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Film critic/actor Paul Fonoroff interviewed
The Movie Critic 1/1 - Page 1
Info
Author(s) : Arnaud Lanuque
Date : 13/3/2007
Type(s) : Interview
 
 Intext Links  
People :
Jackie Chan
Peter Chan Ho Sun
Mabel Cheung Yueng Ting
Samson Chiu Leung Chun
Allen Fong Yuk Ping
Paul Fonoroff
Michael Hui Kun Man
Clara Law Cheuk Yu
Linda Lin Dai
Virginia Lok Yee Ling
Ni Kuang
Josephine Siao Fung Fung
Tsui Hark
James Wong Jim
Wong Jing
John Woo
Movies :
Beyond The Great Wall
The Enchanting Shadow
Flash Future Kung Fu
The Fourteen Amazons
Golden Swallow
High Risk
The Killer
The One Armed Boxer
The Protector
The Warlord
Companies :
Golden Harvest
Shaw Brothers
Lexic :
New Wave
 
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Page 2 : The Actor


Film critic Paul Fonoroff is a familiar face for many Hong Kong movie fans; he has appeared numerous times in HK film as a gweilo. The man is also one of the greatest scholars on Chinese film history and the owner of a very impressive collection of movie memorabilia. Fonoroff was kind enough to share some of his time to discuss his background as well as his experience in the industry and his opinion about HK/Chinese cinema.


the movie critic

HKCinemagic : Let’s start with your movie critic career. Was The Warlord (Li Han Hsiang, 1972) the first HK film you ever saw?
Paul Fonoroff : No. It was the third one. The first one was the Fourteen Amazons. It was just a couple of weeks before I saw The Warlord. I was on a trip here [in Hong Kong] during the summer, while I was in high school.
HKCinemagic : How did you end up here? You are American, what brought you to Hong Kong?
Paul Fonoroff : I started studying Chinese while still in high school, and joined a youth study group going to Hong Kong during the summer of 1972. There was a slight chance they'd let us into China, since this was around the time of ping pong diplomacy, Nixon's visit to China, etc. We were here [in Hong Kong] for six weeks but never got in, but it was a fascinating experience nonetheless. Of course, I didn't have any special interest in Chinese movies at the time. After all, I only saw three films in six weeks (laughs). The first was Fourteen Amazons, which was showing at the old London Theatre. The second was one of the One Armed Boxer films, and last was The Warlord. None of the movies made too much sense to me, especially Fourteen Amazons. I'd never seen anything like it before, and even with English subtitles, I didn't know what to make of it. I kept wondering: "are they supposed to be men or women or what?" Of the three, I liked The Warlord best. I saw it in the Hollywood Theatre in Mongkok, and the next night there was a fire that closed it down… Anyway, I really liked The Warlord. I thought it was hilarious and very clever.


Michael Hui is The Warlord

 
HKCinemagic : Did you start developing your interest for Chinese films from this point on or later when you discovered more?
Paul Fonoroff : I don’t think it started then. I was interested in movies, and I considered going to a film school for my university degree. But I figured if I studied film as an undergraduate and graduate student, I would become a very dull person. So I went to Brown University and studied other things. I took Chinese courses instead. When I was a junior, I had too many credits and I didn’t want to graduate early so I decided to take a year off and improve my Mandarin. At that time, in 1974, Americans could not study in China so I finally went to Singapore. In a way, it was a mistake because at that time, Singapore was not very Mandarin speaking. They had a Mandarin Language Centre for foreign students at Nanyang University, but it was not a very friendly atmosphere for foreigners. We were not allowed to live on campus because we were considered a bad influence. And the Chinese educated students were not very keen to be with foreigners. I think you had a mixture of influences -- conservative Chinese values combined with the radicalism and xenophobia of the Cultural Revolution. If we met students from Singapore University, which was the English-language university, they were very friendly to us; the total opposite of what it was like in our Chinese-language university. Among the foreign students, the largest group was from Japan and the second largest was from Soviet Union. I guess they had nowhere else at that time to study Chinese. So, we spoke Chinese among ourselves and not with real Chinese people (laughs).

We were living near a Shaw Brothers theatre so I started to see a lot of movies. And, when we would go to town, I would go to a Cathay theatre to see the Golden Harvest movies. I had seen The Warlord so I was a bit familiar with Michael Hui and the Hui brothers had become very big. I really liked their movies, much better than the Shaw Brothers movies I saw at that time. They would occasionally have a midnight show with old movies. They were costume pictures like Beyond The Great Wall with Linda Lin Dai. And once again, it was very different from anything I had ever seen. I also saw The Enchanting Shadow, The Golden Swallow… Anyway, I liked those and the Hui brothers stuff. For the rest, there was too much kung fu, silly comedies and I didn’t find them particularly interesting.

