Director Derek Yee: "The Most Painful Stage Was When Audiences Wanted Nothing but Entertainment"

Derek Yee considers I Am Somebody the hardest film he has ever made.

While shooting his latest film, the Hong Kong director took to wearing sunglasses on set, "like Wong Kar-wai," to hide his anxiety. The film, I Am Somebody, tells the story of the extras at Hengdian World Studios, and its leads are played by those same extras.

"I used almost every trick I had, and the actors still couldn't act. They couldn't remember their lines, and they were terribly nervous," Yee says. "They just couldn't get past that hurdle, so all we could do was start over, again and again. If they couldn't remember a line, we fed it to them. The workload was enormous, and it was exhausting." The contrast with his previous film, The Great Magician, where Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Zhou Xun often nailed a scene in one take, made the gap feel even wider.

The anxiety, and facing these newcomers day after day, took him back several decades, to his own first years as an actor.

Yee joined Hong Kong's Shaw Brothers studio at 17 and became a film actor. Thanks to his family (his father, Er Guang, was a Shaw Brothers producer, and his mother and two older brothers were all actors), he never lived through the hard days the extras knew. But he soon felt a different kind of pain: that of a small figure inside a big company and an old system.

Derek Yee in his acting days

"Inside, you couldn't make the choices you wanted, and you couldn't turn down a film even if you thought it was bad. Young actors were all paid a fixed monthly salary. When I was playing leads, the stunt doubles, who were older than me, earned far more than I did. Being an actor back then was just like being an office worker," Yee tells QDaily. All of this left the young Yee angry and anxious.

Meanwhile, the Hong Kong New Wave, which began in the late 1970s, just as Yee was starting out, gathered force in the 1980s. Companies such as Cinema City and D&B Films teamed up with new directors such as John Woo and Tsui Hark and brought fresh air to Hong Kong cinema. Yee, still "clocking in" at Shaw Brothers, looked on with envy.

"We were being pushed further and further to the margins. The 'Five Tigers' had arrived, Andy Lau and Tony Leung were coming up, one batch after another. And we were still making those old-fashioned films for Southeast Asia. You looked outside, and Tsui Hark was already shooting Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain," Yee says. "I joined Shaw Brothers at 17 to act in films. When I left the company I was 26, and I felt I was finished."

The end he feared never came. Over the past 30 years he has made 18 films, and in his view I Am Somebody was the hardest of them to shoot. In his words, "I started out a bit too sure of myself, and by the end I was shooting in a state of total exhaustion." The young people who scrape a living as extras in Hengdian, and who can stay thrilled for days after showing their faces on screen for a second, were suddenly pushed to center stage. With no professional training and crippling nerves, they needed far more retakes than usual. Derek Yee on the set of I Am Somebody

Still, Yee, now 58, loves running the show from behind the camera. Nor has he ever regretted the bold decision he made after he felt "finished": to leave acting and work behind the scenes. That decision made him the "director Derek Yee" we know today.

QDaily talked with Yee about his path from actor to director, the changes he has seen in the industry and the market, how he understands the mainland market and its audiences, and what he likes and dislikes, what he is good at and what he doesn't quite understand.

Q = QDaily

A = Derek Yee

Q: Looking back, you seem to be a much better director than you were an actor. Your first film, The Lunatics (1986), earned a Hong Kong Film Awards nomination, and a few years later C'est la vie, mon chéri (1993) won Best Film and took 30 million at the box office. But by then Hong Kong cinema was already struggling, and the triads' grip on it was getting tighter. You don't seem to have been hit very hard. Why?

A: Things swung up and down a lot back then. 1998 was the worst. Was there a really big impact? Yes. But the most painful stage was actually what you see now: audiences getting younger and wanting nothing but entertainment. I don't want to say brain-dead; I don't want to use that kind of word. But because of the way society is now, audiences don't want to bear so much pressure. They want something entertaining, and heavy material doesn't work. Hong Kong had a period like that too, when you could throw together any comedy and it would make money. If you made something serious, nobody watched it. There really was a stretch like that, and it was an anxious time.

Other than that I was fine, because the triads never asked me to make films for them (laughs). I don't make that kind of film. And to be honest, they wanted you to shoot fast and make money fast, and even if you told me to hurry, I couldn't shoot fast. So I just shot slowly, and I didn't starve.

