Monster tribute to a mother's love
More than a few filmmakers seem to like reflecting on their relationships with their mothers. But whereas many do so through cheesy tear-jerkers, director Soi Cheang Po-sui has gone for a thriller about the making of a monster.
In Home Sweet Home, the director of such cult hits as Horror Hotline ... Big Head Monster has a family of three move into a new flat. But the mother, May (Shu Qi), realises the tenants aren't alone in the building when she sees something climbing the lift vault.
They refer to the thing as a monster (hence the Chinese title, Gwai Mut), but it's actually a horribly disfigured woman (Karena Lam Ka-yan). She abducts May's young boy - who's the spitting image of the son she lost years ago - and a cat-and-mouse chase begins, during which the monster's past is slowly revealed.
Cheang says that the original idea, which he developed two years ago, was to have a father as the monster. 'But the impact and drama wouldn't be as big, because men seem to be more matter-of-fact when it comes to doing - and being capable of doing - such extreme things,' he says.
Cheang, who made last year's surprise hit Love Battlefield, says the film is dedicated to all mothers, including his own.
'I remember my mother hated me going into the film industry, and there was a time when I had nothing to do for six months,' he says. 'One day, she just walked over and put $500 on the table without saying a word. I cried. That's my mother - she might have been a hundred times worse off than I was at the time.'
One of the risks in the film was turning Lam - a local box-office darling - into a monster so scary that the image had to be removed from buses last week. Cheang wanted to show how far a mother would go to show her love for her son.
'When one lives on life's extreme edge, she's not afraid of anything any more because she has nothing to lose - and all she wants is her son,' the 33-year- old director says. 'This person had a lot of injuries and she could always have chosen to die. But she keeps on living because she has a strong hope of finding her son one day.'
But Cheang's vision came at a cost - Lam's makeup, which was done by Hollywood artist Mark Garbarino (Running on Karma), cost $2 million. It took eight hours to put on and two hours to take off, and Lam had to keep it on for at least 14 hours a day. Most of her scenes entailed her climbing walls or hiding behind filthy bins.
She wasn't the only one who had it tough. Presley Tam, the five-year-old boy who plays May's son, had to stay in a pool of dirty water with Lam for eight hours in order to shoot one scene. And many of Shu's scenes were shot in pouring rain or entailed her climbing air-conditioning units.
'They totally understood the necessity of all these,' says the director. 'The more difficult the scenes were, the more feeling they could get from them.'
The movie was shot in a few new housing complexes on the mainland because estates in Hong Kong turned him down, and Cheang says new buildings aren't as safe as they look.
'I just thought, if you move into a clean, brand new flat, but I then tell you there's been someone living there all along, wouldn't you have this really creepy feeling down your back?'
Home Sweet Home opens today
