words yvonne teh

Patience is a virtue for the steady moving director of Fatal Move.

Like many others with a passion for the movies, Dennis Law chose to study filmmaking at university. On his return to Hong Kong he decided to bide his time, rather than try to immediately put into practice what he had learnt at film school in Los Angeles. In an interview with bc, the one time chairman and executive director of Milkyway Image talked about having realized that, unlike those – especially actresses in Chinese cinema – who work before the lens, “There is no age limit for a director or anybody who works behind the camera.”

Consequently, Law, who frankly describes himself as “a very cautious person”, felt no rush to make films and was, instead, content to wait for the right chance and right person to come along. “Then,” he continued, “because life had a different [plan] for me, I started working in real estate.” All the while, however, “I never gave up my chance to meet film people, to get to know them and try to seek some opportunity to learn or invest,” even though he spent the next decade making his mark in the property industry.

Somewhere along the line, the real estate magnate found a friend in Charles Heung, owner of leading film company China Star. Heung, says Law, “knew that I liked film for a long time” but was concerned that the property man didn’t waste his money or energy on something that would yield little or no result. He advised Law to learn from a couple of professional and profitable filmmakers and paved the way for him to follow the whole production process on Papa Loves You, a 2004 movie directed by Herman Yau (who, together with Heung, are involved with Law’s latest venture).

Additionally, “in the period after SARS”, at the tail end of 2003, Law made friends with Johnnie To and became his financial partner at Milkyway Image. As a Milkyway Image senior executive, Law came to have plenty of opportunities to travel to the world’s film markets and festivals, meet film industry personnel from different parts of the globe, find out their views of Hong Kong cinema, and “to see Johnnie To at work, how he manages the crew, how he directs the movie. That’s the other chance I have had to learn the movie trade.” Finally, in 2005, Law decided he was ready to direct his first movie – and The Unusual Youth was born.

A youth-oriented dramedy set on the outlying island of Cheung Chau, the first film directed and scripted – rather than ‘just’ produced – by Law can seem like the complete opposite in many ways to Election 1 (2005) and 2 (2006), the Category III-rated Triad dramas directed by Johnnie To for which Law has producing credits. Or, for that matter, Herman Yau’s retro-horror Gong Tau (2007) as well as Law’s own more recent action-packed Fatal Contact (2006) and Fatal Move (2008), the other films on which Law has been on board as a producer.

To some extent, his involvement with all these different projects is proof of Law’s assertion that he tries not to lock himself into anything. He likes to keep his mind open. At the same time, though, he is equally adamant when he says, “In my movies, no matter what the story is, no matter the outlook or the background, I always find something I like to say.”

His latest movie, Fatal Move, is similar to The Unusual Youth in that both centre on a pair of brothers, but whereas in his directorial debut he says he tried to portray the brighter side of things, Fatal Move, which contains the “finger-cutting, arm-slashing, throat-slashing kind of thing” along with plenty of brutal fight action, depicts the darker side. Thus the grown-up brothers, played by martial-arts legend Sammo Hung and star actor Simon Yam (Election 1 and 2), “are unloved children. They are unwanted children, pushed around by their family members. Nobody looks up at them. Everybody looks down at them and thinks that they are garbage.” Alternatively put, “Those are the people who in real life are doomed to be Triad members. “

As Law proceeds to elaborate, these are the sort of individuals who “have been pushed around” for much, if not all, of their lives. “They have no people to support them, protect them, when they grow up. So when they discover the chance to join a Triad, to follow the Big Brother, they think, ‘I’ve got somebody to protect me. My father never protected me; my mother never protected me. Now I’ve got somebody to protect me.”

And so, as might be expected, Law has set the film – which also stars action movie actor Wu Jing and veteran thespians Danny Lee and Kelly Chu (aka Tien Niu) – in the world of the Triads. He does hasten to state, though, that his choice of a Triad background – as with Johnnie To’s Election 1 and 2 – was not because he wishes to glorify that type of society. Instead, he wanted a background in which the extreme bloody and gory Category III-rated action in what he calls a “dog-eat-dog world, a ruthless, ‘money takes all’ world” could feasibly take place.

Outlines Law, “What I am trying to ask is – is that brotherhood [offered up by the Triads] real or not? Or is it just certain people trying to trick each other or trying to take advantage of the situation? When you are useful to me or the situation, I will treat you as a brother. But once your usefulness expires, when you become useless, you will be disposed of like a piece of garbage.”

That doesn’t necessarily mean that Fatal Move is didactic, however. Law is quick to assure his audiences that he is not trying to preach. Rather, he is merely trying to communicate his point of view of certain things. “Films have to have a statement, they have to have a point,” he says. At the same time though, there is also no question that they must be entertaining and liked enough so that people will pay money to see them. And that is definitely something Law hopes will be the case with Fatal Move.

Fatal Move is currently showing in local theatres.