Then, I quit school after around 6 months because we weren’t learning much Chinese. During the winter break I went to Sumatra and realized in all the coastal towns, everybody was speaking Chinese. Even though the Indonesian governor had closed down the Chinese schools in 1966, people of my age were speaking Chinese or learning Chinese at home. I was about 19/20 then and was really forced to speak in Chinese when traveling there. So I quit school and traveled in Indonesia and in all South East Asia. It really helped my Chinese. In Laos, I was staying with a Chinese family and then the government made all the foreign tourists leave -- this was right before the communists took power in 1975. I almost went to Cambodia but was warned not to go because it was not safe there.

While traveling around Southeast Asia, I went to the movies a lot. Back then, in the theatres in Thailand and Laos, you didn’t hear the original soundtrack. There was simultaneous dubbing, someone speaking into a microphone in the back of the theatre, and it could be very confusing, especially in the smaller theatres where only two people were doing the dubbing. It was hard to follow which character was doing the talking. (laughs). But if you paid extra in the better theatres, you could see the movie with the original soundtrack and the original language. I went to a lot of Chinese movies back then. But I can’t say I had a strong interest for Chinese films until later.

I finally came back to the US and graduated in 1976. I applied to film school, to NYU (New York University), UCLA (University of California - Los Angeles) and USC (University of Southern California). I was accepted by all three but didn’t know where to go as they were all good film schools. I finally decided to go to the west coast as I had never been there, and chose USC for no particular reason. But they didn’t want me to enter until January 1977. So I had like six months of free time. So, I went to Taiwan as I heard you could get jobs easily, teaching English. There, I really went to see a lot of movies and kept a notebook in which I kept track of what I saw, cutting out the newspaper ads and making note of the ticket price and who I saw the film with. I watched 55 movies in all. That was the era of these very insipid romances with Lin Ching Hsia, Chin Han… I liked to see them not because the movies were good but because it was fun to see the same stars in so many different movies. I was always interested in Hollywood films, I love Hollywood films from the 1930s and 1940s. These Taiwanese movies reminded me of that, when you could have Jimmy Cagney in eight movies in the year. In Taiwan, in three months, you could see three or five Lin Ching Hsia movies in different roles, even if they were always basically the same. I liked that aspect of it. For the most part, they were not very good. So I had some interest in Chinese cinema but not enough to really start doing some research.

It was in Taiwan I first found a stack of old movie magazines, Japanese ones from the early 1930s. I really liked them because they had such big, beautiful photos of early Hollywood talkies, and the combination of these Western images with the Japanese script was quite eye-catching. Each magazine was divided half and half between Japanese and Hollywood pictures, and it was the Hollywood part which attracted me since I didn't know anything about Asian cinema at the time.

Then I went to USC for a MFA (Master of Fine Arts) degree. I never thought about becoming a critic, at all. I was interested in film history but thought I didn't need to go to school to learn that. I needed school to learn more about film production. I thought, “oh, maybe someday, I’ll become a director” (laughs). In the summer of 1979, I went to Hong Kong. Back then, they used to show a lot of old Mandarin films on TV, at least one morning matinee and one late show. It’s this way I saw Mambo Girl. That just opened my eyes! I really had no awareness there was a Chinese film history! All I had been exposed until then was kung fu, silly comedies… And in some of the movie theatres, there used to be morning shows where they would show old movies. There, I got to see Street Angels. It really blew me away! I had no idea that Shanghai cinema in the 1930s could be so realistic, in some ways much more so than Hollywood at that time. Neo-realism before the term was coined. It totally astounded me.

Around that time, my father, who was a university professor in Cleveland, sent me a notice from one of the scholarly journals that there was a new scholarship for Americans to study in China. He kind of meant it as a joke, “if you can’t get work in Hollywood, why don’t you go to China?”. Little did he realize that that was exactly what I wanted to do! Washington and Beijing had re-established diplomatic relations in 1979 and they started to have a fellowship for Americans to study in China. The requirement was that you had to have your masters degree and already be fluent in Chinese, but there was no requirement to be studying for a PhD. That was perfect for me. The only thing I was worried about was that you had to come up with a research topic and I had no idea. I never studied Chinese history or culture and wasn’t particularly interested in doing a research topic on them, so I said Chinese films. I thought it would either make me or break me (laughs). Fortunately, it intrigued them, because most applicants were going for Chinese history or Chinese literature.

I wanted to go to the Beijing Film Academy but they didn’t admit foreign students at that time. I ended up being in Beijing University in modern literature. Since I was considered a graduate student, I didn’t have to go to classes but they assigned me an adviser who I would have to meet every two weeks. She didn’t know a thing about movies but she was a fascinating person and later she wrote a book about her life that was quite well received. Her name is Yue Daiyun. I loved talking to her. She had been branded a Rightist during the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957, but was still very idealistic about communism. God knows why.

