We Talked to Alan Mak and Felix Chong, the Duo Behind Infernal Affairs, About 30 Years of Making Films — the Fun and the Frustration

They've brought us Extraordinary Mission — another undercover film.

Alan Mak and Felix Chong, both born in the 1960s, have each spent close to 30 years in the film business.

When outsiders bring up the years that first made them famous — above all Infernal Affairs, the film that stands at the front of the line — they tend to reach for a retro glow, calling it "the last golden age" of Hong Kong cinema. The two of them just say the market back then was "a mess, awful." They were newcomers, and like most newcomers they had "failed many times," and badly wanted to prove themselves with the kind of work they longed to make.

In Felix Chong's words, what came of it was that they "gained confidence." Ask them about the market now and they reach for much bigger ideas — the ones they dislike, like "big data" and "too much capital," and the one they like, "a huge audience."

After Infernal Affairs came Overheard. As the mainland film market rose as a bloc, practiced Hong Kong filmmakers seemed to have no choice but to take work from mainland film and TV companies, and the age of the "co-production" began. The Overheard trilogy opened in 2009, 2011 and 2014, took in more than 600 million yuan, and remains one of the best-reviewed co-produced cop series.

But when they gave interviews to mainland media during the Overheard years, what reporters kept coming back to was still Infernal Affairs — with the theme now being how to "move past it." That question is aimed at people who have already succeeded, and its subtext is: what do you do about a past you can't top?

From 2014 to 2016 the two released nothing new. Asked what they had been doing for three years, Alan Mak said he enjoys the state of "thinking up a story, often failing to think of one, and finally working it out." Felix Chong talked about the new directors coming up in Hong Kong, the "new hope" — he teaches a film course at a university and serves on a film board committee.

Three years later they made a new film. Extraordinary Mission — directed by Alan Mak and Anthony Pun (the cinematographer on Overheard), written by Felix Chong, and starring Huang Xuan, Duan Yihong, Lang Yueting and Zu Feng — opened on March 31. It is still, in short, a film about an undercover narcotics cop, but the setting has moved to the mainland and Southeast Asia, and the cast is entirely mainland stars. With content review of cop-and-gangster films tightening, the backers include not only Perfect World Pictures and Blue Star Cinema but also the Golden Shield Film and Television Culture Center, which sits under the Ministry of Public Security.

They had in fact sketched the story out back in 2012, and only now got the chance to shoot it. Felix Chong also listed several finished scripts of his — fantasy, period pieces, anything but cops and robbers — that are "set aside for now," because although "if Felix Chong has a script, someone wants it," almost every boss who actually puts up money ends up wanting the kind that "replicates a success."

Alan Mak and Felix Chong each sat down separately with QDaily. The two are quite different. Discussing "serious art," Alan Mak will reel off a list of intellectuals and insist that the most important qualities in a filmmaker are "stubbornness" and "subversion" — and that he has both. Felix Chong comes across as mild with the press (one reason may be his poor Mandarin). He says there is no line between art and commerce for him, that his fixation on undercover cops comes from growing up in a police family, that what he envies most is how "relaxed" Johnnie To is on set, and he brings up the word "innocence."

Faced with the same questions, though, the partners answer alike: both grumbled at length about being told to "stay grounded," both think the point of making a film is for people to watch it, and both think you should save money while you shoot.

How do you see the artistic side of film and the commercial side — do they conflict?

Alan Mak: For me there's honestly no line anymore. There's no art film, no commercial film, only whether it's good to watch, whether it connects with the audience. Good to watch is what matters. What I can do is make sure I think it's good first. People often ask why I don't follow the market — everyone loves this thing called big data now. I say, if big data could really tell you a finished script has an audience, then you wouldn't need me, would you? If one day I make something and nobody watches it, that means I've already left this market.

Felix Chong: To this day I treat film as a serious art. But the way I see it, you have to make the film first, and only then can the audience watch it and judge it. I heard one of my students say he wanted to make an art film, and I asked him: how do you know your film has artistic value? You haven't made it yet.

The Hong Kong director Benny Chan is the man who found you both and brought you into the business in the 1990s, and he stands for the most typical Hong Kong thing — the hot-blooded commercial action film. But what people loved most in Infernal Affairs was two characters facing off, the interior drama. What was behind that choice?

Alan Mak: The film market was actually terrible then. I'd directed two or three films, none of them did well at the box office — the reviews were okay, just okay, not good. There was no work either. Then one day Wong Jing called me into his office and said, you direct pretty well, why not sign for three films with us first, and he picked up the phone: get so-and-so to bring in a contract. I said hold on, Jing, what are we shooting? Three films is no problem, but what are we shooting? Wong Jing said, we sign the good ones and the bad ones, we're brothers. That night I got home and thought, I'm finished this time, because even Wong Jing has come looking for me. Actually he wasn't doing badly himself. I started wondering — I'd made three films already, was I even right for this job?

