 HKCinemagic : Talk about the
'Mo lei tau', your brand of non-sensical comedy you have established with Stephen Chow. |
Wing Jing : I’ve explained this a few times.
'Moleitau' is a swear word in Cantonese. They deleted the most dirty word after moleitau. It basically means that they don’t understand.
It is because at this time Stephen Chow and I put a lot of Japanese cartoon elements into the films. We watched Japanese cartoons after work and we both liked it very much. I asked Chow to act like the people in the cartoons, to redo the movements. At that moment, most mature men didn’t watch animation, except for me and Chow. So moviegoers didn’t know what it was but thought it was so funny. Actually we just did some motions
stemmed from cartoon. Like the characters do like that [Wong aping someone falling on floor and moving his
four legs]. That [move] means they are so surprise or so angry. They put their face on the ground and are trembling like that. That’s it, that’s moleitau. There is nothing to understand but audience thought it was very funny. So they use the words moleitau from an expression with actually contains four words:
'mo lei tau gau;' 'gau' meaning penis. So it was like they were saying: 'What’s the fuck?',
'What’s the penis?' |
Stephen Chow in Fight Back To School |
| HKCinemagic : So the genre comes from you and Chow. |
| Wong Jing : Yes, both of us laughed at the anime. We thought it was hilarious, and to act
in a film like a Japan animation character was also very funny. |
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| HKCinemagic : Were you also influenced by other comic actors, like Jim Carrey? |
| Wong Jing : Actually, I don’t like Jim Carrey. |
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| HKCinemagic : What about Michael Hui? |
| Wong Jing : Michael Hui is good. He was inspired by a lot of the old time [Cantonese] comedians like Leung Sing Bor. |
Michael Hui dans Private Eyes |
| HKCinemagic : But Hui’s films can’t be categorized as moleitau? |
Wong Jing : Actually, they borrow things from the Saturday Night Live [Saturday Night Live is a 90-minute comedy and music television series that has been broadcast live from New York City on NBC since 1975], all ideas come from this show, and Woody Allen, and some American dramas [Ed.: Hui claimed to be inspired by Chaplin, Leung Sing Bor, Billy Wilder and Robert Wise].
If you study the Saturday Night Live shows and Benny Hill [Show] and those things, you can find Hui’s [ideas] there. |
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| HKCinemagic : Do you think for the moleitau the best actor is Stephen Chow? |
| Wong Jing : Actually I don’t think moleitau is a term for a system. It is just an impression after watching our films. So we were not doing moleitau films
on purpose, we just did it. If people liked to categorize it into moleitau genre, it was not our idea, not our initial intention. |
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