Across Time and Gravity, Kung Siu-ping’s Leap to the Big Screen

In Measure in Love (他年她日), the first feature film by industry veteran Kung Siu-ping, romance blossoms between a working class thief and a resident on the verge of becoming a fully licensed doctor, living on opposite sides of a gravity wall, a barrier thrown up in the middle of the sea in the aftermath of a catastrophic earthquake. 

Aside from class and privilege, the pair is separated by a gravitational phenomenon that makes it dangerous for them to actually see each other, and also makes time pass faster for the thief – a year to the soon-to-be-doctor’s day. It’s a fantastical premise that’s the basis of countless science fiction tales, but strangely Kung wasn’t inspired to write the original story by Star Trek or Dune. The unlikely source was a video short on long-running sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live.

“Many years ago I saw a parody sketch on SNL of high school cool kids walking in school corridors in slow motion, who then go right back to normal speed when they leave the corridor,” explains Kung, sitting at a café in Elements in between preview screenings and Q&As for Measure. Though the punch line of that particular sketch was unrelated, Kung found his mind wandering to the real life impact of such a trick of time. 

“I asked myself, ‘What if the world we lived in were separated into two?’ Two regions with two times. I considered making [this] into an action movie, and even considered a heist movie, but after some brainstorming I think we decided it would work best if we were talking about a relationship – romantic, family, whatever kind.” Kung added some details based on real science — gravitational time dilation —  and he was off to the races. Until he wasn’t.

From backstage to big screen

Measure in Love was one of several ideas Kung had brewing in the 2010s, when he was in no position to make a feature film. The Hong Kong native was admitted to Baptist University’s School of Communications in the early 2000s, mostly because his grades weren’t good enough for business school. “I have to be honest: before I enrolled in film school, I actually spent more time watching television; TVB was in its heyday at the time,” he admits. But one night, he was walking through Tsim Sha Tsui soon before he had to declare a major in  university. “And I saw a crew filming on the street – I think it was a Donnie Yen movie,” he recalls. “There was a huge crowd of gangsters and Simon Yam was there. I remember thinking this was the future I wanted.”

It was his time at Baptist that opened Kung’s eyes to cinema. With so many films to see as part of his studies, he didn’t settle on any specific influences, but admits that hee has recently come to admire renowned action filmmaker Johnnie To. “I went to see the 4K remaster of PTU last week and that film is a masterpiece,” he says of the cop thriller about an overnight squad trying to retrieve a lost service revolver. “He did it on such a small budget, and focused on drama and the humanity [of the story]. It’s commercial and stylish and true. I hope in one day I can do something like that.”

Kung graduated in 2007, shortly thereafter entering the Fresh Wave filmmaking programme with The Legend in 2008, which caught the eye of director Alan Mak Siu-fai, who was on the Fresh Wave jury. Scratch the surface and it’s clear Measure in Love isn’t a stretch for Kung, considering The Legend was about a middle-aged man who finds a portal to a dreamscape where he’s a heroic warrior, protecting the world from darkness. Fantasy is in his nature. The short, however, prompted Mak to offer him a job with his and partner Felix Chong Man-keung’s new production company, Pop Movies. “When the co-director of Infernal Affairs calls and asks if you want to be an [in-house] assistant director,” says Kung. He pauses and gives a little shrug. “Of course I said yes immediately.”

Kung worked with Mak for nearly 10 years as a script supervisor, as a first and second assistant director, and as a post-production assistant. As a bonus, he was fortunate to be hired on a project-by-project basis, which gave him time to continue making his own short films. 

In 2015, he crossed paths with writer-director-producer Sylvia Chang Ai-chia. “I worked on Office, the one with Chow Yun-fat directed by Johnnie To, because I’d shot a musical for my graduation project, so when they turned the stage play into a musical for the film [Sylvia] thought I’d help.” His work there put him on Chang’s radar, and he continued working with her on Murmur of the Hearts (2015) and Love Education (2017). He valued the experience he gained working with Mak on commercial films – it taught him how to navigate big scale filmmaking, action and car crashes and the like – but notes Chang is a “totally different” kind of filmmaker, one focused on intimacy and emotion. “It was another learning curve,”he says. When Chang approached him with a funding opportunity, he immediately thought of his lingering script for Measure in Love.

