words yvonne teh

Filmmakers pitching baseball in Hong Kong make some startling discoveries.

It used to be that Hong Kong movies were famous for their uncommonly short gestation periods. After all, even Wong Kar Wai, the local auteur most notorious for seemingly taking forever to finish a film – it was often joked of his 2046 that it would only be ready in 2046 – used a couple of months break from working on his desert epic, Ashes of Time, to produce the bright and breezy Chungking Express that many still consider his best cinematic offering.

Nonetheless, two months is a long time compared to the three weeks of work that resulted in Sexy and Dangerous, a movie produced by another Wong – in this case, Wong Jing – that aimed to capitalize on, and be the female equivalent of, the Young and Dangerous Triad dramas. Or the mere 13 days it took to shoot Fist Power, an Aman Cheung Man actioner that suffered the ignominy of a local theatrical run even shorter than its brief production period!

So what can we say, then, about City Without Baseball, a film directed by veteran helmer Lawrence Lau (aka Lawrence Ah Mon) and the first-time filmmaker known as Scud that will have its world premiere at this year’s HK International Film Festival (HKIFF) and took some four years to make? Also, what of it being a work that, for all of its title’s naysaying, aims to show that Hong Kong is actually a city with at least a sprinkling of baseball enthusiasts, including the members of a competitive team which trains four or five nights a week as well as during weekends? And not to mention that most of those in the team are willing to do whatever it takes, include appear in the buff in a movie, to help publicize the sport’s existence and garner some support from their hitherto unknowing fellow Fragrant Harbour denizens.

Scud, who produced and scripted as well as co-directed this film, shares that, “It all started in 2004 when I received a phone call from a friend who plays baseball here in Hong Kong.” Hailing originally from Mainland China but having spent time in Asia’s World City, Scud was in Australia at the time. A man who had long had an interest in filmmaking, perhaps that is why his friend nonetheless thought of him when wanting a short promotional film for baseball in Hong Kong.

At first, Scud knew very little about the subject but over the course of his research for the film, he found that not only are there baseball players here but “we had a pretty good team. And they had some remarkable victories though nobody ever mentioned that.” Certainly he had never heard about it. After meeting the team, he was even more impressed and thought, “Why don’t I just make a full feature-length film instead of just that smaller project?”

To help make what has turned out to be a film not only about the HK Baseball Team but in which the players and coach actually play themselves, Scud turned to “a friend of a friend of mine” who he had met some 10 years previously. An experienced director who Scud considered “the best person to show [the film proposal to] because he has a perfect record of handling amateurs” (see Gangs (1986), Spacked Out (2000) and Gimme Gimme (2001)), Lawrence Lau also has a reputation for making compelling ‘slice of life’ movies about people on the fringe, be they prostitutes (Queen of Temple Street (1988)), out-of-work actors (My Name is Fame (2006)) or troubled youth (Besieged City (2008), which screens too at the HKIFF this March).

In response to my query whether his South African upbringing has anything to do with the choice of very localised subject matter for his films, Lau says, “I don’t know whether coming from a foreign country makes me more interested in that but, yeah, basically, I like my films to be a record of what contemporary life is like. The fringe thing I think is probably subconscious but I’m interested in people who are really playing against all odds.”

As with so many of the characters of Lau’s older movies, those at the heart of City Without Baseball have everything stacked against them. Players of a game without much of a presence in Hong Kong, he observes that they still have the courage and determination to plug on. He was further fascinated to find that not only are the baseball players charismatic in themselves, but that the sport is a kind of obsession for them.

That surfaced when Lau and Scud began talking to members of Hong Kong’s baseball team and were gripped by their many stories. “A lot of the script is taken from what actually happened in their lives,” says Lau, “things that they have talked about.” But he also admits, “When it came time to put all the facts into a dramatic form, we had to put in some kind of fictional structure to make the whole thing gel.”

They also wanted to emphasize a theme of loss and the unpredictability of life. Referring to the film as a “potpourri of Hong Kong life”, Scud concurs that loss is ultimately what the film is about – that and how people handle it in their lives. Paradoxically, one of the most inspiring stories they heard from the baseball players was about a loss they suffered on foreign soil at an international tournament in 2004.

Not only did the incident cause the team considerable grief at the time but they continued to feel strongly about it afterwards – even when team members told the filmmakers about it, says Scud, they cried. And so the ‘poetic licence’ taken by the makers of the film included the decision to set it in 2004, even though shooting actually started in the spring of 2007.

Additionally, although the baseballers are all real, the other characters in the movie – particularly the females – are actors. Scud says, “Actually one of the [baseballer’s] girlfriend was going to take part in the film too but because we had two years pre-production, when we decided to shoot it, they had already parted! So I had to cast another girl for that role!” And that is just another hazard of an uncharacteristically long birthing period, even if the film is a labour of love.

City Without Baseball will be shown twice over the course of the 2008 HK International Film Festival that runs from March 17 to April 6. The first screening will take place at 6pm on Saturday, March 22, at the HK Cultural Centre while the second is at UA Langham on Friday, March 28, at 9:30pm.