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INTERVIEW
WITH DANTE LAM
05 April 2009 | 1600 HRS Hibiscus Room The Grand Hyatt
It’s
not easy shooting action movies in Hong Kong, as veteran
director Dante Lam will tell you promptly.
“Hong Kong is actually quite
a small place, and there are a lot of people and cars
on the road. If you’re just doing fistfights,
then that’s much easier. But if you’re shooting
gun battles or explosions, then that’s really
quite difficult,” he said.
The trick is, he divulges, to do it
secretly whenever possible- unless of course the movie
calls for an extended gunfight or explosion scene. In
which case, it will require many days of preparation
just to shoot that scene, something his latest movie
“The Sniper” certainly necessitated.
In fact, the movie’s finale takes
place in downtown Hong Kong where three expert snipers,
Hartman (Ritchie Jen), OJ (Edison Chen) and Lincoln
(Huang Xiaoming) face off in a climatic showdown. It
is the culmination of a rivalry between two of them,
Hartman and Lincoln- the latter bent on exacting revenge
after suspecting Hartman of framing him for a mission
gone wrong.
Like several of his previous movies
“Beast Stalker” and his award-winning “Beast
Cops”, “The Sniper” also features
conflicted characters at odds with one another. And
this is by no means coincidental.
“Every movie needs a theme. You
can’t just film an action movie for the sake of
an action movie. You need to find a theme in the movie,
a message that you want to share with your audience.”
He added: “The Sniper is about
the mistakes that all of us make in our lives. All of
us have our own ego. The question is whether we can
face up to our own pride, whether we can triumph over
our arrogance and confront our difficulties.”
But ask him how this applies to Edison
Chen in real life, and he gets a little miffed. Dashing
away persistent comparisons between the similarity of
Edison Chen’s headstrong sniper character OJ and
his real-life persona, he encourages the media to see
how self-confidence is a necessary quality for OJ and
a sniper in general.
Certainly, he would know- the director
has spent more than 10 years of research familiarising
himself with the material. Since his directorial debut
back in 1997 with Option Zero, a movie about the elite
paramilitary Special Duties Unit (SDU) of the Hong Kong
Police Force, the director said that he has constantly
been in contact with people in the Special Forces.
Indeed, “The Sniper” is
one more in his long list of films that reflect the
interest he has always had in such a subject matter.
But the movie, which was completed more than a year
ago, had its release date delayed by the studio because
of the infamous Edison Chen scandal. That was a feeling
for him, “like a father waiting for his wife to
give birth to his child”.
Even so, the movie will not be released
in China- but he is not upset. Speaking almost philosophically,
he said: “Every movie has its own life, so maybe
this movie is not meant to live its life there. But
still there will always be other places where it will
be able to thrive.”
Surely, after 15 years of directing
action films, director Dante Lam knows that there has
been and probably will always be an audience for action
movies. “I was very surprised when “The
Sniper” actually sold out both its screenings
at a film festival in France.” And to be sure,
he added, the people who saw it actually enjoyed it
very much.
The Sniper opens 9 April 2009
The
Sniper Singapore Press Conference + Interview with Richie
Jen
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