In 1995, director Fruit Chan began to hoard fragments of unused film stock. For a decade, Chan had been associated with the Golden Harvest Studio, for which he directed his first feature, Finale In Blood, in 1991. The name turned out to be semi-prophetic: although there wasn't exactly a massacre, its poor reception signalled the beginning of the end of his relationship with the studio and encouraged him to go independent.
Salvaging snippets of celluloid was an essential part of this indie plan because Chan had so little money. Within a year, he had collected 80,000 feet of stock and raised US$80,000 (HK$623,000) from friends. Then he began shooting with an unpaid crew of five and a cast culled from the streets. Amazingly, out of this haphazard patchwork of material and intent, he created the film Made In Hong Kong. It won Best Film at the 17th Hong Kong Film Awards and made the shortlist for a Best Foreign Film Oscar nomination.
It's worth rehashing this oft-told tale of endeavour - to do a Chan, in effect, but recycle old press cuttings instead of film stock - in order to make the essential point, early on, that the motley method which characterised his first success has never left him. This was going to be the story behind the making of one film; unexpectedly, it became a story behind the making of another one. So anyone who wants to profile Chan, and to attempt an analysis of how he works, also has to fashion a sequence out of fractured images and snippets of sound, worry occasionally about continuity and hope the fragments make sense. The good news is it's a professional plan that has worked well for him.
TAKE ONE. It is a warm night, about 11pm, in early May, a couple of weeks after Chan's 42nd birthday, and he's standing in Spring Garden Lane in Wan Chai talking about his latest project, titled Public Toilet. In fact, he's in a public lavatory, amiably mooching around the deserted men's stalls while the photographer takes pictures. One flight of stairs up is the women's loo: four young women, two of them in pyjamas, are chatting girlishly together. They're probably immigrants, for this is still a corner of Hong Kong island where the buildings are hives of rooms, each housing one family. It's quintessential Chan-land: unglossy, mildly claustrophobic, a potential story-cluster of desperate optimism or optimistic desperation, depending on how you look at it.
Chan chooses to see it both ways. He likes to portray unhappy squalor but he also likes the sunny, ridiculous moment. He doesn't like, he says, 100 per cent gloomy films and even in trying circumstances (of which more later), he always has the expression of someone who might be on the cusp of a ribald laugh. Perhaps Public Toilet will be the perfect expression of that - toilet humour in the most literal sense.
He talks about various lavatories he has known on his cinematic circuit. China: 'Last year, I made my film Durian Durian in north China, there I have to pay the toilet attendant RMB1, he gives me chewing gum, then you realise it's for the smell.' Germany: 'Two years ago, when I went to participate in the Berlin Film Festival, I went to a very modern toilet, aluminium, shiny, if you're a man you can see your 'baby' in the mirror.' India, where he has been filming most recently: 'India is a big public toilet, you can go anywhere in the streets, it's very, very free.'