Returning to the Tokyo International Film Festival nearly 30 years after his UFO film sold out Tokyo theaters, filmmaker Peter Chan Ho-sun reflected on a career shaped by market forces, from Hong Kong’s golden age, through Hollywood detours, to his current work in mainland China.
At the festival, where his films 1993’s “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Father” and 1994’s “He’s a Woman, She’s a Man” once drew sold-out crowds to the Shibuya venue, Chan traced his journey from independent-minded Hong Kong filmmakers to major Chinese film producers, explaining how economic realities have dictated every creative shift.
“Those were the best days of my life. Whatever I do in the future, I’ll remember those days as the best days,” Chan said of his UFO days. At the 1994 festival, he was given a videotape of himself at the old venue with fellow UFO directors Jacob Chan, Tony Leung Ka-fai, and Carina Lau.
Mr. Chan co-founded UFO in 1992 with like-minded directors who felt out of place in Hong Kong’s action-comedy-dominated industry. “Necessity is the mother of invention. We started UFO because we don’t know how to make comedies. We don’t really fit into the Hong Kong industry because we don’t know how to make blockbuster action movies, gangster movies, martial arts movies, special effects movies,” he explained. “Personally, on our own, we’ll never be able to make the kind of movies we want to make – movies about ordinary people, because we are ordinary people.”
Inspiration came from United Artists, a filmmaker-led studio founded by Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbank, and Mary Pickford. “It felt like a dream come true to be able to make a movie that young people want to make that studios don’t notice,” said Chan. The company gave Chan and his collaborators several years of creative freedom before all principals retired.
However, that independence came amid not only a long-running debate about the demise of Hong Kong cinema, but also the actual decline of Hong Kong cinema. “We have been talking about the decline of the Hong Kong film industry until today, but the actual decline started in 1991 and 1992,” Chan pointed out. The collapse of the Taiwanese market was devastating.
Taiwanese distributors, who were important financiers of Hong Kong films, began dictating content rather than simply acquiring the finished product. “They always order the same kind of movies with the same actors,” Chan explained. “Distribution is a very cutthroat business, and it’s also the closest thing to the audience. So it’s like we’re talking about big data today…They’re only looking through their noses, because they’re looking at what today’s and yesterday’s audiences like. And they keep saying they want you to make (those) movies. It’s like driving in the rearview mirror.”
When Taiwanese distributors en masse capped prices in 1994 to stop a bidding war that had driven up Hong Kong film prices, the entire ecosystem collapsed overnight. “Hong Kong films didn’t survive overnight. Hong Kong films completely captured the Taiwanese market by Hollywood majors. Because once Hong Kong films reduced their prices, the government started opening up the Taiwanese market to American distributors,” Chan said.
The damage was swift and severe. “Overnight, the ratio of Chinese movies to English movies became 50-50, or 60-40, and by 2000 it was 98 percent English, 2 percent Chinese, Japanese and other foreign languages, 2 percent Taiwanese, and 98 percent English,” Chan said. “And by that time the whole industry had changed and that was the beginning of the end for the Hong Kong film industry.”
After UFO disbanded, Chan took several detours before settling on production in mainland China. He went to Los Angeles, signed with an agent, and directed the Hollywood studio film Love Letter, but found the company system incompatible with Hong Kong’s independent filmmaking ethos. “Even though Hong Kong cinema was very commercial, we were working in a very independent way of making films. But our ethos and the way we made it was very independent, because the director actually makes the shooting decisions, which is not the case in the corporate studio world. And neither is China today, because China, like Hollywood, is very corporate.”
He contrasted it with Hong Kong’s freewheeling ways: “In Hong Kong at the time, those were the best days of our lives, because once we had that idea, we’d go write the cure and basically start making the movie. And it’s completed in five, six weeks, just like “He’s a Woman, She’s a Man” was completed in five weeks, and it was completed five days before the release date, which was the screening date.It’s crazy, but that’s the way we work and the way we work. ”
Upon returning to Asia, Chan drew on his Thai, Chinese and Hong Kong heritage to pioneer pan-Asian co-productions through his company Applause Pictures. He produced the film with Thai director Nongyi Nimibutr, Korean director Heo Jin-ho, and co-produced the horror anthology “Three” with Kim Ji-woong and Nimibutr. “At that time, we did the ultimate collaboration,” Chan said of the 2002 project.
He didn’t know how to make a horror movie, so he directed his own corner of “Three” and made what he called “a love story disguised as a horror movie.” “The things that have really transnationally worked well commercially have always been horror. So I said, I can’t build a career for the rest of my life making and producing the horror movies I want to direct, and I can’t continue to direct horror movies.”
This recognition led Chan to make his first mainland Chinese film, the 2005 musical Perhaps Love, starring Takeshi Kaneshiro, Jackie Cheung, and Zhou Xun, and co-starring Bollywood choreographer Farah Khan.
From there, Zhang moved to large-scale production in China, constantly adapting to market demands. “I make movies that the market needs, because if the market doesn’t need the movie, you can’t get the money, you can’t get the investment, you can’t make the movie. So I make whatever movie the market needs at the moment,” he explained.
In 2007, Chinese audiences were looking for historical dramas, so Warlord followed, but Chan’s version had minimal action despite starring Jet Li. “Out of 2 hours and 15 minutes, there was about 15 or 20 minutes of action. And it’s not Jet Li action. It’s more like war action, not really kung fu action, it’s actually a drama. It’s not really a real action movie.” He followed up with “Wu Xia,” which featured Donnie Yen and focused on character and drama, while crediting Yen and action director Kenji Tanigaki for fight choreography.
The success of 2013’s American Dreams in China gave Chan the confidence to make 2014’s structurally unconventional Dearest. It depicts child abduction from opposing perspectives. “A lot of people say that Dearest feels disjointed and structurally inconsistent. But that was intentional. The first half follows one point of view, and the second half switches to the opposite point of view. This may not be the most ‘commercial’ movie I’ve ever made. But again, that confidence comes from previous successes. ”
The work in China made it economically impossible to return to production in Hong Kong. “Budgets were getting higher and higher in China, and crew salaries were going up, because a lot of the big Chinese movies at the time were all in Hong Kong. And because of Hong Kong cruises, China’s big market, the cruise fares for Hong Kong working in China went up. And if you want to go back to work in Hong Kong, Hong Kong can’t afford it. So it’s very difficult to go back to work in Hong Kong.”
Zhang’s latest film, She Has No Name, which premiered at Cannes in 2024 and opened this year’s Shanghai International Film Festival, was screened in Tokyo as part of a two-part series about the 1945 Shanghai Murders. Based on one of China’s most famous unsolved murders, the film centers on Zhan Zhou (Zhang Ziyi), a wife accused of the bloody dismemberment of her husband in 1940s Japanese-occupied Shanghai, a murder that seems impossible for her to carry out alone.
The second part, scheduled for release next year, includes extensive behind-the-scenes information about the deterioration of the couple’s relationship. “A good deal is written about her relationship with her husband and how the marriage deteriorated and became violent, how the husband came to beat his wife violently, and how she ultimately decided she had to kill him.”
Reflecting on which of his films has received the most support from viewers, director Chan said that while 80% of people still mention Comrades, it’s not the most difficult film for me, it’s not the most enjoyable experience, and it’s not the most personal film for me. He attributes its lasting impact to timing. “In some movies, everything is just right at that moment.”
Chan was in conversation with TIFF Programming Director Shozo Ichiyama.
