Stephen Chow is a superstar in Asia, where box office records fall at the very mention of his name. Now, with his latest movie, Kung Fu Hustle, he's taking Hong Kong to Hollywood. The actor/director talks to Michael Dwyer about his latest high-tempo, martial arts romp
On screen in Kung Fu Hustle, Stephen Chow is a ball of energy, whether being put through the mill and subjected to an imaginative range of physical punishments, or in his character's later, inevitable transformation from hapless loser into martial arts hero. To cite a couple of western reference points, imagine one of Charlie Chaplin's archetypal sad sacks taking on the grit and athleticism of Neo, the Keanu Reeves role in The Matrix.
Chow, who turns 43 next Wednesday, is a superstar in Asia, where Kung Fu Hustle has been smashing box-office records, and he is already planning a sequel. Although he has acted in 50 movies over the past 15 years, Chow was unknown in the US and Europe until the belated release of his 2001 movie, Shaolin Soccer, which finally arrived at Irish cinemas last Christmas.
Joining forces with the Hong Kong production division of Sony Pictures, Chow had a substantially bigger budget at his disposal for Kung Fu Hustle, a delirious comedy-action romp that doesn't skimp on the effects as it piles on the gravity-defying stunts.
The setting is 1940s Shanghai, when the extortionist Axe Gang rules the city. In the movie's canny fusion of eastern and western movie influences, they are modelled on the mob led by Bill the Butcher, the Daniel Day-Lewis character, in Gangs of New York. However, they are altogether more dapper in their top hats and smart suits - although they mostly have terrible teeth - and they move like dancers choreographed to the score as they take aim to kill.
Chow plays Sing, a petty crook and aspirant gangster who naively believes he can make his mark in the slum area aptly named Pig Sty Alley. Being one of the poorest districts, it holds no interest for the gang, but Sing promptly gets his comeuppance from the locals, who include a lecherous drunken landlord and his bossy, chain-smoking wife, known only as Landlady.
For all its indebtedness to other movies - chiefly Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Kill Bill and Bruce Lee's classic action extravaganzas - Kung Fu Hustle is a Stephen Chow film. He co-wrote and co-produced it as well as directing it and taking the leading role. And he had the added responsibilities of working with a Hollywood studio for the first time, dealing with a much bigger budget than ever before, and pre-planning all the computer-generated effects in the movie.
When we talked at Cannes last month, I asked Chow how he managed to cope with all these pressures simultaneously. "Yes, but it was more pleasure than pressure for me," he says. "It's not easy. In fact, it's extremely difficult, but I like to take on a challenge like that.
"Luckily, I had complete control over the film. I had final cut. During the negotiations we put through several conditions and happily, the studio trusted us. We were aware that we would have to please a western audience, but that was part of what we wanted to achieve with the film."
In person, or in interviews at least, Chow is the antithesis of his boisterous screen image. He is quiet-spoken and unfailingly polite, and seems genuinely modest and even shy. Although he is well capable of expressing himself in English, he has an interpreter with him in interviews, although his services are hardly needed.
In fact, language presented Chow with what he says was his biggest problem when making the movie. "In my earlier films I used a lot of dialogue and I also used many puns, which I enjoy doing, but this would not really work for an audience seeing the film dubbed or sub-titled in another language.
"I wanted to reach an international audience, so I changed my style somewhat to make it a more visual and a less verbal film. For that reason we used a lot less dialogue than in the earlier films, so that the actors could express them through their actions and their body language, which is a language everyone understands all over the world."
He describes the film as his tribute to Bruce Lee and to the kung fu films of the 1960s. The only boy among his family's four children, he was born Chow Sing-Chi in Hong Kong. When he was nine, his mother introduced him to the pleasures of the cinema.
"I can still remember my first visit to the cinema as clearly as if it happened yesterday," he says, beaming at the memory of it. "It was a Bruce Lee film. We saw it in a rundown cinema, but that didn't matter at all. I was just overwhelmed by the whole experience. Sitting there in the darkness, I felt like my heart could burst with excitement, and I remember I had tears in my eyes. Bruce Lee was extraordinary. He was brilliant at martial arts, but he also had this furious spirit that filled the whole screen. He became my hero that day. I wanted to be him."
Inspired by Lee, Chow started taking martial arts lessons, and when his family could no longer afford them, he continued to teach himself, copying movements from movies he had seen.
When he was 20, he applied to an acting school in Hong Kong and was rejected, but thanks to the intervention of a friend, was allowed to take a night class. A year later, in 1983, he was hired to present Space Shuttle 430, a TV series for children, on which he worked for five years before breaking into dramatic roles in movies, followed by the comedies and parodies that made him a star, challenging Jackie Chan as the most popular screen performer in Asia.
He turned director in the mid-1990s, and one of his early projects, King of Comedy, in which he played a film set extra meeting the movie star of his dreams, attracted the attention and praise of Asian movies buff Quentin Tarantino. Chow moved on to another scale when he incorporated digital effects into his entertaining blending of football and martial arts in Shaolin Soccer, and its huge success in Asia made it possible for him to attract Hollywood investment in the more ambitious Kung Fu Hustle.
"I never went to a film school and never did any class or course in film-making," Chow explains. "I just learned everything about directing from being an actor on the set for 20 years. When you're doing that for so long, you learn so much about how films are made. In my view, it's the best way to learn, by observing how things work and learning from it. I was always asking directors about everything, from camera movements to background music, so when I started directing, it just came easily to me."
In preparing Kung Fu Hustle, Chow enlisted the services of several veterans on both sides of the camera. For the crucial role of Landlady, he lured Yuen Qui out of retirement. A former Hong Kong star who had appeared as a "Bond girl" in The Man With the Golden Gun back in 1974, she had to be begged to return to movies, but Chow eventually persuaded her, and she steals the film from him.
He also managed to sign up one of the best action choreographers in the world, Yuen Wo Ping, the Hong Kong maestro whose international credits have included Crouching Tiger, The Matrix and the two Kill Bill pictures, along with another virtuoso, Sammo Hung, for additional action choreography.
There is a point of view that having access to masses of CGI makes a director lazy because CGI makes so much possible, but Chow disagrees. "I think it's the other way around. I have to be conscious of how CGI will be used in every single shot where I need to use it. We were shooting for four months, much longer than on any of my earlier films.
"There are over 500 shots in this film that use CGI so you can imagine how busy I was, working all this out with the crew every day when we were shooting. There is far more responsibility in planning those sets and getting them exactly right."
Being a superstar in Asia, does he get stopped on the street all the time? "No, it's not like that at all," he says. "I can lead a perfectly normal life. People like my movies a lot, which is great, but I don't think they are that interested in me. It's not like Hollywood.
"I know people recognise me on the street in Hong Kong, but in my experience, they treat me like a friend, and not as a star. It is different with the press. I'm in the press a lot and they're often making up some gossip or trying to surprise me with a camera when I am out."
What's the most amusing gossip he has read about himself? "I lead quite a simple life," he says, dodging the question. "I like to go out to restaurants and to go home then, alone or with some friend, which is usually a man. The press all know I'm not gay so they can't make up any stories about that."
King Fu Hustle is released next Friday
