MEET Ringo Lam Ling-tung. Name sound familiar? Try City On Fire. Need another hint? Think of Hollywood director Quentin Tarantino. Lam's City On Fire is the film Tarantino is accused of plagiarising for his hit movie Reservoir Dogs. Lam shrugs when this is mentioned. He has obviously heard it before.
'I am lucky that people can take my film and compare it with [Reservoir Dogs]. It can only make my name better known and help my career actually,' the 41-year-old director said over lunch recently.
'There's nothing unfair about it. I see a lot of Hollywood movies myself to do research and learn from them. American directors also watch a lot of shows. [Tarantino] is no different. I will be influenced by directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, Alan Parker and Martin Scorsese. But I won't plagiarise. So far I have drawn the line at that.' Plagiarising would be difficult, to say the least, since Lam says his movies are all personal reflections drawn from his own life. In his films he sometimes searches for his true self.
'Sometimes I cannot even understand myself. Some things I have to find in the movies. They tell me what kind of person I actually am.' If you look hard enough, it is not difficult to see beyond the explosions and gunfire to find the real him, Lam conceded after further probing.
'Each of my films is a representation of my feelings at that particular period of time. When you spend that time locked up with a film, you will ask yourself 'if things were like this, how would I react?' and all the true feelings will come out.' So far, Lam's films have told him that he is a loner and very contradictory - 'I desperately need friends but find them difficult to make' - and a pessimist who 'sees things in a very grey light'.
Lam would probably be quite happy for people to keep on believing that he was pessimistic and cold but our leisurely chat revealed more to him than meets the eye.