In Front Behind The Scenes: Conversations about Pierre Rissient in Singapore (Part Two)

(For Part One go here)

Two: Boo Junfeng 

“Image makers not filmmakers.”

I met Boo Junfeng and Pierre on the same day in 2007 at the Goodwood Park Hotel, Singapore, where Eric Khoo was introducing Rissient to various film people. Junfeng was already known for his short films. Today he’s the writer-director of two renowned feature films, Sandcastle and Apprentice, both selected for Cannes (Critics Week 2010 and Un Certain Regard 2016, respectively). I wanted to talk to Junfeng about Pierre partly because he’d participated in a TV interview (Signature Conversations) with him in 2012 which closely approximates the experience of spending an afternoon with Rissient talking about films, and also his own relationship to Pierre, which was exemplary of how Pierre mentored/supported young filmmakers who crossed his path. 

Ben Slater: I’d gone out for this crazy lunch with Pierre, and we came back to the Goodwood, and Eric wanted to introduce him to filmmakers and Pierre asked me to hang around. And you and Sun Koh (Singaporean filmmaker) came in, and I’d not met you before.

Boo Junfeng: Sun asked me to go, and back then I didn’t even know Eric very well. At that time I’d made my first film, A Family Portrait, I was probably just out of the army.

BS: You were very quiet. 

BJF: I was very nervous, and I was so fresh. The idea of Cannes was so out of reach, the idea of even making my next short film was so out of reach. I didn’t see it at as “I need to know this guy.” I only got to know Pierre better after Sandcastle. 

BS: I saw him just before he watched it.

BJF: The second run was at The Arts House (an arts centre in Singapore with a screening room), Pierre was there, with a public audience and afterwards we had a very long dinner. Just me and him and one of my Assistant Directors at the time, because I felt better with some company. I think Pierre saw something in the film, because when the DVD was coming out I asked him for a quote and he gave me a very nice quote, not about the film, but about mine being an interesting voice and wanting to hear more from me. He saw the future of a younger filmmaker and wanted to give that support. He knew what to focus on.

BS: And so the next time you met him was when you did the conversation with him for TV? 

BJF: They planned it so it was all quite real. He was sitting there and I was entering as I was arriving (to meet him)… I knew that a lot of the focus would be on Asian Cinema and the kinds of films and filmmakers I was drawn to, and I knew he would be an expert on most of them. He was just responding to the people I was inspired by, and he knew many of them personally. I remember talking about Lee Chang-dong because I had a deep appreciation for his works and Pierre knew him very well. I remember him saying that there are film-makers who are very quiet and when you talk to them you can sense a vulnerability and that’s reflected in the films they make. That stayed with me, because you do have to be a real person, at least for the kinds of films that I want to make. 

After that I only saw him again once or twice, and I remember sending him an early cut of Apprentice, and I don’t think he was too fond of it. He didn’t say much. He said how he felt it could be better and what was missing and what were the weaker parts of the film, and that gave me a lot to think about. And then I was in Paris and I met him for coffee and we talked, and then we went back to edit the film further.

BS: Can you remember anything he said that struck home?

BJF: Some things about certain performances. Which made me feel like I shouldn’t be too precious about certain moments, and I should just cut them out because they weren’t working. 

BS: Did you see him in Cannes that year?

BJF: I heard from other people he wasn’t there. So as I was leaving at Nice Airport I texted him and immediately he called me and said he’d heard good things about the new cut, and he looked forward to seeing it and apologized for not being there. He was a gentleman, the way he spoke. The last time I saw him was last year at Fribourg, which turns out to be one of his favourite festivals, and I remember having breakfast with him, and Apprentice won the Grand Prix. I don’t know if he saw it. 

BS: He was generous with his time.

BJF: It was one of those things that I deeply appreciated. He really didn’t have to. Of course he probably enjoyed company, and to have people to listen to him, talking about films. But as a film-maker I felt always quite honoured in his presence that he’d give me that time to discuss films and my films. Sometimes when you meet people at festivals they will look over your shoulder to see if there’s anyone else, but with him he was always so dedicated and so one-on-one and so genuine. He’s known to be honest, brutally so sometimes.