It was a good time to be in Beijing and I was supposed to stay only one year there but that’s the time it took to make the connections just to start my research! So I extended it for another year, then another two months. So I stayed 26 months but it was only in the last six weeks I was allowed to go to the Film Archives (laughs). I was trying to see as many pre-1949 films as possible, but it turned out there were only a few that were officially approved. They'd occasionally turn up on TV, but that was about it. Around that time, there was huge retrospective of Chinese films in Torino, Italy and somebody sent me the catalogue. And I was amazed that even though the prints were from the Beijing Film Archives, they could see more of them in Italy than we could in Beijing. (laughs) So I resolved to see as many movies as I could, period. Even if they were recent films of questionable quality. I figured they wouldn't be seeing those in Torino, but I could here in Beijing.

So I really tried to see everything I could. And it was not an easy matter. I developed a routine. I had a friend in the city who was living near one of the major newspapers, so he would get the paper -- and the cinema listings -- about an hour before we got them at Peking University, which isn't so close to the city center. So I would call him at 8 in the morning and we would examine what would be showing in Beijing's theatres that day. Unfortunately, the movie listings were never complete. So let’s say there was a theatre showing a movie at noon, 2 pm, and 6 pm. It meant there was probably one show in the afternoon between 2pm and 6pm that wasn’t listed in the paper. So I would call the theatre to know what they were showing. Then I would hop on my bicycle and make the rounds, sometimes checking on the more obscure little theatres that didn't have any listings in the paper. In this way, I got to see over 300 movies in about eight months, which was no small feat back then.

I can’t believe how enthusiastic I was! Now, that enthusiasm has gone, sorry to say. But at the time, it wasn't just a way to get to know contemporary Chinese cinema, but I also got to know Beijing very well (laughs). I remember once I went to an open air screening at night at one of the children's centers, which they called Children's Palace. I arrived on time but they had already started the movie! I was so pissed off. I mean, starting late I can understand, but starting early? So afterwards, I marched up to the projectionist and demanded to see the first reel. I can't believe I did that, but that's how audacious -- and enthusiastic -- I was back then. And I guess the projectionist was surprised as well, that here's this angry foreigner demanding to see the beginning of a not-too-good movie. But he showed it to me!

So in the end I managed to see lots of post-1949 movies, but not too much from the pre-1949 era. They wouldn't ever let me see old movie magazines, for instance. I even managed to go to the Beijing Film Academy a few times and got permission from the vice-principal to audit classes, but I still had tons of difficulties with the school's security division, so I never actually was able to attend any classes. In China you can get the approval of the highest bureaucrats but if you don’t get the approval of the middle level bureaucrats, you’ll never get anything done. It was very frustrating. In the library, they would not let me see the magazines before 1949 because they were considered too sensitive, full of military secrets (laughs). So I resolved then and there to start my own collection, something that no bureaucrat could restrict me from looking at. But at that time, it was impossible to find any movie-related things for sale from the pre-1949 era; after all, it was only a few years after the Cultural Revolution and people still didn't feel too at ease about displaying things from the Republican era.

Every time I traveled outside Beijing, I'd also go to the movies as much as possible. And again, it wasn’t easy. I would be in places like Xi'an and Guilin and would go to the post office to buy the newspaper to see the cinema listings, and they'd refuse to sell me the paper because it was still considered a classified internal document. It was very frustrating. Of course, I also realized that things would evolve, and so even then I appreciated how interesting it was to live in those times. But it was not easy. Anyway, I went to see a lot of movies and I even had the chance to act in one, a Peking studio film whose title I refuse to divulge. I hope it will never come out on DVD! (laughs)

 
HKCinemagic : What was the year the movie was made?
Paul Fonoroff : The film was released at the end of 1982, I think, but we shot for about five months in 1981-1982. It was the first mainland film to be shot partly in Hong Kong since 1949. The character was supposed to be African but they couldn’t find any African students whose schools would give them permission for such a lengthy leave of absence. On the other hand, I was a grad student and not required to attend classes, and the Foreign Student Office at Peking University was only too happy to get rid of me for a few months (laughs), so permission was granted.

Most of the shooting took place on a ship. I played a student of oceanography who was doing his training on this ship. My role was quite large -- I think I was number three in the cast. The movie's theme song became quite famous, and I heard the movie did very well when it was initially released. And then the government started a campaign against spiritual pollution in 1983, and the release was affected because the authorities said it made Hong Kong look too good. So I don’t think anybody remembers the film -- which is no great loss, because it wasn't too good -- but the song is very well known and the cast included some very famous older stars. It was interesting to work on the film as a whole. And I got to spend a lot of time at the Peking Film Studio. Back then, I was friends with Chen Kaige. He was a student at the Beijing Film Academy and his family lived at the Peking Film Studio. We hung out together, but after Yellow Earth he became too famous and I didn't see him much after that.

