A Borderless Vision of Hong Kong Film

The corridor outside director Jonathan Li Tsz-chun’s office in Kwai Hing is that of a typical industrial space. The lighting is dim, the doors are nondescript, but this one smells of oranges. For some reason huge pallets of oranges are being moved in. Li opens the door and seems unsurprised by the smell of fruit. It’s an industrial building, after all.

The bright office has a sparseness to it that complements Li’s top-to-bottom black. He mentions he’s only just moved as he sits down at the central table; the artwork isn’t up but the office is crammed with notes and books, and dominated by a large computer monitor. It looks like a place he spends a lot of time writing.

Despite Li’s stated awkwardness, he’s got plenty to say. On this sweltering July morning he’s taking a day off post-production work on his third feature film, right now titled Behind the Shadows. He starts by explaining what he means by awkwardness. “My dream job growing up was to be a firefighter,” he says, explaining how he applied to the department at the ripe old age of 17 and was thrilled to pass the physical exam. 

But then came an interview. “Communication was not my strongest point, and I was disqualified at that stage,” he says with a laugh. “I was really nervous with the interview board. They asked me whether or not I would get breakfast for the team leader if they asked me to. I said yes. I thought that was what they wanted to hear and when they asked why, I stumbled. I realised I wasn’t really suitable for a government job and that I was poor at talking to people. It made me take a couple of jobs that focused on that; I worked as a real estate agent and an insurance agent. It helped.”

Born and raised in Hong Kong, Li accidentally uncovered a passion for filmmaking rather than pursuing a calling. As is often the case in Hong Kong, a friend of a friend of an investor introduced him to producer Derek Yee (Somewhere Beyond the Mist, In Broad Daylight, Time Still Turns The Pages) in 2002. “He was working on Ann Hui’s July Rhapsody, and he kind of asked me what I thought I’d like to do on set,” recalls Li. “I had no idea how the industry or a film worked, no clue about camera angles, what lights did or how much time it took to achieve one shot. So I had no idea what I could do.” Li’s earliest film knowledge came from watching movies by Johnny To – especially Election – the work of Ringo Lam (City on Fire, Triangle, Septet), and Ricky Lau’s 1985 cult classic Mr Vampire and its various sequels, usually rented on video with the family.

Yee put him to work on his first job as a production assistant, a move that gave Li his vocation. Initially he just immersed himself on set and watched everything so vigorously he got a sunburn bad enough to warrant a hospital visit while shooting on Lamma Island. His second job was as script supervisor on Lo Chi-leung’s Inner Senses, also produced by Yee. After that film, Li was committed to filmmaking, but he never went to film school. He didn’t need to.

“When I was a script supervisor I was observing what a second AD [assistant director] did, and then when I was a first AD I’d watch the actual director. Every step actually felt really fresh,” he recalls. Li’s on-the-job training was varied. His years as a script supervisor came on films like Wong Jing’s Colour of the Truth in 2003 and Andrew Lau’s Korea-Hong Kong co-production Daisy in 2006. As second assistant director he connected with Soi Cheang on Dog Bite Dog and Shamo in 2006 and 2007. And as first assistant director he worked with Tsui Hark on Missing in 2008 and Alan Mak and Felix Chong on Overheard 2 and 3 in 2011 and 2014. Cheang in particular would go on to be a major influence. 

“He taught me a lot about directing specifically, a lot about tapping creativity and finding inspiration, and especially about leadership – how to lead a group of people to complete a project,” Li says of Cheang. “Whether it’s with a single scene or a character he has this ability to use those to elevate a project. And I found his love of movies contagious.”

Li got his big break in 2017 with the Cheang-produced The Brink, very much a Hong Kong product in the sense of it being the kind of relatively rote crime thriller the local industry was known for. It had a visual flair that nicely exploited the city’s grimy side, but of the film, The Hollywood Reporter said, “Director Li has clearly picked up solid tips from the likes of producer Cheang … and Alan Mak during his years as an AD, and he has a strong feel for composition, but he’s put more artistic weight on the film than it can bear.” 