BS: In the interview he says he didn’t think much of your short films! 

BJF: He talked about other filmmakers, and he said some are “image makers” not filmmakers, and there’s not a real understanding of cinema. He knew what he liked and what he didn’t like. 

BS: I once asked him what he really liked and he said he wanted things to be stripped-back and simple and he didn’t enjoy excess, at the heart of what he liked was a very stark, spare cinema.

BJF: He liked films whereby the truth of that reality or story and the human condition is right there. You could see the author and the sincerity and the truth. 

Signature_Rissient_Boo from M'GO Films on Vimeo.

Three: Panuksmi Hardjowirogo & Michel Cayla

“You discover it in reverse.”

Full disclosure, I have worked with Panuksmi Hardjowirogo and Michel Cayla of MGO Films quite a bit. Prolific producers of media content based in Singapore/Asia, including a great deal of work for museums and television, they frequently work with filmmakers. Among many projects, they co-produced the feature film HERE, directed by Ho Tzu Nyen which was in the Directors Fortnight in 2009, and produced a TV series Signature Conversations for Singaporean news network ChannelNewsAsia, which included the aforementioned interview/conversation between Pierre Rissient and Boo Junfeng, filmed in 2011, broadcast in 2012, produced by Panuksmi and directed by Michel.

Panuksmi Hardjowirogo: I met Pierre in Paris with (Zhang) Wenjie and Warren (Sin), they were working at the Cinémathèque of Singapore (at the National Museum of Singapore) and I went along to be a translator and to meet people at the Cinémathèque in Paris. We met up with (Saint Jack producer) Pierre Cottrell who introduced me to Pierre Rissient at a lunch for the five of us. 

Ben Slater: So how did the TV show come about?

PH: Michel had this concept for a TV series called Signature Conversations which was about peers interviewing peers. So we had Boo Junfeng as the Singapore filmmaker interviewing a film person from overseas, and we knew from Wenjie and Warren that Pierre was coming into town.

BS: He came to the National Museum to show Five & the Skin (1982)… Had you heard of him before Cannes in 2009?

Michel Cayla: No. He was under the radar. But knowing where he came from, researching a bit more, I got a better picture of the fellow. He starts in Paris at the Cine-Club. His generation loved cinema, wanted to watch movies, so you get friends and you realise you can organize your own Cine-Club, which I did in Montreal, and through that you meet distributors and you find out how film works. But you discover it in reverse: you start projecting films, and then you meet distributors of film, and then understand marketing and finally how they are made. 

BS: How did the idea come about for putting him in the series?

PH: We thought he could open a door into Asian cinema, but we wanted someone who was coherent and not just about Hollywood. 

BS: You knew what he was like?

PH: I knew him through drinking and eating, and when I met him he wasn’t in very good shape, he’d just had an operation and was on crutches. 

BS: He was off crutches when you filmed.

MC: The original concept was to have him walk into the studio with Junfeng, and to sit together and to be continuing a conversation, but he didn’t want to be seen walking on camera. So it starts with him sitting in the studio waiting for Junfeng to arrive. We had to improvise.

PH: We wanted to show the contrast between this young Asian filmmaker in his early 30s and this older French guy in his 70s. 

MC: That pairing would never happen in any other context.

PH: He also wanted to find out the ideas of young film-makers and what the film culture here was like here in terms of film history.

BS: There were so many films mentioned by Pierre, you had to find clips and stills. There’s a clip of an Edward Yang film…

PH: We got that from the family. Pierre also helped us get the contacts, through Benjamin (Illos), for a lot of those clips. 

BS: One of the things about Pierre that makes him hard to interview is that he drops names all the time. And drops them with the certainty that you know who he’s talking about.

MC: He mentioned this old French silent movie that he loved, L’Assommoir (1908). Completely out of the box. 

BS: How long did you film him for?

PH: We were two hours in the studio.