 
HKCinemagic : So, how exactly did you make the transition from Beijing as a student to  a film critic in Hong Kong?
Paul Fonoroff : As I mentioned earlier, it was only in the last six weeks during my two year-plus stay in Beijing that I got permission to see some pre-1949 films at the Archives. This was thanks to there being a group of graduate students at a Chinese film research unit -- the very first group of grad students specializing in Chinese film history. I was given permission to go to screenings at the Archives with them. There were six or seven students and their teacher was one of the authors of a very definitive, and very political, history of Chinese cinema that had been published in the 1960s. We got to see six movies, that’s all. But among them was Springtime in a Small City (Fei Mu, 1949), one of the all-time greats, and some other great, great films. And this got me even more interested in Chinese movie history.

At the end of 1982 I went back to the States for a few months but finally decided to come back to Hong Kong in 1983 because several friends told me it would be easy to find work. One friend introduced me to TVB. They were looking for scriptwriters for Pearl, the English Channel. There was also a magazine called TV & Entertainment Times which was similar to America's TV Guide and, at the time, had quite a big readership, and they were looking for a film critic. My initial reaction was, like, "Ew! Film critics, they never create, only criticize”. Then I discovered I liked to criticize (laughs). So, I started writing reviews and, at the TV station, they had a show called Pearl K-100. It was the English-language edition of K-100, which was one of the biggest shows on TVB's Chinese channel. The English version was much smaller. I wrote the script for a few months, and it was quite interesting. And so was being a critic. This was kind of the tail end of the so-called Hong Kong New Wave, and I got to review films like Health Warning. But there was a definite down-side. One Western critic in particular really tried to destroy my career. I think he was jealous because I could speak the language and he couldn't but pretended to.


The Protector

 
HKCinemagic : Can you tell us who it is?
Paul Fonoroff : I'd really rather not -- he's not so important after all. He was terrible, not just to me but to everybody he regarded as a threat. If he had been smart, he would have been nice to all of us and made us feel obligated to him. But I think he felt very threatened. I don’t mind if people criticizes me for my views but he wrote a letter to my editor, and had a friend write a letter using a false name, saying I was racist, that my Chinese was bad, as if he were in a position to judge… They were real personal attacks. I felt so discouraged I thought of giving it all up. Then Allen Fong said to me: "No, don’t do that, that’s exactly what he wants you to do.”

So I continued writing my column till 1985, when I heard there was a movie being made in Hong Kong called The Protector with Jackie Chan. They needed somebody to be Jackie Chan’s dialogue coach because it was shot in English. So I worked on the film, I think I was officially an assistant production manager or something like that. But basically I helped Jackie with the dialogues. That movie took a few months to shoot. Peter Chan was assistant director on this film. And after that, there was an American TV movie being made called Blade in Hong Kong. They hoped it would be a pilot for a TV series. There were three assistant directors, Peter, Samson Chiu and me.

After that, Taipan came along, so I signed as assistant director and worked about five months on the movie. We shot in Guangzhou for six weeks, Macao for about five weeks and then Hong Kong. And it really changed my life, not because of the movie -- the movie was pretty bad -- but in Macau, it’s the first time I found old movie magazines. I'd always been looking around and earlier, in Hong Kong, I'd found some magazines from the 1950s and 1960s, but nothing really old. There was a dialogue coach from Hollywood working on Taipan, and he and his wife knew I liked old magazines and one day while we were shooting in Macau, the wife came up to me and said: "Oh, yesterday we went to a bookstore and they had some old movie magazines, I’ll bring you the address tomorrow”. And I was thinking: “They don’t know Chinese, it might not even be a movie magazine. But what if it is? They might have sold it by tomorrow.” So, I went in search of the bookstore, and finally found it. I think it was fate, because I wasn't familiar with Macau, and the shop was on a small side street, but somehow I found the place. I walked in and asked the proprietor in Cantonese if he had some old movie magazines. He answered "yes," and then asked a question I didn't expect: "From what era?" I didn't really expect there to be super-old magazines, so I asked :"From the 1950s and 1960s?" When he said, "Yes," I added, "How about the 1930s and 1940s?" To my surprise, he said, "Yes."

And from the back of the shop he brought out a small stack of magazines. One of them turned out to be the very first Hong Kong movie magazine, published in 1926. Another was from 1937 and had an actress named "Lan Ping" on the cover -- I don't think the proprietor knew it, but "Lan Ping" was none other than Jiang Qing, who later became Chairman Mao's wife. I was so excited! I thought I had hit the jackpot! After that, every time we had a break on the set, I would rush over to the bookstore. And I would continue to do that when we were back in Hong Kong, I would go to Macau when free. By then, he knew me well enough and let me go to his storeroom. I could spend eight hours looking for stuff there. But some things were in horrible shape, insect-infected or water-soaked from sitting out in the rain. Some of them I didn’t dare open because they were so fragile. But at the end I found 500 movie magazines from the 1920s to the 1940s. I remember thinking that this was the beginning of a real collection. Before, I was barely aware that these magazines even existed. After all, while in China I had never even seen one magazine from pre-1949, since the Archives and the library at the Beijing Film Academy wouldn't give me permission to look at their collections. But now that I knew magazines like these were out there, I really started to aggressively look for them. And in the late 1980s, some of those finally started to appear on the market again.