Some people used to make four films a year and now could make only one, and they felt the drop keenly. But I never asked for much. Once I moved behind the camera, I no longer had to worry every day about what to wear when I went out or what image to show. I had been through all that as an actor; I had driven sports cars and tried everything. If anything, I gradually became more down-to-earth. My family came from the grassroots. We were in show business, but it was hard work even before me; in my parents' generation, show business was a hard life.

Q: They weren't really stars. They were more like craftspeople.

A: Right. When I was very small, my mother's stage name was Hong Wei, and people would say, "Hong Wei has had a baby, bring the baby over." Whenever a film was short of a child, they would carry me over to act a bit, to bring in a little extra money for the family. That was how we lived.

When we were small, more than a million people in Hong Kong lived in wooden shacks built on the hillsides. If you watch Police Story, you can see the last generation of them, a cluster of wooden huts. Only around then did Hong Kong finally clear out these squatter huts. They were illegal structures with no land deeds, nothing. Later the residents were gradually moved into public housing.

So I have never been extravagant about material things. If I make some money, spending a bit of it and treating myself is fine. That is exactly why I didn't feel it was so bad. In fact I didn't make many films, and I was prepared: if I worked behind the scenes, I could never earn as much as I did in front of the camera. I knew that going in. When I decided to stop acting and move fully behind the scenes, my whole family told me to think it over carefully.

Q: What worried your family most?

A: That I had to be prepared, because the money wouldn't come as easily as it did for an actor. But I said, how long can I keep acting? Tony Leung and those guys were younger than me! I didn't want to wait. I wanted to do it myself, and really, it was because I loved it (working behind the scenes). We made a lot of bad films back then, and the assistant directors, a bunch of young people, would sit together and say, how can they shoot it like that? Look at the New Wave out there; that's how we should be shooting. Once we could criticize other people's films, it meant we already had ideas of our own. You believed you could do it well. First of all, I believed I could shoot it better than him, and that is a kind of interest.

So what I tell young people today is that your first three films matter most: shoot what you want to shoot, as far as you can. Actually, you won't even manage three. Once you finish the first, you're already influenced, and you start thinking about the second. So the first film matters most; shoot it as close as you can to the way you want. The market is good now. Once you have made your first film, you have already reached your goal. It doesn't decide whether you live or die. You can forget about it now and move on to your second film. A director gets summed up only at the very end, when he retires. You don't need to sum yourself up now; along the way, your box office will certainly go up and down.

Q: Many young directors hope their first film will make a splash, the way Xu Zheng's did.

A: Right, but it shouldn't be like that. The mainland now has a huge cinema audience. Back then, my film's 33 million in Hong Kong was already very high for Hong Kong's population. After I finished that film, got that box office and won that award, I knew the very next day that I hadn't succeeded.

The day after the Hong Kong Film Awards, at most they throw you a party, and then people forget. You're back to zero, a new year's work begins, and nobody knows whether your next film will succeed or fail. It's like Real Madrid now: will they win the next match? Not necessarily. You win some and you lose some; that's perfectly normal. Of course, now I encourage others, and back then others encouraged me. It's exactly the same; I went through it too. When I talk with young people now, it's not because I'm so wise. It all comes from experience. In the past, when people saw me about to hit a wall, they said nothing and let me hit it. Now, when there's something I want to tell you, I say it and leave it at that and let him go his way, and he may never run into those things at all. That's what a life teaches you; it comes from experience. Derek Yee won Best Director and Best Screenplay at the 13th Hong Kong Film Awards for C'est la vie, mon chéri (1993)

Q: I'd guess that, more than educating young directors, you have to spend time getting to know, and educating, mainland audiences. When did you first start dealing with the mainland market and its audiences?

A: Very early. The first film of mine to be imported was Lost in Time. I came to Beijing for its premiere, and it was probably the first film to be promoted at UME. Back then there was hardly any box office, and the mainland had hardly any cinemas. Look at UME: when it first opened in Zhongguancun, it was packed. That was the era when I could get a film into the UME in Zhongguancun. Co-productions had always existed; back then, unlike now, you could split the revenue. Later, as the market kept growing, we started to think about this question in earnest. Why didn't we think about it from the start? Because the box office really wasn't high. Manfred Wong made a film, My Brothers and Sisters, and its 30 million was very impressive at the time. Yu Dong was the distributor. Wow, so you could get 30 million at the box office. That was when many companies began to shift their focus; some wanted to co-produce and get into this market. We shifted with the times.

Q: But the style of your films hasn't changed much. They're still very Hong Kong, like Precocious and Protégé.