MC: But he took a break, it wasn’t two hours straight. These guys know what they want to talk about, and what they don’t want to talk about. They are very coherent, quite focused. They don’t need to see the questions.

BS: After that did you see Pierre again?

PH: The last time I saw him was in France at the premiere of Ilo Ilo (in Cannes in 2013). He looked happy.

(For Part Three go here)

In Front Behind The Scenes: Conversations about Pierre Rissient in Singapore (Part One)

(For the Introduction go here)


One: Chew Tze Chuan

“You have to be more vigorous!” 

To understand Chew Tze Chuan’s unlikely collaboration with Pierre Rissient, you must first know of Toh Hai Leong, the fiercely outspoken film critic, writer, archivist and ubiquitous figure at film screenings and festivals in Singapore throughout the 90s and into the early 2000s. Always armed with bags full of paperbacks, VHS tapes, newspaper cuttings and other cultural ephemera, Toh was Singapore’s most relentless and passionate cinephile and had over the years crossed paths with Rissient, introduced by film programmer Philip Cheah (who can take the credit/blame for many such introductions). In 2004, Chew, then a fledgling filmmaker collaborated (as editor and co-producer) with veteran Singaporean director Eric Khoo on Zombie Dogs, featuring Toh playing himself, a scabrous, hilarious fake-documentary that celebrated Toh’s wildly funny monologues on women, sex, violence, porn and life in Singapore. Not long after that, Toh was diagnosed with diabetes, and was trying to manage his failing health while living a life close to poverty. Chew himself had his own struggles, and this is where the story begins.

Chew Tze Chuan: I was at the bottom of a pit and felt very depressed and Mrs Chew was freaking out and she called Eric  and said, “Please save my husband.” This is 2005. So, Eric brought me the clipping of Toh Hai Leong in The Straits Times, with sunken cheeks and depressed, and we were equally depressed, and Eric said, “Chew, why don’t we do something for Hai Leong?” 

Ben Slater: You’d already done one film about Hai Leong.

CTC: Yes, Zombie Dogs. So now we were going to do a documentary “to encourage him”, quoting Pierre Rissient, “to live life again.” That was the mission. Some time in the latter part of 2005 we started to shoot for 40 days, and then Eric showed it to Pierre. 

BS: Did you know about Pierre before?

CTC: He had seen Zombie Dogs and gave Eric advice to restructure the whole thing (which they didn’t take), but I didn’t really know who he was. The first time I met him I was still shooting (the documentary). There was one scene at the Goodwood Park Hotel, they were sitting down together beside the pool (Pierre talks with Hai Leong about Korean cinema).

BS: And Pierre set up the phone call between Kang Soo-youn (the iconic star of Im Kwon-taek films) and Hai Leong, that’s in the film.

CTC: So generous of him. He called me and said, “Chew, I’ll call you in two hours and please be there.” And was really intense as usual. I had my old Nokia with the speaker and there we were, talking with Kang Soo-youn. Pierre really appreciated what we were doing… So he watched the documentary, and Eric says, “Pierre loves it.” Eventually, he told me to visit him in France, because Pierre couldn’t make it to Singapore, and we could edit together. 

BS: So you went to Paris.

CTC: With the hard-discs and my laptop. We went to Benjamin Illos’s place (Pierre’s long-standing assistant). Benjamin was there, which is why he’s in the credits as one of the editors (Benjamin is credited as providing “friendly special assistance”, Pierre does not take a credit). The first cut was two hours, and then it went to 90 minutes, and the one that Pierre saw was about 67 minutes. I was quite happy with it.

BS: How was it working with Pierre?

CTC: Benjamin was beside me, Pierre sat behind. Half the time he was yelling, or talking with a very stern voice. I wouldn’t call him a dictator but he was very concerned, and one of the main motives there was – “If you do it like this the Parisian audience will never get it!” I realized why he related to Hai Leong’s journey. He himself was taking insulin jabs, and by 4pm, despite the coffee he’d be dozing off, and then he’d get up and say “Chew, where are we?” He was maxing himself out. 