A brother of a friend of mine in Shanghai, he was a cripple and had nothing to do all day so he looked for old movie magazines. The first time he found some for sale, he sent me a letter with a detailed list and asked if I wanted them. But by the time he received my reply, he wrote me another letter to tell me they were already sold. The price was so cheap -- about the same as scrap paper! -- I told him if he saw anything, he should just buy them. So, I got a lot of duplicates which I would use to trade. It seemed like each time we went searching, we'd find hundreds of magazines, and after a while, I became very blasé about it, as if finding hundreds of treasures from the pre-1949 era was commonplace. Of course, times have changed and now, if I find just one, I'm very happy (laughs).

Anyway, after Taipan I realized I didn’t want to be an assistant director anymore, it’s an awful job. And again, I wasn’t really looking for anything but the people who had been doing Pearl K-100 started a new show called Eye on Hong Kong. And they needed a film critic to be on camera on the show and since they already knew me, they asked me to be part of it. But they didn’t want me to review Hong Kong films. I could talk about any other kind of movie, even Chinese films. In addition to movie reviews, we did interviews and once we interviewed the South China Morning Post film critic, Perry Lam. That was the first  time I met him, and we didn't meet again until years later, but he had a huge influence on my life. I didn't know it at the time, but he was planning to leave the paper soon after that and recommended me to take over from him. It was 1988. At first I didn’t want to do it after the bad experience I had at TV & Entertainment Times. But a friend of mine said, "Go ahead! Take it, it will be a good discipline for you to write every week.” So I did and I've been writing for the Post ever since.

Then the people from Eye on Hong Kong jumped ship, they went from TVB to ATV. And they said, "If you come to ATV, you can have your own show and talk about Hong Kong movies or anything else you want to talk about." Well, in Hong Kong, TVB is so number one and ATV is so number two, when you're on ATV you really have the freedom to try different things. Back then there was more English language production than today. Nowadays there is almost nothing done in English anymore, except the news. Anyway, that's how we started to do the show called Movie World back in 1989. I think it was one of the best series we ever did. First of all, because films were really booming in Hong Kong, in the late 1980s to mid 1990s, every week there were four or five new movies coming out. There were so many movies in production! So, every week, we would go on a set and interview the actors and directors. I would review all the films coming out and I always had a segment on film history. At first, the producers were appalled by this. Their attitude was “who is going to be interested in that??” And I said, "I'm from the American Midwest, and if I got interested in it, I can make other people interested in it too.” And in the end, our show had better ratings than some of the shows they had on the Chinese channel. Of course, for ATV that wasn't saying much.

But at the beginning, nobody knew who we were. We would go on a set and it was, like, 'Who are you?' That is, till we went to interview James Wong. And he was the first person to know who we were. He was “Oh, you know, I watch your show every week.” “Really?!” (laughs). And he said, "Since I'm a guest on your show, how would you like to be a guest on my show?” At that time, James, Chua Lam, and Ni Kuang were the host of ATV's number one program called in direct translation 'Tonight Without Reservation.' I think I was the only Western guest they ever had and it was the first time I ever did a Cantonese show. It was kinda like being on The Tonight Show. James was just wonderful to me, and his death a few years ago has left a real void in my life, and the lives of a lot of Hong Kong people. Anyway, I appeared on the show, and even if my Cantonese wasn’t very good, it did leave an impression. A few months later, a really famous opera star named Yam Kim Fai passed away, and ATV had a special about her life, and invited me to come and show the photos of her from my collection, and this left a very big impression, that here was a foreigner that actually collected pictures of Yam Kim Fai.

Well, the next year, in 1990, they arranged for me to do a Cantonese show called Movie Talk and my first co-host was Mabel Cheung. They would always pair me with a female co-host, usually a director or producer, like Clara Law and Virginia Lok, who's now one of the top officials at TVB. So I got a lot of exposure. Around 1992, the show came to an end. Movies had started to decline so there was less interest in a movie program. But fortunately, a few Mandarin channels had begun to spring up in Hong Kong, like CTN, Star TV, and Phoenix, and they still were interested. Being a foreigner is a double-edged sword, it can get you some jobs easily and it can keep you from getting jobs too. For example, TVB thought that foreigners should never host a Cantonese show. We could be extras or have small roles but they always thought the Hong Kong audience would never accept a foreigner as a host. Fortunately, not all the TV executives shared this view.