A: I think so. The biggest deliberate change in technique was One Nite in Mongkok. I did that on purpose; I shot it with a technique I had designed in advance. Beyond that, there are two schools. Some people think the script is everything, and a smaller group think the script doesn't matter and the way you shoot does. I side with the first, because I started as an actor; I work mainly through the drama and the actors' eyes. If I tried to lead with technique, that wouldn't be my strength. Whose strength is it? Wong Kar-wai's. I'm a fan of his. Why do I like watching his films? Because I can't shoot like that; that's why I watch them. He has his own visual sense, his own sense of beauty, and he plays his own music. I joke that in In the Mood for Love, I can't work out how Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung just walking back and forth can look so good, those images, with the music playing. I wouldn't know how to shoot that. A shot of the hands, a shot of the feet, a shot of the shadows, and it's beautiful. I especially like Fallen Angels; I love the world those characters live in. I don't like making films about rich people. I like shooting in alleys and run-down houses. His is a particular technique. I can analyze myself pretty well, the influence of all the films I've watched since I was a child. I prefer small American films, many of them superb, which also start from story and characters and are shot very plainly. I prefer realism; I like documentaries. That is roughly my creative direction, and I've used it before. A deeper analysis of myself I can't manage; someone else has to tell me.

Q: But have you made any films aimed purely at the market, at the money?

A: Yes, I have. I've made films for the money. I wanted them to be fully commercial, without expressing so much of myself, but even then I'd slip in some views of my own. Take Drink-Drank-Drunk: with something like that you need to find a so-called situational comedy, but you still put people's ideas in it, love and so on, and make the ending a bit rowdier, because it's a comedy. The Great Magician was the same. I actually don't like watching magic. When the script was finished it was very serious, so I brought someone in to turn it into a comedy. During preparation I immediately emailed my friends: what do you think of magic? I had no opinion of it at all. Derek Yee's previous film as director was The Great Magician*, starring Zhou Xun and Tony Leung*

Q: Do you think you understand audiences here? Do you get what young people on the mainland find funny?

A: It depends on the subject. Some things are universal. If I were to make something about young people's memories of school now, how would I know? I can't judge it. I don't know what your primary and middle schools were like; I don't know that world. Hong Kong in my day, I know. Taiwan's primary schools, I know; I know Paradise in Service, I know the films Yonfan made. I have impressions and knowledge, so I can make some judgments. It's not as if you build the set, the art department finishes, and that's it; it takes personal judgment. Those other things I can't get right. Now, if I made Tiny Times, that would be no difficulty, because it has been done before. Thirty years ago there were already princes and princesses of this type; they came from Japan. But this kind of girlish sentiment, forget it. If I made one, would audiences accept it? I wouldn't want to, either. As you get older, the things you watch inevitably get a bit more serious. I try not to be stuffy, since I'm not that old yet, but things that young can no longer hold my interest.

Q: Would you make something like The Monkey King?

A: That film... well, how should I put it. I'm not very fond of special effects. My films have 32 effects shots at most. That process is very industrial, and it's exhausting. We'd do a whole round of work, and then all of it would be rejected and redone. The person who's interested in that is Tsui Hark.

Q: Is that why you asked him to produce Sword Master, which you're shooting now?

A: Yes. Without him as producer, I wouldn't dare touch this stuff, because I don't know enough about it. This time I really learned a lot about 3D and special effects, many things I'd never known how to shoot. At one point he was about to leave Hengdian, and I said, no way, we start shooting tomorrow and I don't know how to handle any of these storyboards. Tell me what to do, and what to do if it doesn't work. He told me everything, and I said, OK, you can go, I'll shoot tomorrow; if I can't do it, I can't. You have to be interested. Tsui Hark wants to make things that could never exist look real; he loves shooting that. My direction is to find stories in people.

Derek Yee and Tsui Hark on the set of the new Sword Master

Q: You just said the extras' acting wasn't professional, but to audiences, some A-list actors also act stiffly. Do you feel that too?

A: I can only speak about Hong Kong first. For a while it was the age of idols. Actors came out of listed companies' training classes, TVB's training classes and the Miss Hong Kong pageant, and later from among singers. Some were just idols who couldn't sing very well either. They moved from singing into film, and they became Hong Kong's "little fresh meat" of the day, the pretty-boy idols. They couldn't do kissing scenes, because that clashed with a singer's image. A male star couldn't shoot a kissing scene, or his female fans would jump off buildings. It's the same in Japan and Korea. So how high a standard can you expect from someone like that? Idols like that are the same in Japan and Korea, and you could say the mainland's little fresh meat today are the same.