BS: What did he yell at you about?

CTC: Anything that was too technical, like I would manipulate the frame-rate, using slow-motion to emphasise a gesture, he thought it was fake, contrived. He could see it was a bag of tricks. There are scenes he took out, like when my son had a fever and we were giving him paracetamol by syringe, and he refused, and I parallel cut with Hai Leong refusing the medication and bitching about it. I could see Pierre smiling, but he wanted me to cut it. It’s in the Singapore cut, but not in the Locarno (film festival) version, A Friend Like None (the Singapore title for the film was simply F), which was 45 minutes. On the last day of editing he was quite happy and we had wine and he said “What shall we call this?” Pierre was a gentleman for coming up with that name.

BS: He didn’t like F as a title?

CTC: It was a bit ambiguous for him. He also said to me, “Chew, you have to be more vigorous!” 

BS: Make it faster and shorter?

CTC: Exactly. One scene was really zestful. Kang Soo-youn was talking about seeing Hai Leong in Busan, and then there’s a straight cut, and we hear a screech and we see Hai Leong walking very briskly to the screening of a film. I thank Benjamin and Pierre for that.

BS: Did my scene make the Locarno cut? (In the film I tell a story about the reception to Zombie Dogs when I showed it in a festival)

CTC: Yes, I can’t thank you enough. You chose the place, the kopitiam (coffeeshop) opposite The Substation (an indie Arts Centre). Pierre said, “Who was this guy?” He hadn’t met you yet. After that he got very intrigued. He wanted to know who you were, actually he wanted to validate everyone in the film. 

BS: So the cut that you showed at the Goethe Institute during SIFF (the Singapore International Film Festival, which later became SGIFF) was the longer ‘local cut’?

CTC: The version you saw was based on A Friend Like None. I came back from Paris with 45 minutes and Philip (Cheah) was the one who said, “Actually Chew you don’t have to do everything he says.” Because Philip had watched the Director’s cut and it had been accepted by SIFF. So I scratched my head and took a look at the cuts and chose the best moments, so I kept it at 60 minutes. I was satisfied. It was the best of the best. 

BS: What happened in Locarno?

CTC: Pierre had helped it not only get into Locarno but in a very good slot, during the first three days. (Before the festival) Pierre told me to get the French subtitles ready or at least the transcript. I thought that Benjamin would get back to me, and I let it pass. Then, the doctor seriously discouraged me from bringing Hai Leong to the festival and I thought it wasn’t fair. I was down because after shooting Hai Leong got much worse. I felt I was profiting from his disaster. So it got re-slotted from the first three nights to the last three nights. And there were no French subtitles, so Pierre was furious; fuming. In the end Eric kicked my ass, and said "You better go." So, I went. Pierre was there for the first week and by the time I got there he was gone. I came back with the programme as a souvenir, and Hai Leong was smiling at first and then he was angry, “Why did you go without me?” 

   

BS: But you saw Pierre again.

CTC: Whenever he was here. I saw him in 2014 during SGIFF.

BS: That’s the last time I saw him.

CTC: I met him for lunch and he was asking about my adventures in Manila and when I mentioned (director’s name redacted) he flipped, “Stupid, stupid, stupid!”. (Zhang) Wenjie (then director of programming for SGIFF) was trying to calm him nicely, and Pierre said, “No, don’t talk about this.” I thought maybe he had a certain Euro-centric mindset about art-house or so-called “Good Cinema”, but then I heard him rail against the label “Art House”. I saw that this man has real integrity. He has an ideal about a certain purity in cinema. 

BS: He respected ambition, but if you’re just trying out a style he would see through it very quickly.

CTC: At the end of the day Pierre will know if this person is doing it with his heart, if he sees sincerity in the film-making. 

BS: Once he believed in a film-maker he would stick with them. I would sometimes say of a director, “There’s this one work that I don’t like”, and he’d say, “No, I don’t agree.” But if he thought a director was getting bad advice from someone else who Pierre didn’t like, then he would be very angry…. Did Abdul Nizam meet Pierre in 2014?