So I started thinking, I'm going to write a script myself, put what I think is best into it, how I think a story should be told, how I think characters should be — just write it out.

Felix Chong: People in the business used to laugh at us — they said that isn't an action film, it's a sit-down film. The guns only come out to be shown off, they never go off. All we got out of it was that big a cast. And the man I worked with was Andrew Lau, who gave us a lot of freedom. Of course we hadn't thought it through that clearly at the time. Only later did I realize the cop films that shaped me were The Godfather, A Better Tomorrow, City on Fire — films not built on selling action, where the drama itself has to be good.

I still remember coming down the stairs on premiere night. I wasn't known yet, nobody recognized me, and I heard a lot of people in the industry cursing: how could those three turn this story into this, an action film without a single shot fired. There was one, actually — we counted, at 48 seconds. And people were cursing, how can this be, the undercover in the middle has a family, how does that work — a lot of doubt, a lot. I was used to it by then. I'd failed many times; one more failure wouldn't matter. What I never expected was the box office exploding afterward. That gave me one thing: confidence in myself. It turned out I was right, there is an audience that likes that kind of drama. And I used that method to handle everything that came later in our co-productions — though that's a very technical matter.

For Felix Chong: you said in an earlier interview that you wanted to move past Infernal Affairs?

Felix Chong: I wanted to; the bosses wouldn't let us. Other bosses saw what a windfall Media Asia got out of it more than a decade ago, so every one of them wants to copy it. That's actually a problem with this industry: copying what worked last time is no guarantee it works this time.

At first the bosses all say you can write whatever you want, but it always ends the same way — say you want to make a romance, the odds of winning aren't good, so why make it? The subtext is, why take my money to shoot that, why not shoot something that makes money? I start shooting a new one in May, one I finished writing in 2008 — you see, it's taken until now to get made — a fantasy dressed up as a cop film, though it isn't a cop story at all. It's a story about art.

A Hollywood-style industrial system demands strict planning, one step after another. But plenty of Hong Kong directors, Wong Kar-wai and many commercial directors among them, shoot and rewrite as they go, without a finished script. Which camp are you two in?

Felix Chong: I still remember writing a script when I was young and handing it to a Hong Kong director, and it sank without a trace — a month, no reply. It turned out he was wrestling with it. He said he couldn't shoot my script. Why? Too complete. So you want me to write you an incomplete one? What that really meant — it sounds like a joke — is that Hong Kong directors were used to a kind of creative freedom: taking a script that isn't quite finished and developing a director's script out of it. The custom of the Hong Kong film industry, so to speak. But our team never worked that way. We go by the script, because we've been poor. If you keep changing things, it costs a lot of money. We lived through the late 1990s, when the film business was in a terrible state, so now we treasure every bit of our production budget, we don't dare spend carelessly, we really don't.

Two years ago a master-level director told me, hey, you should try my method. His method is to shoot and rewrite as he goes. I said I can't. It's a matter of temperament — I don't have the nerve, I really don't.

Alan Mak: But this is genuinely something co-productions brought us, a real benefit of co-productions: at the start you need some kind of script, but you haven't yet decided how you're going to shoot it.

From the Infernal Affairs sequels through the co-productions to now, what's been the hardest part?

Felix Chong: The hard part is that people keep telling us to "stay grounded" — but grounded in whose ground? Shanghai's ground, Beijing's ground, or the north's ground?

Alan Mak: So the first problem, I think, is that I don't know how to do it. The second is that all I know how to do is tell a story I find good to watch. I like watching stories from other cultures and backgrounds too, but I don't know how to "stay grounded."

What's the difference between mainland audiences and Hong Kong audiences?

Felix Chong: Going to the movies on the mainland is very different from going in Hong Kong. On the mainland it's a social activity — tickets cost that much, so you have to say something afterward. It isn't like that in Hong Kong; you toss off a line or two, good or not good, that's it. Hong Kong people treat film purely as entertainment, which is why you'd never get an interview like this one in Hong Kong — the media there interview the stars, not the directors. Doing publicity in Hong Kong is comfortable. One day and you're done.

What does the writing itself have to adjust to?

Felix Chong: Once I understand what the mainland wants, I use a Hong Kong method to deliver it. Take Overheard: what matters in it isn't the eavesdropping, it's the dirty secret — the so-called big boss behind our ordinary lives. I found this idea is everywhere on the mainland, the sense that every industry must have a big boss behind it. So I started from that, and shot it the Hong Kong way.

Do you think about censorship while you're writing?

Felix Chong: No, we don't. You can't — if you do, you won't be able to write anything. Write it first, revise later, see then whether there's a problem. We get two kinds of scripts back, of course. One where the regulator's comments run to maybe three sentences, not much to change. Or the other kind, where they haven't even started reading and they tell us, hey, this can't be touched.

