chow told the Los Angeles Times. "If your real life and your role don't match -- they know. They will feel very frustrated, resentful."

On screen, Mr. Chow's down-to-earth demeanour goes a long way. U.S. film critic David Chute has written that "the breadth of Chow's appeal has no exact equivalent in this country. No American movie star has ever been as equally popular as a clown, a lover and a fighter, all at the same time -- and sometimes in the same movie."

But as Mr. Chow, who still lives in Hong Kong, tries to make a go in Hollywood, he hopes that his versatility will triumph over typecasting. Being pigeonholed is every actor's bane, but for an Asian in Hollywood it is doubly a problem.

Historically, whatever prominent parts there were for Asians went to white actors in "yellowface," such as Mickey Rooney's Japanese character in Breakfast at Tiffany's, or Werner Oland playing Charlie Chan. Nor has an Asian actor carried a film in recent memory, except for martial arts beat-'em-up movies, which are inevitably seen as second-rate. This year Gentleman's Quarterly mistakenly stereotyped Mr. Chow as "a martial-arts phenom."

Before The Replacement Killers came along for Mr. Chow, there was a lot of dross. "We turned down so much stuff," says Mr. Chang. "They wanted him to play villains, they wanted him to play parts so insignificant. And I told them why would he even bother considering it? It doesn't make sense to me. He's a huge superstar in Asia. Why would he want to do this?"

U.S. studios and producers saw an unknown and offered him scraps, Mr. Chang says. "They all said, `Oh, but this is an American film. He should be honoured to appear even in a bit part in our picture.' Stuff like that."

Mr. Chow was offered a role in the next Aliens movie. Mr. Chang dismissed it. "A nothing part," he says. "Guy always standing in the background. No dialogue. I find it really insulting."

Ms. Scharres contends that even a mainstream North American audience can accept and appreciate Mr. Chow as a true leading man.

"There are certain qualities to performance that are universal," she says. She recalls a scene in the drama Hong Kong 1941, in which Mr. Chow's character realizes his girlfriend has been raped by invading soliders. "You see the tears start rolling down his face. It's more than just crying. His body language. Everything about the way he's expressing what he's feeling is so extremely beautiful and so touching. That's 100-per-cent universal as far as I'm concerned."

Mr. Chow has spoken of Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as his idol: "As an actor, I like him because he's full of power." He regrets that he has never yet been offered so meaty a role.

"I hope I can do more dramatic movies, more than only carrying two guns," Mr. Chow says with a laugh.

Mr. Chang says that Mr. Chow opted to star in The Replacement Killers because it isn't much of a stretch for him. His lead role echoes his hitman-with-a-heart role in The Killer, which along with Hard-Boiled, is his best calling card abroad. "It's easier for him to start his American career by doing something quite similar to those films," says Mr. Chang.

"The character is good, even though it is still the same old story, the killer story," Mr. Chow says. "This character, he's got a good big heart, big conscience."

Mira Sorvino, the female lead in The Replacement Killers, has said of the film: "It's really a Hong Kong-style gunslinger movie. I see these as sort of the '90s answer to the western ... I think the whole John Woo-spawned world is just the new OK Corral."

But even as Mr. Chow awaits the release of his first film, he is looking ahead to projects that could broaden his appeal in the West. He is set to work in an Oliver Stone production called The Corrupter, a story about a Chinese gangster and a New York cop. Mr. Woo is developing an action comedy called King's Ransom for his favourite leading man. Even a remake of The King and I has been put on the table before Mr. Chow.

"I hope more people (will be) knowing who I am," he says. "I hope that a lot of Hong Kong filmmakers and directors, the actors, they can come over to work with the Hollywood people ... they need some new blood," Mr. Chow says. Do he and his Hong Kong peers fit that bill? He nods and answers with nothing but humility. "I think so."

You are probably the only person who has ever accessed this web page, while I myself have logged on times since January 8th, 1998.

Back to Winnifred's Home Page, or over to my page of CYF movie reviews, pix, and links, or to the Chow Yun-Fat: God of Actors page....

This page last officially modified January 1998. Created January 8, 1998, with help from the NCSA's Beginner's Guide to HTML, by Winnifred Louis.