CTC: Yes! The night when they showed Breaking the Ice (Nizam's last film) in SGIFF. There were two students (assisting Pierre in Singapore), and Pierre was watching the film and Wenjie said afterwards “Pierre wants to go for prata.” Nizam was busy doing his stuff, so it was Uncle Pierre me, Wenjie, and the students, and they were asking Wenjie, “Why did you programme this?” They felt it was not good enough. Then Rissient said, “It was a promising film, it was just that there were too many elements, and it would have been stronger if he’d just focused on one or two.” In the film there are underwater sequences shot on this cheap Kodak underwater camera, and it was after Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life (2011) with its underwater sequences, and I said that if Nizam had a million dollars to shoot those sequences in the neighbourhood swimming pool they would have looked a lot better than Malick’s, and Uncle Pierre laughed, but they didn’t. Nizam had made the film for nothing, just because people believed in him. That was the last time I saw Pierre; a wonderful night.

Note: Toh Hai Leong died in 2015, age 58 and Abdul Nizam died in 2016, age 50.

(For Part Two of the conversations go here)

Saint Jack is NOW on Blu-ray!

Saint Jack's past existence on 'home video' formats has been somewhat patchy in the DVD era. There was the New Concorde "Roger Corman Presents/Directors Series" edition from 2000, which presented a decent if scratchy scan of the print alongside a few basic extras from Peter Bogdanovich; a commentary-track and a to-camera interview. After that went out of print, Australian DVD outfit Umbrella licensed that very same version around 2006, however the compression of the file left something to be desired and it was a moderately inferior looking-thing, paler in colour and lower in resolution. That was the edition that hit the streets in Singapore when the film was 'un-banned', and became a fast bestseller for a while. While flat-hunting in 2010 I'd occasionally see a copy on peoples' shelves, so I know it got around. When Umbrella stopped shipping or printing them (presumably the license had ended, or there was no more demand) the film was suddenly unavailable again for the first time since the 1990s, although there was a Spanish-subtitled version showing up on Amazon, which was another license of the New Concorde edition. Then in early 2014, I saw a mention in a forum that Scorpion Releasing, a small DVD/Blu-ray imprint specialising in bringing out relatively obscure B-Movie, action and exploitation flicks, had announced that a Saint Jack disc was in the pipeline, even going so far to include the trailer on some of its releases. Hoping to get involved, I speculatively dropped an email to the anonymous "Info@" address with some blurb about my book, and to my great surprise got an email back from Walter Olsen, who, I think it's fair to say, is Scorpion Releasing. Thus, a correspondence that would last several years (on and off) was initiated, and to Walter's great credit, while the Blu-ray project was delayed or held off for years (a much improved in terms of pic-quality DVD from Walter popped up in the interim), he was true to his word and happily enabled me to impose myself onto the project, recording an exhaustive audio commentary and producing two short documentaries, 'Memories of Saint Jack' (which edits together interviews with a good number of Saint Jack cast and crew, including Pierre Cottrell and Lisa Lu) and 'The Singapore Locations of Saint Jack' AKA 'Dormant Glories At Dawn', a video essay by the brilliant artist Toh Hun Ping. These feature alongside all the old extras. There's also an excellent reversible cover with the stunning Polish poster image instead of the not-wonderful Corman-edition poster with all the critics' quotes. When you get your copy, change the cover immediately! The best aspect of the edition is of course the film itself, which is stunningly cleaned-up, and as I've said elsewhere, it's doubtful that we'll ever see a better copy. A few years ago Peter Bogdanovich told an interviewer (during the She's Funny That Way press) that he hoped to see Saint Jack be brought out by Criterion. Well, Walter's done an equally great job on far less resources, and if you love the film, you absolutely must get this. It's available here and here and if you are in Singapore and want to acquire one, drop me a line.

"The Women Round Here..."

