Not Afraid to Fail: Upstart Filmmaker Trevor Choi

“I don’t mind making bad films,” admits director Trevor Choi Hong-ying as he relaxes on the plush sofa in his shared Wan Chai office. That’s not to say he isn’t trying: Choi has seen two fully or partially self-funded features films hit theatres in Hong Kong in the last six months – Fresh Off Markham (敗走麥城) last winter and Smashing Frank (搗破法蘭克), released in mid-April. 

“I would say both these films were like homework. It’s practice for me. That’s how I learn,” says Choi. “Hardly anyone comes out fully formed as a filmmaker.” He points out that Jordan Peele, Damien Chazelle and Barry Jenkins all made raw, unpolished debuts before making a splash with sophomore efforts Get Out, Whiplash and Moonlight respectively.

Ayla (Hedwig Tam), Hugo (Locker Lam) and Chun (Kaki Sham) take down an armoured car in Smashing Frank by Trevor Choi – Photo courtesy Entertaining Power

It’s the Friday after Smashing Frank opened in Hong Kong and Choi has had a long day of post-screening Q&As, audience meet-and-greets and various other promotional engagements. After Easter, he’s heading back to Korea to complete the seven-month course he started in March at the Busan Asian Film School (BAFS, created with the Busan Film Commission). The programme is timed to finish in October, to coincide with the Busan International Film Festival and its market activities. “The graduation project is actually pitching at the forum in Busan,” says Choi. For his pitch, he intends to use a script he began before he made both features, called Weird for Weirdos, and which he’s refining at the BAFS. He actually pitched Weirdos to the Film Development Fund in Hong Kong — which passed on it — as well as the second edition of the Federation of Hong Kong Filmmakers new development programme. The first edition produced Jeffery Lam and Antonio Tam’s Valley of the Shadow of Death, which screened at this year’s Hong Kong International Film Festival. The Federation passed too.

If that makes Choi sound like a scrapper, that’s not too far from the truth. His road to the director’s chair was a long and twisty one. Born in Montreal, Choi moved to Hong Kong with his parents when he was a kindergartener and did his schooling here until returning to Canada to study at the University of Waterloo. He eventually landed in Toronto working in finance, where he met his Guangzhou-born wife. Like many kids, Choi and his mother were regular movie-goers when he was growing up in Hong Kong, and Choi’s innate passion for storytelling and, later, cinema which she cultivated blossomed while Choi was at university and later while living in Toronto, where he could make an annual pilgrimage to its film festival. 

“I was on my way to becoming a fully licensed financial planner,” he says. “I was 28, 29, and all my colleagues were in their 50s or 60s and I thought, ‘This is going to be my job for the next three decades.’” But he never lost his passion for storytelling. Waterloo had a robust Cantonese Theatre Club, where Choi essentially learnt playwriting and the basics of scriptwriting. It was his wife who nudged him into trying his hand at filmmaking as a full time job. “She said, ‘If you don’t do it now, you never will.’ That really helped,” he says.  Also helping? News that the Director’s Guild of Hong Kong would be offering its filmmaking class again in 2018; the last was in 1998. That was the first really pushed Choi into high gear.

“Somehow I got into that without any prior experience,” he says with a bit of a sardonic laugh. “A lot of my classmates were feature film editors or commercial directors and things like that, and here I am totally unrelated in my prior experience. I worked in banks.” He shakes his head, still not quite sure how he made it into a class of 30 fellows for an eight-month programme, attending class three nights a week. “And then the 30 of us had to pitch film ideas in front of the best film professionals in Hong Kong – Felix Tsang, Soi Cheang, Philip Yung and Fruit Chan.” Choi credits Chan with instilling his own independent, DIY spirit. He cites Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights) as a personal influence, and locally Johnnie To in addition to Chan and Cheang, particularly when it comes to damning the torpedoes and dodging roadblocks to filmmaking.

“Soi Cheang doesn’t mind making mistakes. If you look at his earlier films and compare them to his later ones you can definitely see progress,” says Choi. “In every one of his films I find something that I don’t think even he’s sure of. And Chan gave me the mindset to not fear anything, just go independent. So those two combined influence my filmmaking philosophy.”

Despite the affirmation he was on to something Choi still didn’t feel like a filmmaker, so he started making more of his own shorts. Then came Covid. Like many other businesses, work ground to a halt, but Choi dug in, establishing a YouTube channel for all kinds of short filmmakers. The channel, 16by9, featured workshopping and scene breakdowns and interviews with local artists, and it gathered a small but devoted following. The insatiable digital content world being what it is, “We needed to put out two videos per week, and I thought if no one’s making stuff, I would,” he says. “Eventually I just got comfortable putting out flawed films. The journey is more important than perfection. It’s only by failing you learn this stuff. The next one will be better.” Choi found success with a few, including Ouroboros, 9 lb Hammer and Lamma, all in 2019, and he also found a reason to keep making films – and step up to features. 

