Also showing: Alexi Tan
It's fitting that Alexi Tan cites John Woo Yu-sum as an inspiration for his latest work. After all, the veteran filmmaker has become Tan's mentor and is the producer of Blood Brothers, Tan's first feature-length film.
Tan worked as a fashion photographer in New York before trying his hand at film in 2000 with a short piece titled 17.17, which had its premiere at the Brooklyn International Film Festival. He then moved to Hong Kong and began directing television commercials and music videos, which led to him making Double Blade, a short film that was also used as the video for a song by Jay Chou Jie-lun.
Woo discovered Tan through a chance viewing of Double Blade, and the two met in Los Angeles to discuss Tan's interest in features.
'I was seeking John's advice about how to go about my first film and he pretty much told me his story about how he shot Bullet in the Head,' says Tan, referring to Woo's trigger-happy classic about love and betrayal among a group of friends in wartime Saigon.
'He told me everything: the inspiration, and the whole filming process,' Tan says. 'Now it's a critical hit, but at that time it wasn't. He went through all this hardship on that film. Leaving the meeting, I was really inspired by the story. I watched the film again, and I thought the characters and the story could be great inspirations for a film.'
From that conversation emerged Blood Brothers. Taking his cue from Woo's film, Tan also focuses on three childhood friends: reluctant, self-doubting mobster Fung (Daniel Wu Yin-cho); ruthlessly ambitious Kang (Liu Ye); and his fragile brother Yu (Tony Yang). The film chronicles their fortunes in 1930s Shanghai, as the village boys rise within the city's underworld, their bond tested by the lure of power and fortune.
Another influence were the tales Tan's grandmother told him about Shanghai's gangsters. 'She's a student of [Peking Opera master] Mei Lanfang, so I grew up hearing [her stories] about old Shanghai,' he says. Apart from the glamour of the era, she told him tales about the notorious gangster Du Yuesheng and his heavies, who frequented the family home because her uncle worked for them.
Tan's final influence on Blood Brothers was Sergio Leone, whose spaghetti westerns were his favourite films in his childhood. 'I thought Shanghai in the 1930s was a pretty lawless time - like the wild west,' says Tan. 'Foreigners were coming in and there were international settlements. It was a pretty chaotic period - a great setting for my own western.'
Tan says he's still astonished that he's making films. 'Before I met [Woo and co-producer Terence Chang ] I thought the nearest I could get to becoming a filmmaker was doing photos, TV commercials, music videos and working with film people so I'd have a taste of what it felt like,' he says. 'I never thought I could actually get in.'
His decision to pack in his photography career came in the wake of the death of his father. 'It made me re-evaluate my life,' he says. 'I wasn't happy as a fashion photographer and I wasn't happy in New York. I spent a year being lost and crazy and confused.
'Then one day I thought, 'What the hell - I'm going to do what I want to do. I want to know what it's like to be behind a movie camera.' So whatever money I'd saved, I put into 17.17. It gave me more determination. I just let everything go.
'After I decided to do 17.17 it changed my outlook completely - I went with the flow,' he says. 'Even when I met John and Terence, it was fate. I didn't knock at their door and wasn't begging them to look at my reel.'
Blood Brothers opens today