This went online a few days ago. It's actually the video from a site-specific installation at a karaoke lounge in the Bugis area which is part of the art/film tour State of Motion, mentioned in my last post. The video is by Amanda Lee Koe, a writer and poet, whose collection of short stories Ministry of Moral Panic was widely acclaimed in 2013. It's directed by Kristin Tan, whose debut film Pop Aye just opened the international section of Sundance, and picked up best international screenplay too. As far as I know, outside  the work done by Toh Hun Ping focussed on locations, this is the first time (as far as I know) that a Singaporean artist has directly 'responded' to Saint Jack. Amanda addresses the complexity of her relationship to Saint Jack as a text, while presenting a real, precious history of Bugis Street alongside Saint Jack's documentation of that storied place. It's cool, funny, provocative and I wish it were longer...

Singaporeana in 2017

Two related events coming up incredibly soon.

Firstly a talk entitled 'The World of Saint Jack' will be at the National Library on the 7th January. This is an attempt to get away from the very general introductions to Saint Jack that I normally do and present matters relating to the film in a more informal and digressive way, without apology! So, it's a structured ramble through some alleyways and side-streets connected to the movie. There will be a revelation or two around the identity of at least one person who Jack Flowers was based on - which involves poetry (!), plus something I just noticed about the 'Jack of Hearts' Treatment, and a tribute of sorts to Pierre Cottrell and Tony Yeow.

It's actually part of an event State of Motion, which is an annual exhibition around art/film curated by Kent Chan with help from my good friend Toh Hun Ping, who you will all know from his amazing locations archive. I'd like to think that this year's theme 'Through Stranger Eyes' is inspired by the work I've done as the films they are focussing on have featured on this blog over the years, and they are showing Ring of Fury by Tony Yeow.... Talking of which:

A week later, on the 14th, Sherman Ong and myself will present Tony's Long March at the National Museum of Singapore, in a double-bill with Lost in La Mancha. It's the first time the film's been seen since the Singapore International Film Festival in late 2015, and about time too! We'll be introducing it and doing a Q&A afterwards.

SINGAPOREANA COMES TO LONDON!

Last year this blog became a 10 film year-long season at NUS Museums, which included my first sighting of the infamous Hawaii 5-O episode(s) The Year of the Horse. This year it becomes a one-day event in London, as part of the Asia House Film Festival 2016, and 'Singaporeana Day' will take place at The Cinema Museum on the 5th March, and will include Pretty Polly, The Virgin Soldiers and a new HD (BluRay) file screening of Saint Jack, which will be the first time that's shown in the UK since it was released. I will be on hand to introduce each screening as lucidly as possible, and then at the end of this marathon of Singaporeana, I will be on a panel with some other luminaries from film-making and film criticism to discuss the films, their context and impact. All of this was made possible by secret legend Gareth Evans for introducing me to the good people of Asia House and then well-known legend Jasper Sharp, who is the festival director and organiser who got excited by the idea and really pushed it through against all the various challenges of prints and rights acquisition that we faced. I look forward to seeing UK people at the event, come and say hi!

Remembering Tony...

Image from TONY'S LONG MARCH (photo: Sherman Ong)

During the upcoming Singapore International Film Festival, they'll be a tribute to Tony Yeow, the Singaporean film producer who died in June this year. Tony worked as the Unit Manager on Saint Jack, among many other things. He produced, conceived and co-directed about six feature films during his career; developed dozens more; produced and directed a bunch of commercials, documentaries and PSAs; was a TV presenter for a while; as well as an actor in big-budget TV miniseries and local theatre productions. Tony was a character. And Sherman Ong and myself set out to capture that in a film we shot between 2008 and 2010 called Tony's Long March. We'll be showing that at the tribute, and hearing from some of those who worked with him.

Details of the event can be found here. Scroll down to find 'Remembering Tony'.

In the meantime, here's something I wrote about him for Time Out Singapore in 2008.

***

Singapore’s film industry has its fair share of colourful characters, none more so than Tony Yeow. A producer, writer, director, occasional actor and veteran of television and commercials, Tony was born in 1938, around the same time as the Shaw Brother’s set up their film studio in Jalan Ampas and so his career spans the history of film-making in Singapore until today.