 
HKCinemagic : Do you personally agree with that?
Paul Fonoroff : Of course not! It’s a very narrow point of view. So I continued to do TV shows for several years, though not on TVB. Nowadays, the interest in this kind of show is really gone. I think today there is more emphasis on reporting movie stars news and gossip and fluff, which certainly has its place but it's sure not everything. I was always very critical in my program. And I think people liked it that way. There is not the same excitement about movies that there was then. In the early 1990s, there were so many movies being made that every once-in-a-while, even I would get a call from a director and be given a small part in a movie.
 
HKCinemagic : In general, would you say you have been warmly welcomed by the Hong Kong film industry?
Paul Fonoroff : I don’t know. I think I’m kind of oblivious to things. Looking back on it, some people who originally were friendly would suddenly stop talking to me. They were probably more sensitive than I thought they were to the things I wrote or said on TV, or maybe they didn't even see or hear them but someone told them what I supposedly said and probably got it all wrong. If you had asked me 10 years ago I would have answered, "Oh yes, people can take the criticism, they won't let the friendship be affected by what I do professionally.” Because even though I may be critical, I don't think I'm ever vicious or put things on a personal level. But over time, I realized that I wasn't invited to certain movie-related functions or screenings. So I guess there's a lot going on that I'm not aware of. But I can't say I've ever encountered any real hostility due to my being a foreigner. Never at all.
 
HKCinemagic : Can you say the same about the local film critics?
Paul Fonoroff : I found the local film critics very unfriendly. It took years before any one of them started talking to me. I’m not exaggerating. I would meet them all the time for screenings and it took four to five years before one of them talked to me. The first one to do so was Jupiter Wong. He was very nice. And then other people started to talk to me. It wasn't until I became better known on TV.

There are two film critics' organizations in Hong Kong -- the Film Critics Society and the Film Critics' Association. The first one to be established was a very small in-circle type of group; you had to be invited to be part of it. And I wasn’t invited until five years after it was founded, when the original people left the leadership positions and new people were in charge. My non-inclusion was totally due to the fact I was a foreigner. And I really resented that because they had accepted people who very rarely wrote reviews. Here I was, reviewing movies on TV, radio, and on TV every week, in English and Chinese -- if I didn't qualify as a Hong Kong critic, then who did?

 Much later, I began to understand some of the reasons behind some of the prejudice. I think some of those people see foreigners as very transient people. They feel they are here just to exploit Hong Kong for a short period of time and then move on. So no need to talk to them and be friends because they will be gone before long. And maybe when they realized I wasn’t going to be gone, they started to feel embarrassed (laughs). But I would think that in any other city I would have sought out as a friend by people with similar interests. It just never happened. Of course, I have my friends here, but I’m not part of a warm, fuzzy community where we all get together and talk, discuss things. Never happened. After so many years, I've gotten used to it and don't think about it -- except during interviews (laughs), but it was a big disappointment for me at one time.


The Killer

 
HKCinemagic : Many westerns fans have been shocked by the stance you have on some movies usually considered as classics. I’m thinking of The Killer or Bullet in the Head. Can you explain a bit your position about those?
Paul Fonoroff : Of course, everybody is entitled to his or her own opinion. But I remember the first time we interviewed John Woo, right after The Killer came out, it was one of my first interviews and I wasn't too experienced. While we were setting up, he asked me: "What did you think of my movie?” So, I started telling him exactly what I felt -- it was all very friendly and polite, but honest. Well, my producer called me out into the hall and said: "Tell him what you think of it after the interview.” (laughs) But John Woo has always been very nice to me and never had any problem with my opinions. In fact, he even wrote the introduction to my book. One time I mentioned to him how kind he'd always been to me even though he knew what I thought of his movies. And he said, "You know, I’m surrounded by people who love my movies; it's always 'Oh! John!! John Woo!!' Sometimes it's good to hear a different opinion.” Some people can take it. And I never thought my opinion was so important anyway. I’m a critic, after all. It's not like I’m creating films.

But I feel some Western critics have a double standard. The things that they would not stand for in Hollywood films, somehow it becomes ok when it is in an Asian film. I never thought that way. To me the script is very important. I’m not saying a movie needs a traditional kind of a script, just that it has to make sense. They need to have some kind of internal logic. Even if it’s crazy, it must have its own logic. So scripting for me is very, very important. And another thing I don’t like is phoney sentimentality. I can’t stand it. I don’t mind being moved by something but I don’t like it when I feel it’s being imposed. And I think in some of John Woo’s films, the scenes are brilliantly done, if you look at the action scenes individually, but in terms of substance, I don’t come away with any deep feelings for the characters. It just doesn’t work for me. You know, you have a blind girl, a child being rescued. It could work if it was done well but they often don’t know what script construction is. For instance, sometimes Woo or Tsui Hark will attempt a romantic thriller in the mode of Billy Wilder or Alfred Hitchcock, things that can be done in a very clever manner and when done well can really move me. Scene by scene, some of the Tsui Hark films and John Woo films are absolutely brilliant. But I feel they don't always hold together as a whole movie.

 
HKCinemagic : So the main problem of HK industry for you is the scripting?

