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.