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Conversations with Peter Chan Ho Sun
Perhaps Love 4/7 - Page 4
Info
Author(s) : Thomas Podvin
Date : 27/10/2008
Type(s) : Interview
 
 Intext Links  
People :
Jacky Cheung Hok Yau
Movies :
Perhaps Love
 
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Autobiographical film, or not
HKCinemagic : Jacky Cheung reportedly said the movie was quite autobiographical for you.
Peter Chan : Everybody keeps saying it’s autobiographical because his character is a director, and I am a director, of course it sounds biographical. I think there is a nothing autobiographical. I don’t have a beautiful young actress wife like the character!
Cheung’s character is supposedly a mainland director. Not a HK director. It’s very different. HK directors are very approachable, mainland directors are very powerful. They’re officers in the party, high ranked people. They are very official, because in the party everything is official. Directors in the studio system are also ranked, class-1 director, class-2 directors, etc. They are like bosses.
In HK, directors aren’t bosses. Mainland directors have more stature in the industry. That’s why the audience will follow directors more than they follow stars. Not literally in term of following but in terms of box office, directors mean more than stars. In HK, stars mean much more than directors!

This movie is about a changing climate. China has been in a social and economical reform for the last twenty years. But the film sector only started to reform two years ago [2003]. So that’s the last sector to be reformed. I think mainland directors are dealing with a lot of crisis. All of a sudden, the director in the movie has to deal with a HK star. It’s like: “HK actors? Give me a break. In HK, they have stars and they don’t have actors.” Now a mainland director has to use a star and try to make him an actor. It’s really the dilemma for mainland directors.

However, Perhaps Love is autobiographical, because we, HK filmmakers, definitively need a bigger market for HK films. So the director in the film, and myself, are going through the same thing -- we need the movie to be bigger. So yes, I am going through a crisis, but it’s not prototypical of an HK director, it’s prototypical of a mainland director, including this relationship with this young actress wife. I don’t remember a single HK director with a young actress wife. I know a dozen of my mainland friends who have young actress wives; every one, the big and small directors, the very famous and not so famous ones. Everyone has a young actress wife.

With the emotion and the sentiment I put into this film this is my most personal film to date.


Jacky Cheung and Zhou Xun in Perhaps Love
Censors
HKCinemagic : Can co-productions like this one, between Shanghai and HK, be a solution to the current crisis of the Hong-Kong film industry? Can it help set an example for potential developments of the Chinese cinema industry as a whole?
Peter Chan : Some of the solutions I’ve tried for a few years were working with fellow Asian filmmakers, and that was my way of coping with the fact I still wasn’t conformable with the mainland censorship. Now it’s more and more relaxed. Even a film like Perhaps Love, would have been difficult a few years ago. Look at Comrades, everybody enjoyed the film, even the party officials, they all liked the movie. Even the older party officials have seen the movie. But the film was banned in China. It was sensitive because it portrayed mainland Chinese leaving, going to HK. But there was nothing political with the movie, I didn’t even write about the June 4th, 1989 issue [Ed.: The Tiananmen Square massacre]. That wasn’t a part of the movie, but the film was sill not uncensored. The thing is I was very nervous about how censors would affect contemporary movies.

If you’ve noticed, most of the co-productions are period movies. In period movies, you have no dispute. It’s not about reality of life and between what is really happening on the street [of our modern cities] and what is portrayed on the big screen, there is a big difference.

But that has changed a whole lot. Maybe not enough, because there isn’t a rating system, there is no PG or whatever. Which means you cannot make horror films, you cannot make scary movies, or violent movies. There are a lot of talks about it, but it still hasn’t happened, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen soon.

The HK filmmakers know from day one that unless you extend your film influence outside HK, HK should not have the right to make movies for the 6 millions people [living in HK]. There are just not enough people to watch movies to justify an investment. [In the past] HK was benefiting from the fact it was the Chinese filmmaking capital for Chinese overseas all over the world. But that has stopped. In the last five-ten years, it’s gone. It’s totally gone. Right now, our biggest hope is China, which has still a certain amount of censorship going on, even though [things are] better.

So I was working with Asian filmmakers. Are those really HK movies? They are not really HK movies. But even Perhaps Love isn’t a traditional HK movie. But it doesn’t matter; I still think that the spirit of HK filmmakers is very much evident inside Perhaps Love. Even though the story is about the mainland. But the approach is very specific because I am from HK. If I were from mainland, I think the story would have been very different.

 
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Page 3 : Love isn’t invincible
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