It's been three years since Overheard 3 in 2014. Where did Extraordinary Mission come from?

Felix Chong: I was working on another film at the time, and while doing the research I picked up a lot of background on drug traffickers. I found that all of them were ethnic Chinese — people the Kuomintang left behind in Southeast Asia during World War II, that whole large group. I thought they were fascinating and wanted to dig further. But you can't write a story that's all villain; you need a villain and you also need a hero, and that's when it occurred to me — why not try putting a mainland police officer into it.

How do you find investors, and what sort of bosses do you work with?

Alan Mak: Of course we know there's a lot of money on the mainland now. But we still have to be careful. Say some coal-mine boss hands you 100 million or 200 million yuan, and once the film is made he watches it at home. No distribution, no promotion, no deal with the theaters. That's what a coal-mine boss is like — the condition they set is that the girlfriend has to be in it, and that's simply impossible. Not for me. You make a film to put it in theaters, to get it out there, not for your own enjoyment.

Why stick so closely to cop-and-gangster films? Why not try more of what Hollywood genres allow?

Alan Mak: It probably has to do with my background. I come from a police family, I have great respect for police officers, especially undercover officers. It really isn't a job fit for a human being, and yet they're willing to do it.

If I think of a story that really feels like a Hollywood film, I will absolutely make it. I just haven't thought of one.

For Felix Chong: have you never thought of directing a film yourself?

Felix Chong: I already have — Once a Gangster. It couldn't open on the mainland, but it did win several awards (released in Hong Kong in 2010; Best New Director at the Hong Kong Film Awards). It's a triad story. I told it about a group of bosses choosing their "chairman" — you know what "sitting as chairman" means, choosing the head of the group — and none of them wants to be picked, so they all scheme against each other to get out of it. Then one day one of the big bosses watched Election (Johnnie To's 2005 film about a fight over the top job) and told me it was all wrong: nobody wants it. Why doesn't anybody want it? Because if you're the boss, you have to carry a lot of responsibility. Responsibility. It's human nature that nobody wants to be responsible.

I do have a period cop script, actually. Oh, it's wonderful. But I can't tell you the story.

What kind of films do you like, and which filmmakers?

Alan Mak: My mentor Johnnie To — I admire him greatly. There are things I've learned from him. He's very relaxed, you can see it. He's relaxed on set, and when he walks the actors through a scene he's very precise, taking them through it slowly. That relaxed way of making films is what I admire in him.

Felix Chong: I like every genre; I love film in the broad sense. Call me an intellectual, I suppose — someone who's studied. I studied film, and at film school back then I read a great many foreign masters: Susan Sontag (American writer and critic, a feminist), John Berger (English writer, author of the art criticism collection Ways of Seeing), Marshall McLuhan (Canadian philosopher and educator, a founder of modern media theory). I was formed by that current of thought.

People feel Hong Kong cinema today has declined from what it was, and yet the past couple of years have produced some fresh films, like the Hong Kong Film Awards nominees Mad World and Weeds on Fire. How does it look from the inside?

Felix Chong: You can measure the rise and fall objectively, of course, but the most important thing in Hong Kong these years is that technology has lowered the barrier to making a film by a great deal. Mad World and Weeds on Fire each had a budget of only 2 million Hong Kong dollars. The crews worked like guerrilla units. What I see in that is hope, in fact — a way of making films far from the industry's standard practice, and because those two succeeded, more and more people are copying it. Raising a few million on the market isn't hard now. Last year 28 first-time directors in Hong Kong put out a film. There'll be more next year, and after that.

People inside the market's system have to help the people outside it get in. I'm a member of the Hong Kong Film Development Council, and there's a scheme called the First Feature Film Initiative that lets first-time directors apply. If we approve them, they get — right now it's 3.25 million — free and clear, entirely theirs.

What in a new director makes you think this one might amount to something?

Felix Chong: First, they have to be resolute, able to take hardship — that's essential — able to concentrate hard, very, very stubborn, thinking differently from everyone else. If you think what everyone else thinks, you have no value. In the scheme where we pick new directors, every time we pick the most troublesome ones, the ones with the most subversive ideas. We never pick the type who does everything by the book, all neat and tidy.

(Are you like that too? What's the most subversive thing you've done?) Of course. Having children and getting married — I never once planned either. In my career, the most subversive thing is that I keep turning down very large sums of investment. It isn't that I don't like money; it's that it's usually not something I want to do. I'm rather pleased with myself about that. I've never done anything in this industry I didn't want to do.

Alan Mak: I don't think it has to be stubbornness. For me it's a willingness to work with other people. Because I often meet people who think — directing especially — that this is an artist's job. But the nature of art is that it takes a lot of people. It isn't one person's work; it's something made with many, many different people.

And I think you should always look at the world with a child's heart. I think that matters a great deal — you see the beautiful side of this world.

Images from film stills and i0.sinaimg.cn.