Paul Fonoroff : To me, it’s almost always the script.


Wong Jing making fun of Jackie Chan in High Risk

 
HKCinemagic : But I seem to remember you were quite tolerant with some Wong Jing’s movies which are usually poorly scripted.
Paul Fonoroff : Yes because you expect it to be crap, and within that context, it works. I would never say that it’s art, but it works. He’s true to his crappiness. He’s not pretending to be more than what he is. He’s not making grandiose statements about brotherhood or righteousness; he’s just putting together little pieces of things that he thinks may sell at the box office. And it’s kind of fun to watch that. I wouldn’t say they're great movies but within their own crappiness, they work. Garbage can be good sometimes. Sometimes it can be so bad, it’s fun to watch. I don’t mind things which are ambitious but I really resent things which are pretentious.

Actually, my favorite Wong Jing movie is High Risk. It has all the usual Wong Jing trademarks, such as combining multiple genres, and in this case throws in a rip-off of Die Hard for good measure. But what really makes it outstanding is its hilarious parody of Jackie Chan. I think only Wong Jing could have the guts and the audacity to take on one of Hong Kong's biggest icons, and to do so with such viciousness and such humor.

 
HKCinemagic : Many western fans are mostly interested in big action titles and do not try to discover other genres or older movies. What do you think about that?
Paul Fonoroff : Well, there's a basic difference between reviewing films as they come out on a weekly basis , which is of course what you do as a newspaper columnist, as opposed to picking and choosing what titles you're going to write about, which is the case with most Western fans. And it’s different when you look at films years after their original release and you’re seeing them out of their original context. It doesn’t mean that's not a valid way to critique movies, because it is. But it’s a different kind of viewing. Some of these Western critics, all that they see are the big movies, the famous movies, and they'll see them on DVD or within the context of a festival or retrospective, and it’s quite different when you see two to three films every week, fifty weeks a year. It forces you to see the movie in terms of the time it came out. Similar plots or stunts might have already been used a hundred times in the previous few years, so the subject matter isn't necessarily new and fresh, as it might appear to be to overseas fans who were never previously exposed to Hong Kong cinema. And that’s another reason why I may come across as so intolerant about some of these things. Watching the pictures right here in HK right when they hit the theaters just gives you a different view of the industry.

One thing I tried consciously to do in my reviews was to give you a sense of the time when I was watching the movie. That's something I like about reading the old reviews in Variety, you can get the feel of the time. Because films are a popular form of entertainment that people see at a specific time. Especially in the early 1990s, there were so many movies coming out. I thought most of them were pretty bad but it was exciting that such a small place like Hong Kong could have such a vibrant movie culture. There was three, four, five new movies every week! Every week! And people would go to see them. In the city's Top Ten box office listings back then, nine would be Hong Kong movies. Where else did you have that kind of local support for the local film industry? It's now a thing of the past.

Of course, different critics have different goals and cater to different readerships, and that will influence the way they go about their Hong Kong movie-watching. If they want to have a well rounded view of Hong Kong cinema, of course they should see different styles. It’s all right if they don’t, but they should please stop making all those generalities. It’s the same when we look at old films -- Hollywood films or French films or whatever. We're necessarily seeing them out of context, and if you are not aware of the events of the time or what films were made at the same time, you can’t really have an accurate view of what the movie was. So, looking at Hong Kong films, you may not know that something which seems silly might actually have a greater cultural significance, be it a satire of a popular TV show or whatever. Of course, it could just be silly. But things like that happen in every culture, in every film.

 
HKCinemagic : Do you look for reviews on the Internet sometimes?

Paul Fonoroff : No, there’s no need for it. When you review a film which has just come out, you don’t have the luxury of looking at what other people had said about the film to see if your opinion is right or not (laughs). When you hear “this movie is a classic,” it does influence you when you are writing, at least on a subconscious level. Because you don’t want everybody to think that somehow you missed something, that you didn't get it. In general, if you have a strong feeling about the movie, strongly like it or dislike it, it’s easy to write a review. But the vast majority of movies, you just don’t have much feeling for them one way or the other. So without even realizing it, you might be pushed one way or the other according to what your friends say or what other critics have written. You don’t have that when you are watching it in a preview and you have to hand your review the next day. And afterwards, when you discuss the film with other people, you might realize: “Oh my God, I really got that one wrong." I’m sure if I were to look back at some of my reviews I would see that I missed lots of stuff. (laughs)

 
HKCinemagic : Still, you didn’t do any change in your reviews when you published your book?
Paul Fonoroff : We just tried to correct some factual mistakes like I would have written a character’s name wrong. But otherwise, no, I didn’t change anything. I did ask somebody to read through the manuscript to keep an eye open for things, but she did a terrible job. When you write every week you might end up using the same phrases every week and not notice it -- but you'd certainly notice it when all the reviews were collected into one book. I asked her to tell me if she noticed things like that but she never did. Now that 10 years have passed, I’d like to do another book with reviews from the first decade after the handover, which is when the first book stopped. A new book of reviews covering 1997 to 2007. All that I need is a publisher (laughs).
 