“I’m a has-been that never was,” he ‘s fond of saying, and its true that Tony has been an outsider, hustling to get projects off the ground, facing indifference, censorship and critical hostility along the way. He’s also a survivor, and recalls several close escapes from death during his WW2 era childhood in Chinatown (one bad fall leaving him with two broken arms), which he credits to “somebody upstairs taking a liking to me.”

As a boy, Tony often slipped off alone to the cinema, soaking up martial arts and horror flicks, “I enjoyed it, but I never thought I’d end up as a film producer.” Instead, as the premature breadwinner for his family, he became a teacher, then stumbled into radio broadcasting, largely on the strength of his still-resonant, crystal-clear voice, a tool he deliberately cultivated to imitate colonial era English news announcers. He side-stepped into television, getting promoted as a producer and presenter, and managing to be in the studio in 1965, when Lee Kuan Yew tearfully told the nation of Singapore’s separation from Malaysia.

His first film, Ring of Fury, came in the aftermath of a year working in TV in Hong Kong, “they had colour, Singapore was still in black and white.” Tony had met Bruce Lee, who was deeply into disco, “He was always dancing. He broached the idea of doing a musical with me. Unfortunately a year later he died.” Inspired by Lee, Tony created the Singapore’s first and (so far) last martial arts action film, producing, storylining and co-directing a low-budget but very stylish tale of a humble noodle-seller (played by Peter Chong, a real-life Karate master) who battles against gangsters led by a man in a metal mask. Aside from showing many parts of Singapore in 1973 that no longer exist, the film has some memorably hard-hitting combat scenes. “We didn’t choreograph those,” Tony explains, “I told them where to run, and we just turned on the camera and they fought.”

The film was banned for its portrayal of crime at a time when Singapore was aggressively ‘cleaning up’. After a disaster like that, most people would bow out, but Tony found himself “bitten by the passion”. His second film, a comedy about fisherman-out-of-water called Two Nuts, didn’t change the tide of decline in Singapore’s film industry in the late 70s, and his production company Impact, turned to commercials, documentaries and government campaign films (such as ‘Stop At Two’, intended to curb overpopulation). During this period, Tony joined the crew of Peter Bogdanovich’s infamous Saint Jack, the Hollywood film secretly shot in Singapore, and also took acting roles, including a part in the Australian mini- series Tanamera: Lion of Singapore, but the “impossible dream” hadn’t disappeared.

“Once you start on one film, it somehow leads onto another”, Tony says, and he kept toying with various ideas, inadvertently kick-starting the ‘revival’ of Singapore’s film industry with Medium Rare in 1991. Supposed to be a documentary-style account of the Tao Payoh murderer Adrian Lim, it drifted radically from this concept and is now largely seen as a terrible, albeit historically significant, flop. “Medium Rare could never be well done”, laughs Tony (he has a pun like this for all his films), who says he walked off the set on the first day of shooting and never returned. It did pave the way for more successful local films by directors

like Eric Khoo and Jack Neo, and that in turn gave Tony the chance to produce Tiger’s Whip, a comedy about an American looking for the titular Viagra-substitute that was intended as “spiritual film”, but ended up being “whipped pillar to post.” The lead actor, an American, was “a zombie, but very good-looking”, and the film also flopped.

“I had one more joust at the windmill,” says Tony of his virtually forgotten 2001 Malaysian action-comedy The Deadly Disciple, but he’s still going strong. After our interview he’s driving to town to “meet a friend who has an idea for a film”, and he has drawers full of screenplays, everything from knockabout comedies, to horror flicks and his period epic Little Red Star, about The Long March in China. If you meet Tony for even a short while, he’s likely to suggest you read one of them.

“I never made any good films,” Tony muses, by which he means that they didn’t make any money. For a moment he seems to regret his life-long involvement in an industry that wasn’t always kind to him but has certainly been interesting, “What else can I do? There’s no place to go”. Then he’s enthusiastically discussing some other new projects. As he says of that his much cherished Long March film idea – “It’s just a dream.”