New funding models

The funding opportunity came in the form of the Film Development Council’s 2020 Directors’ Succession Scheme. The programme sought to team emerging but experienced directors with a mentor, awarding selected projects up to HK$9 million in grants, a step up from the ongoing First Feature Film Initiative. Kung and Chang are the first out of the gate with a completed film, and other approved teams in production include Mabel Cheung Yuen-ting with Norris Wong and Wong Hoi, among half a dozen others. 

As a beneficiary, Kung is naturally inclined to appreciate the programme, but agrees that skills development is crucial to the local industry’s survival. Mentoring is a critical part of that and isn’t as common as it used to be. “Even old filmmakers on a crew, like me, don’t have many opportunities; we’re all fighting for jobs on the few films that do go into production,” he says. “It’s even harder for new filmmakers. They work cheaper and gain some experience but that’s not healthy for the industry in the long run. We need to break that cycle.”

Kung is launching his feature directing career just as filmmaking around the world is facing pressure from AI, which has the potential to control high production costs — at the expense of human touch — and the streaming quagmire. “We can’t worry about streaming,” he says. “I’m a filmmaker but I’m also a consumer, and streaming does provide an opportunity to see movies from around the world. We need to find a way to co-exist.”

Besides, streaming is only one obstacle for Hong Kong filmmakers these days.  Among the others are shrinking audiences, shrinking budgets and dwindling investor sources beyond arts councils. All of these factors combined are moving the goalposts for what people will head to theatres for, says Kung.

A big screen experience

For its part, Measure in Love was created to be a big screen experience. The film features Taiwanese actor Greg Hsu Huang-han playing Tato alongside fast-rising Hong Kong star Angela Yuen Lai-lam (The Narrow Road) as Ann-Jean, the time-crossed lovers in a story that doubles as a commentary on class division, privilege and private activism. 

Tato’s Evergreen Zone has lower gravity, and so a faster pace of time, which has rendered it an over-industrialised environmentally degraded place where health care is rare but heavy-handed security patrols are common. Ann-Jean lives in the clean, sleek, orderly Aurora Zone, which benefits from the labour and misery of the people in Evergreen. She discovers just how dire things are when she accompanies her supervisor on a humanitarian trip with the White Doves, a Médecins sans frontières type of organisation. When they meet, Tato is a child, but dilation ages him quickly and eventually they’re peers. Tato is inspired to try and make his community a better place by Ann-Jean’s charity work, and the normally dour woman is moved by his optimism despite his circumstances.

Kung initially pitched the film as a drama in which Hong Kong and Kowloon were divided by a wall in Victoria Harbour. Chang argued the setting was a little too realistic, and that Kung might want to lean into the fantastical a bit more. That’s the story that’s on screen now. Kung is fully aware that the more politically minded among audiences will see the romance as out of place, while the romantics likely to give themselves over the heightened fantasy may think the messages get in the way.

“I wanted to include all those elements, and I think you can read those in the film, especially the class issues,” he says. “But I had to choose. I had to make my decision on where the focus would go, and had I chosen class it would have become a Hunger Games movie about revolution.” 

As Kung sees it, the social themes are carried by the romance, but he respects opinions on both sides of the aisle. “During the scriptwriting process I tended to be rational and logical, but Sylvia is quite sentimental. We had many discussions where I argued that we needed to explain something and she reminded me that if you explain too much that’s all the movie is. People that don’t want to accept the fantasy elements never will, so we put more effort into the drama and into the relationships. And anyone who sees the real world as it is won’t need any explanations.”

The ambitious genre mash-up is wrapped in several layers of technical polish thanks to impressive work by visual effects supervisor Alex Lim Hung-fung, production designer Man Lim-chung, and legendary Taiwanese sound editor Tu Duu-chih (All Shall Be Well). Aurora is tranquil and soft; Evergreen is constantly creaking and hollow. 

The film received a warm welcome in Busan where it made its world premiere in September. Despite that, Kung is being the consummate director and wondering what he could have done better. “Of course, I have regrets,” he says. “Given another chance I might change the blocking in some scenes, maybe add more shots in some sequences. Maybe I did need to explain a few story points. I’m always going to look at my films and wonder why I made this decision or went with that shot.” 

He continues his train of thought: “Being a director is all about making choices – and you will make a lot of bad choices,” he says. “This movie is a record of me, at this moment. We took a big swing, and I think it should be watched on a big screen.”

Measure in Love is in Hong Kong cinemas now.