HKCinemagic : What gave you the most satisfaction in your film critic life?
Paul Fonoroff : I guess when you find out that something you've done has had a positive affect on people. For instance, not too long ago I was at a screening, and a viewer came up to me on the street afterwards and told me how "Movie World" was what originally got him interested in movies when he was growing up.

Another time, someone wrote a letter to me at the TV station, and said I should check out a certain bookstall in Shenzhen that had old movie magazines for sale. So the next time I was in Shenzhen, I went there, and sure enough, this bookstall had an incredible collection of Hong Kong movie memorabilia from the 1940s-50s, and what was surprising, it wasn't published in China but in Singapore. Some of the items were quite rare, from before World War II, and I bought everything there. The lady in charge had a real interest in the old movie stars and movies, which was kinda unusual because she was quite young, maybe in her early 20s, and from a small town in northern China, so it's not like she was exposed to this stuff when she was growing up. So I asked her where the interest came from, and she said: "Honestly speaking, it was from reading your book." And she pointed to one of the shelves, and there was a copy of my pictorial history of Hong Kong cinema. I was really surprised, because she hadn't given any indication that she recognized me when I came into her shop.

It was also very satisfying when you went to a movie set and you didn’t have to explain why you were there. It's a nice feeling when everyone knows who you are and why you're there and makes you feel at home, that you're regarded as a real member of the Hong Kong movie community. Not that people here are overly friendly or demonstrative. Though there are a few, but only a few.

I could probably count on the fingers of one hand the movie people whose homes I've been to. James Wong, Josephine Siao. Fung Bo-bo invited me to her home for dinner during Chinese New Year, because she knew I was alone. I really appreciated it. Probably James Wong was the kindest towards me. When I didn't have much work, he tried to get jobs for me. He even tried to hook me up with potential dates. One of the last times I saw him was when my mom and sister were visiting Hong Kong and he invited us to a wonderful lunch in the Peninsula Hotel. He touched so many lives, and has a special place in the hearts of Hong Kong people, not to mention his contributions to Hong Kong culture. I feel very privileged to have known him.

 
HKCinemagic : In your opinion, what do a good Hong Kong film critic need to know? What skills must he have?
Paul Fonoroff : I think a high level of proficiency in Cantonese is essential. To be honest, I'd have to say my Cantonese is not very good, so in that area, I’m lacking. For a foreigner, it’s good, but it’s not on the level of a Chinese person. How can you hope to understand the subtlety of the dialogue if you don’t know the language? Film is a visual medium but language is also extremely important. Context. Knowing the background.

On the other hand, there is nothing wrong in being an outsider. In fact, as an outsider, I think I have a unique viewpoint and perspective and, precisely because I haven't grown up with it, I might see something special that a locally raised critic might pass over. But without a sense of context, you also might tend to read things into it that aren’t there. Some critics might say, "Well, that's still a valid point." Is it? I don’t know. Something that might strike you as wildly original may be something already seen many times for a Hong Kong person.

And just because it’s Asian doesn’t mean necessarily it’s fantastic. It can be as lousy as any Hollywood film. I've read some Western critics who look on Hong Kong movies of the 1980s and 1990s as a kind of return to the simplicity of Hollywood in the early silent era before things supposedly became so crassly commercial. But you can’t get more commercial than Hong Kong films, especially in the 1980s and 1990s!

It doesn’t mean Hong Kong films don’t have their charm of course, and it doesn't mean there aren't exceptions. But I think some people project onto it things that they want to project and that are not really there. Anyway, I don’t think critics are so important, so it doesn't really matter in the end. Especially where big blockbusters are concerned, movie critics can't sway viewers too much, though critical opinion might certainly help out a smaller, more obscure movie.

 
HKCinemagic : Do you intend to publish more books after the two you did?
Paul Fonoroff : I’d love to! I’d like to do an updated collection of my reviews -- I've reviewed over 1,000 Hong Kong movies by now. Another compilation book could be based on a weekly column I used to do on the old movie stars of Shanghai and Hong Kong. I did about 180 pieces in all, and they would make for a nice photo book. Another pet project is a pictorial history of Shanghai cinema from the 1920s-1950s as seen through the movie magazines. My collection has about 300 different kinds of film magazines from that era, and the photos and graphics are wonderful. But unfortunately, there are not many publishers in Hong Kong willing to do projects like this, particularly in English. Some friends were thinking about applying for a grant to get funds to digitalize my collection and start a website. It would be a huge project, and I doubt it'll ever happen. But if it did, that would give the motivation necessary to do some of these book projects. After all, you don't want to spend years of your life on a book unless you know that in the end it will be published, preferably on paper but electronically would be OK, too.
 
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