Initially, 10-12 years ago, there were two stories ideas. The movie wasn't supposed to be about martial arts, it was about music. It was about old people coming together and making music again. They just wanted to perform one last gig. Another concept was to get all the action stars from the 60's, 70's, 80's and 90's, and get the usual good guys to play the bad guys, and the bad guys to play the good guys. The movie was about non-stop fighting, action, and justice. So eventually I combined these two stories and it worked. I just don't know why.

The reason why I am into it and am doing it is because it [kung fu] is a special genre. It was created in HK by HK cinema. I thought, “If I was to make a movie in HK, let's make something relevant.” Everybody is saying the HK cinema industry is dying. The first day I was working in the movie industry in HK, people were telling me I was so unlucky. “It's too late, the peak is over. You are not going to earn money. You'll have to do something else.” They were saying it in a good way, like they were trying to help. And they were saying this was not a good place anymore. I guess the only reason I had a chance to direct movies is because all the big name directors thought there was no market anymore in HK, and they all went up north to make movies in China. Like I said, I go the other way.

The process took eight months. We kept changing the script again and again and again. They said we couldn't have the local HK elements in it because it was supposed to be a Chinese film now. We couldn't have any bad guys because it looked like triads. You know that's crazy, but we did it anyway. At the end, after eight months, there was just one dialogue line they felt offended by: at the very end, a line about what kung fu really means. My partner Derek Kwok and I wrote the whole script again, and thought it was nothing [like] we had come up with at the beginning. And if we were going to make these compromises, we were going to do a shit movie.

It might not be bad but it's something we really didn't want to do. Even though we waited for ten years to get people to invest in it, we thought, “F*@! it, we're not going to do this.” We just quit. We discussed it for two or three days, and it was a really hard decision. We kind of regretted it the day after we told Mr. Lau. But then it was all good, and we held up our own dignity, I think. That was the only thing we had left at the end.

Three months later, Mr. Lau got someone to call and ask us if we still wanted to make the movie, but with one third of the budget. We were totally shocked. It was supposed to be an action film. For no reason at all, and with exactly the same gut feeling, we said “Okay, let's do this.” We just didn't know how we were going to do it. When we got off the phone, we called people who did a lot of action and martial arts movies. And they said, “You'd better call back and say you won't be able to do it.”

Clement Cheng and Derek Kwok on the set of Gallants.

We only had 18 days to shoot and a limited budget. The cheapest and shittiest martial arts films take 25 to 30 days just to shoot the action scenes. We only had five days to shoot the action scenes and 18 days to shoot the whole movie. We didn't know how to do it. We just persevered. Many people chipped in and helped, especially the actors. They really, really helped. We had two cameras on set everyday but we only had one set of lenses, one set of tracks and one director of photography.

Poster of Gallants.