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Gangland Hit

Cathy Chui as Jo in Time and Tide. Photos courtesy of Tristar Pictures.

Tsui Hark returns with an explosive new thriller, Time and Tide

By Robert Ito

For filmmakers, there’s often no substitute for shooting on location. So when director Tsui Hark wanted to stage an elaborate action sequence for his latest movie, Time and Tide, he selected a real Hong Kong apartment complex for the shoot, then prayed that the hundreds of residents in the building would patiently endure days of raging gun battles and wall-shaking explosions. Not surprisingly, many tenants were not pleased about being at ground zero of one of the most ambitious Hong Kong action films in years. “When you hang people outside of buildings shooting at each other, it can get a little chaotic,” Tsui says. “We broke a few windows and air conditioners. There were lots of complaints.”

Tenant problems aside, Time and Tide was wildly popular in Asia when it debuted last year — so popular, in fact, that TriStar Pictures bought the distribution rights for its U.S. release, hoping to capitalize on the American box office success of recent Hong Kong films such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. TriStar is currently screening Tsui’s latest effort in select cities and watching the returns Crouching Tiger-style, to see if it merits a wider run.

Director Tsui Hark.

The movie marks Tsui’s long-awaited return to the Hong Kong action film genre that he helped popularize with movies such as Peking Opera Blues and Once Upon a Time in China. Since 1979, Tsui has directed and produced many of the region’s biggest box office hits, and is often credited with jump-starting the career of film star Jet Li. Along with former colleagues John Woo and Ringo Lam, Tsui was at the center of the Hong Kong New Wave of the 1980s, and championed a hyperkinetic brand of filmmaking from which Hollywood has been enthusiastically swiping ever since.

Set in Hong Kong, the film revolves around two friends who end up on opposite sides of a gang war. Tyler, a 21-year-old street tough, dreams of making some quick money as a bodyguard. Jack, a former mercenary, wants to go straight after years of fighting rebels in the jungles of Brazil. Their paths cross when Tyler discovers that Hong, the triad leader he’s been hired to protect, is actually Jack’s father-in-law, and that the triad kingpin has been marked for assasination by Jack’s Brazilian allies.

Nicholas Tse as Tyler.

Tsui pulls out all the stops with Time and Tide, filling the screen with dazzling, “how did they do that?” action sequences. The movie combines jaw-dropping stunts in stadiums and railway stations with dizzyingly mobile camera work, while cool animated effects — from colorful title cards to slo-mo bullets ripping across the screen — add to the visual spectacle. The finale, which involves childbirth and automatic weapons in an obvious nod to Hard Boiled’s maternity ward scene, is hilarious fun. Tsui even managed to make his cable stunts, now one of the most overused action film techniques in the business, look fresh.

While the onscreen mayhem will likely attract most of the audience’s attention, the director was particularly proud of the acting performances turned in by his young cast. As with previous films, Tsui hired non-actors for Time and Tide, including four musicians and a former Elite agency model. Nicholas Tse and Wu Bai, the film’s male leads, are two of Asia’s hottest pop stars. Candy Lo, a successful singer in Hong Kong, and Joventino Couto Remotigue, a 22-year-old drummer, are making their screen debuts. Except for veteran actor Anthony Wong, most of the cast has more experience in a recording studio than on a movie set.

Stocking a feature-length movie with musicians might seem risky to some, but Tsui has never had any qualms about it. “If they can maintain this energy and charisma for three hours in a concert, they can generate that same energy in a movie,” he says. Tsui helped his young cast hone their skills in a makeshift workshop, where he explained the basics of screen acting using musical terms. “You talk to them about rhythm or pace or feeling the energy,” he says. “That way, they feel natural in the environment and perform the role like it’s a part of themselves.”

Tsui’s least favorite leads for action films, perhaps not so surprisingly, are martial artists. “You have these people who have this martial arts background but don’t know how to act,” he says. “It looks weird. They perform in a very stagey style, and if you try to stop them from acting that way, they’re lost.” Incidentally, Tsui’s last two U.S. releases starred Jean-Claude Van Damme, a kickboxer who’s not considered one of the acting world’s brightest lights. “Stunt people and martial artists are the worst,” says Tsui.

The actors in Time and Tide are likeable and well-cast, although Anthony Wong, a personal favorite, could have been given more to do. And while the plot is often tough to follow — I got lost somewhere between South American mercenaries and a train station locker — it really doesn’t matter. Enough of the plot does stick, particularly the storylines about the relationships between the four young leads.

Tsui is currently completing post-production work on Black Mask 2, a sequel to the 1996 Jet Li superhero thriller. In the meantime, he’ll wait to see how Time and Tide does in the U.S. while he scouts around for future projects.

His top casting pick for one of these projects? Rowan Atkinson, a.k.a. Mr. Bean, one of the funniest — and funniest-looking — actors to come out of the UK. “I would love to get the chance to work with this guy,” says Tsui.

Nor would he rule out doing a pornographic film in the future. “I’ve never tried it,” he says. “I might try seeing how I’d function with this kind of material.”

And if porn films and Mr. Bean comedies don’t pan out for Tsui, he can always fall back on his lifelong dream of opening up a restaurant in Texas. In the late 1960s, when Tsui was a young film student at the University of Texas at Austin, one of his biggest adjustments to life in the U.S. was trying to choke down the uniformly poor food around campus.

“After a week, I was craving rice and noodles,” says Tsui, who grew up in Vietnam and Hong Kong. The director initially toyed with the idea of becoming a restauranteur after a particularly bad lunchtime experience, and he has never completely abandoned the idea. “I really wanted to open a restaurant there, a fast-food place, but one with really tasty food,” he says. “Austin is like my home town, but the food there, at least around the campus, is very bad.”