As one of Hong Kong's first batch of bona fide pop stars, Teddy Robin and his band, the Playboys, were the most popular ticket among local hipsters in the 1960s. So Teddy Robin Kwan Wai-pang is the last person one would expect to be apprehensive about taking up a musical challenge. But that's exactly how he says he feels as he recalls his initial doubts about writing the soundtrack for same-sex romance Permanent Residence, directed by rookie filmmaker Scud.
'I did feel a bit nervous about not being up to the challenge, as my past work has always been either for very robust, masculine films or straightforward love stories,' he says, laughing. 'But then again, I realised this is a love story, too - just the sexuality's different. I've always wanted to try my hand at working on different types of movies, and Scud's film is an outright gay-themed film, something I haven't done before. Well, if he had confidence in me, I was more than up for it.'
And Kwan (right) is very much up for collaborations with young talent these days. Of the new generation of directors, he is closest to Derek Kwok Chi-kin, who honed his skills as a screenwriter under Kwan's tutelage before he made his break with 2007's The Pye-Dog (on which Kwan worked as producer and composer) and last year's The Moss (another film with a Kwan score). It's not coincidental that he's mostly preoccupied with newcomers these days: describing himself as a trickster with a penchant for edgier material, Kwan says he's fascinated by how directors such as Kwok and Heiward Mak Hei-yan (the 23-year-old director of High Noon fame) dare to defy convention in their work.
'They might not be thriving at the box office, since these young directors are not working on productions on a lavish scale. But at least they are creative,' he says. 'They have the guts to shake off the constraints dictated by the market. That's already a good thing.'
His lament about the conformity demanded by mainstream film financiers and distributors is rooted in first-hand experience, he says: he has been unable to secure funding for many screenplays he and his associates have written, most of which remain locked up at home. That explains Kwan's absence from frontline filmmaking for the past decade after his ubiquity in Hong Kong cinema in the 1980s, when he helped engineer the success of Cinema City studio - a company he presided over as part of a creative septet that also included Karl Maka, Raymond Wong Pak-ming, Eric Tsang Chi-wai and Tsui Hark. He also worked on projects alongside Tsang at Alan and Eric Productions (Alan being singer-actor Alan Tam Wing-lun), Friend Cheers Limited, and finally Tedpoly Films, a Polygram movie subsidiary he ran.
True to his word, his slate included films that are hardly mainstream commercial fare: he was a champion of Clara Law Cheuk-yiu's work, for example, producing the migration-themed comedy The Other Half and the Other Half and its more solemn, dramatic counterpart Autumn Moon, and the period epic Temptation of a Monk (starring Wu Hing-guo and Joan Chen).
Kwan's filmography is all the more impressive given that he started out as a musician. His first brush with film was in 1971, he says, when he read a newspaper report about a competition for experimental 8mm films.