The leap to feature filmmaking was always bubbling. Though Fresh Off Markham landed on screens first, Smashing Frank started development earlier. Among Choi’s reasons for enrolling in the BAFS were a desire to have some kind of film school experience, but there was another more bankerly, pragmatic reason too. “Commercial funding for films is kind of dead in water in Hong Kong now, and in a lot of places,” says Choi. “So I think it’s a good time to explore international co-production. That’s a reason I’m there. It’s a really great place to foster collaboration.” 

Finding alternatives is why Frank became Hong Kong’s first crowdfunded film project in 2022. Choi sourced half of the film’s roughly HK$5 million budget via Kickstarter, which got boutique producer-distributor Entertaining Power to commit to the balance. Crowdfunding, however, came with conditions, and Choi isn’t sure he’d do the half-and-half model again. Pre-production dragged on and eventually Frank lost its original leads — Alma Kwok from A Light Never Goes Out, and Time Still Turns The Pages’ Hanna Chan — and with it some donors.

While Frank took a hiatus, Choi headed back to Toronto for a bit in 2023 and teamed up with film pals Cyrus Lo and Kurt Yuen and decided to make Markham, an anthology of loosely linked stories — about a pair not-very good thieves, a Black Uber driver and a Hong Kong influencer looking at houses for her father — set in a Toronto suburb home to many Hongkongers. Choi’s segment was the vaguely supernatural closer, which sees the influencer come face-to-face with the history of Chinese Canadians. While the trio didn’t crowdfund Markham, they did raise their own cash (roughly US$100,000) and took advantage of the fact that Hollywood was undergoing a summer of labour unrest.

“No Hong Kong investor was interested in a film set elsewhere. Only my part related to Hongkongers, so they had no interest in it,” recalls Choi of financing the film. “And I think that really triggered us to go the self-funded route. Hollywood was on strike, and in Toronto about 90 percent of the crews weren’t working and were willing to join a non-union project. The Hongkongers in us thought, ‘Hey, it’s a good deal. We should take it. Union [quality]. It’s got to be better,’” he chuckles.

For much of 2023 and into 2024 it was back and forth between the two films — post-production on Markham was rushed along when HKIFF accepted it — and Choi started looking for Frank’s new quartet. He found them in emerging Montages of a Modern Motherhood star Hedwig Tam, who was referred by Locker Lam (Fight for Tomorrow), who Choi had worked with on a short in 2020, and Kaki Sham and Renci Yeung, themselves prior collaborators. Choi wanted a foursome who were naturally convincing as a group of friends and who could quietly realise “the metaphor for many of the things that happened in the past few years.”

A mix of Johnnie To-styled urban crime thriller and Robin Hood legend, Smashing Frank pivots on longtime friends Ayla (Tam) and Hugo (Lam), each with considerable skeletons in their closets who’ve taken up a hobby a robbing armoured cars, leaving the signature “Frank” spray-painted at the crime scene and then posting video of their antics online. Before long they’re roped their more nervous friend Chun (Sham) into their scheme as videographer and getaway driver, who in turn reaches out to an ex-girlfriend who’s close to the members of a local church. The church, led by the shady Ho Ka-wang (Ben Yuen, Pavane for an Infant) is suspected of money-laundering, violence and threats and Ayla decides if the law can’t, or won’t, punish Ho, Frank will. 

The expected narrative beats for urban thrillers are here, and Frank gains almost folk hero status and a clutch of followers before its plans spin out of control. In its lean, stylised 88 minutes Smashing Frank covers subjects ranging from wealth disparity, to encroaching conservatism, online breeding grounds for mob justice and Gen Z disenfranchisement – as a start. 

Choi naturally thinks the film could be better — what director doesn’t? — and were he to have total control it would be a slightly slower, more character-driven 95 minutes, just enough time to flesh out the personalities more. As it stands it’s a swift snapshot of late-stage capitalist Hong Kong shot with a digital aesthetic, made better by performances by four of the industry’s brightest lights. Not bad for a partially self-taught reformed banker.

“I learnt so much doing both projects, stuff I could never learn in film school,” finishes Choi. “One year at TIFF I saw Nocturnal Animals by Tom Ford. I loved it, and Ford came out and shared his story on how he became a filmmaker. Of course, he’s an established fashion icon but it was a career switch as well. But he described filmmaking as a calling. That touched me; it’s not such a big deal to change paths.”

Smashing Frank is in cinemas now.