As mentioned earlier, I was in touch with Richard Ng from Underground and it was great to not only have him on board as an actor but also being able to get advice from him and filming in HK as he has such vast experience in HK and China. Richard put his son Carl forward, who I met with in HK in Starbucks. Mike put me in touch with other local talents, such as Vincent Sze who plays Leung, the Bodyguard. I remember having a very long meeting late at night with Vincent and we hit it off.

Other cast from HK included Shing Fui-On who I was very excited about working with having been very familiar with his work, in particular in John Woo’s The Killer. We had Vincent Lam Wai (Roaring Wheels) and James Ha (Crime Story) who play the gang bosses as well as Brandon Rhea who plays a drunken businessman and was seen in Fearless alongside Jet Li.

I met Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa with Mark Strange at the American Film Market (AFM). He’s a very talented actor and has such great screen presence and a large body of work. He’s a real great guy. Very gentle individual and very different to the bad guy roles he plays onscreen. We showed him some extracts from Underground and he really liked the tone and style of the film as well as what we achieved with limited resources and we kept talking and there was a window he was free. After the Bodyguard shoot he went on to take a key role in the Tekken film based on the computer game.

Stephanie Langton who plays Chloe, the girl Leung is sent to protect, is from the UK. Stephanie came to an open audition and she just stood out amongst everyone we saw and we had literally hundreds of people applying for that role. After her audition I just kind of knew she’d be right.

As well as acting, I should add Mark Strange was also very integral (as with Underground) in bringing together some great UK action talents in his role as producer including Nathan Lewis (who’s a three-time kickboxing world champion) who plays one of the hired help in the film.

In Bodyguard: A New Beginning they play father and son. Carl’s character seeks approval from his father and also Boss. Richard’s character sees so much of himself in his son, and he’s concerned that he’ll make the mistakes he made early in his life. Both characters go on interesting journeys throughout the film.

There’s one sequence, which was a challenge for both involving Richard’s character pointing a gun at his son, Carl. That was certainly an intense and emotional moment.

When directing them, I really tried to push them both emotionally and psychologically. We also worked on some improvisation between the two. I like to work closely with the screenplay, but sometimes I also like things to be organic and at times, there are moments of magic which happen onscreen that you can’t predict. At times you never know when it’s going to come and it happens when you least expect it. I like to create an environment on set with actors, where they feel they can offer up ideas and suggestions and improvisation certainly allows that. At times, saying a line [in those circumstances] can come across a lot more real than when an actor ‘reads’ it from the script, or a reaction can come across more real when they actually don’t expect something to happen but it happens.