Li agrees. “The script of The Brink was not really on a par with my personal tastes. I like watching films by [Korean director] Lee Chang-dong’s (Burning), and [mainland director] Jia Zhangke (A Touch of Sin),” directors known for emotional ambiguity and psychological nuance. “I wanted to find a script that had more to it, like those, and that was Dust to Dust.”

Written by Chou Man-yu, 2023’s Dust to Dust was a moody cold case thriller starring Hong Kong staple Gordon Lam and mainland actor Da Peng. Loosely based on the events surrounding a massive 1995 Guangdong bank heist, the real story unfolds 20 years after that, with Lam’s retired cop convincing the police department he knows where the mastermind that got away is hiding. Dust to Dust is a good thriller, but it’s also an elegant slow burning meditation on fate, free will, and whether second chances ever really happen. “Apart from the crime itself I was interested in the 20 years that came after it. How did these people actually feel; how did they deal with guilt?” The film earned Li a nomination for best new director at the 42nd Hong Kong Film Awards and a win from the Hong Kong Film Critics Society.

For his third film, co-directed with Chou, Li turned to Louis Koo’s One Cool Group and its newest office in Kuala Lumpur, opened in April 2023. Cheang, once again, is producing, and Behind the Shadows stars Koo, Chrissie Chau (29+1) and Taiwanese actor Liu Kuan-ting (Old Fox) in a crime thriller about a Hong Kong private investigator (Koo) living in Malaysia. Similar in construction to Dust to Dust, the genre mechanics of the story will dive deeper into the psyche. Told from the perspective of the PI, the film also explores his crumbling marriage to his Malaysian wife and his professional malaise. “The kind of jobs he takes are of baser crimes, chasing affairs and cheaters. They’re different from the jobs he got in Hong Kong, which were high profile financial cases,” says Li. 

Notably, One Cool has offices in China, Thailand and now Malaysia, and is part of an emerging strategy One Cool and other commercial and independent filmmakers are experimenting with as another way to sustain and broaden the industry, support local filmmakers and cultivate emerging talent.

“Louis Koo is a big supporter of the Hong Kong industry, and he’s also very insightful,” says Li. “We all know Hong Kong is having difficulty in terms of moving forward and I agree with Koo that the only way out of this is actually to push the boundaries and move outside of Hong Kong. When we look at the movie industry in China, it’s already doing its own thing. It’s matured past the years when the industry needed talent, creatives, and production know-how. So the only way for the whole industry here to survive and grow is to expand outside of Hong Kong, and to work in places like Southeast Asia.”

Though Li is still actively working on Behind the Shadows, he’s got his next projects lined up. One reunites him with Cheang for a television series complement to the massive hit, Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (now the all-time box office champ, with HK$125 million); rumour has it Cheang is on board for a sequel. The second is an adaptation from suspense novelist Chen Zijin’s High IQ Crime series, which Li admits could be a challenge.

“It’s a sensitive topic,” he says. “It’s about a genius physics professor murdering corrupt government officials. I don’t know whether it will pass the censors,” he says with a shrug. On top of that, he’d like to film it in China. Which means after shooting in Yunnan, Guangdong and Malaysia, Li is perhaps the busiest Hong Kong director who doesn’t shoot in Hong Kong. He’s confident, however, that has no impact on his work or its identity.

“It makes no difference where a movie is made, because it’s creativity that counts,” he says. “If a project is conceived by Hong Kong talent in my mind it’s a Hong Kong film.” As global industries contract and borders get crossed more often and more easily thanks to streamers, “we’re all going to have to rethink how we define films. Art is about the spirit of the production team and the director, the writer; where they grew up, what informed them and influenced them. A film will reflect that, so it doesn’t necessarily need to be shot here to be a Hong Kong film.”