Q: One more small question. Some people say you're very good as a director, an actor and a producer. Having done so many different jobs, do you look at a project differently than when you did just one?

A: When I shoot my own films, I'm still mostly the screenwriter and director. The market side has to be thought through in advance, before you start. When you're working out the script's structure, the scene breakdown, whether to make the film at all, that commercial calculation uses the left brain. Once you've worked it out, writing the script takes the right brain. Before, it's the head; when you write a script you have to use the heart. You move yourself first, and if you think it's good, that's enough. For the practical problems, I get people to do the budget for me and finish shooting as fast as possible, no more dragging on. I can be flexible; that's one of my methods.

Producing is a different matter. As a producer you don't bring much personal taste. When I'm given a project, I don't start by asking whether I like it. Many directors come at things as screenwriters and creators. I don't. You want to make this film and you've run into problems; I help you solve them. A lot of the analysis now is very rational. Once the problems are solved and the decision to shoot is made, you go and shoot. How you shoot it, I don't know and I don't interfere; I won't sit on set with you, and with an experienced director I certainly won't. During the shoot, I remind new directors to stay on schedule; I can keep the pace in hand. When you finish shooting you go and edit, and you shape your own work. Once you've cut it, I give my notes; I'll go through the cut shot by shot and look at the problems. I don't care how your camera moves; that's nothing to do with me. Whether a scene is too fast or too slow, whether there's enough in it, that's what I look at. If it differs from the script, I don't care; it's bound to change, and the script gets thrown away. This is fairly professional work. As a producer I come from a completely different angle. I bring my experience as a director to it, but I'm more rational.

Q: You're nearly 60. Do you find your creativity fading, or that many things no longer interest you?

A: Everyone runs into creative problems. That bottleneck, I've hit it, and it was terrifying.

Q: What was terrifying about it?

A: What's terrifying is that you don't know what to shoot, the whole market changes, and the things you have in mind don't work. The most terrifying was when Hong Kong hit what you might call its idiot era. When the scripts you worked on in earnest, all those directors' films, didn't make money, and silly slapstick did, you simply didn't know what to do.

Q: That sounds a lot like the mainland now.

A: Now, because there is a market, there's still hope of making money. Some directors also run into these problems, and young directors choose serious subjects.

Q: For example, Lou Ye made Blind Massage, and its box office was very low too.

A: It's very hard. Take Wang Xiaoshuai, and I don't think raising money is easy for Jia Zhangke either. They must have their difficulties, with their fairly serious subject matter. On top of that, when serious subjects earn back too little in today's market, it's actually a blow to people who create in earnest. Hong Kong went through this period, but I think it will pass quickly; cycles on the mainland turn very fast. Because things keep getting worse, with more and more investors and platforms and more and more films being made, many films can't get released and many will lose money. Once audiences move past that trend, they will start making demands. Blind Massage grossed only 13 million yuan on the mainland

Q: Where do you think those demands show up?

A: An audience that laughed at this kind of film two years ago grows up, isn't satisfied anymore and wants quality. American TV series, even though some can't be aired now, and foreign films have all come in, and the level of TV dramas here has started to rise. Shady shortcuts only work for a very short time. Even if you find a gimmick, you still have to put your heart into it. The production may come out a bit rough, but it has to find some warmth, something people recognize from their own lives. Audiences are satisfied too, and those things took thought. Some bad ones are simply unwatchable; some get dropped within ten minutes of going online. So I don't think it's that grim, because change comes fast.

Q: So you think the market and audiences will adjust.

A: Because the more high-quality work you see... When American films came in, they seemed like a threat to our market, but did they help the industry? Yes. Look at how many companies now pour money into technology and equipment for TV dramas, more than in Hong Kong, bringing in new things. At least the money is there; creativity is harder to say, but I believe audiences can tell the difference. I think commercial work really does need more money. Actors' fees are high, though not always; for some small films, hiring big-name actors doesn't necessarily cost a lot. As conditions gradually adjust, things will settle into a normal pattern again and keep getting better, and audiences will gradually demand more and more. So-called domestic blockbusters have improved technically too. Bosses are starting to understand that it isn't just about paying the actors, because everyone is complaining. They're making demands about the script, the production and the quality, instead of slapping on special effects any old way. They didn't understand before, and those companies were a complete mess. Now people see Tsui Hark's 3D and special effects, and after that, 3D that isn't genuine no longer gets subsidies, because it's all fake. All of this is being adjusted.