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Clarence Tsui

Dennis Law Sau-yiu remembers the day last summer when he was set up to shoot an outdoor fight scene by a nullah in Fanling for his latest film, Bad Blood.  
A black storm swept in and, as  the water levels  rose, Law quickly decided to scrap the scene, asked his crew to pack up and arranged for everyone to relocate to Tuen Mun to shoot something else.
Making a snap decision like  that would not have been possible had Law not been  the movie's  director, screenwriter, producer  and financier.
'I guess my strength lies in the fact that I'm everything rolled into one,' he says, laughing. 'I didn't  have to convene a meeting with anyone - the deliberations all happened in my head.'
Law says he's best at 'coaxing a workable situation out of a cul-de-sac'.  After studying film directing at Los Angeles' Loyola Marymount University, Law's first credited role in a Hong Kong film was as producer of Johnnie To Kei-fung's  2005 underworld drama Election. At that time he was  also chairman of the company To founded, Milkyway Image, after he acquired a majority stake from the veteran filmmaker. 
Law has since established himself as a director, having  made six films since  his directorial debut, the teen-drama The Unusual Youth, in 2005. 
However, the 46-year-old still talks about his work from a producer's point of view, explaining how he shaped each film with marketing and distribution  in mind. 
Bad Blood is a case in point: Law explains he assembled the cast and the storyline - which revolves around a deadly struggle for power within a gang  - so that it would  click with local audiences and international buyers. 
Bernice Liu Bik-yee, who plays a ruthless killer in the film, was recruited partly because  she is one of TVB's most popular stars. Former mainland wushu champion Jiang Luxia was brought in not only because of her martial arts expertise. 'There's quite a market worldwide for films with female fighters - so I reworked my original story to accommodate her,' Law says. 
US-born Andy On Chi-kit,  one of the most ubiquitous action men in Hong Kong cinema today, was drafted in to 'package the film for international markets' owing to his appeal with foreign audiences familiar with his roles in the Jackie Chan film  New Police Story and Johnnie To's Mad Detective.  
Law says pragmatism is key to filmmaking, as films are 'inevitably market-driven and capital-intensive commodities. And at the end of  the day, I have to consider where  the audiences and the markets are,' he says. 
If Law talks like a businessman, it's because he is one. When not making films, he is the managing director of Yu Tai Hing, a privately held firm which began life as a pawn shop a century ago and grew into a  medium-sized property developer under the stewardship of Law's father, Lo Shiu-tong. Although Law  harboured dreams of being a filmmaker from an early age, he took up the mantle of the family business when he returned from his studies in the US in 1989 'without that much of a struggle inside'.
He was already in touch with the film industry by then, as he returned to Hong Kong during his summer holidays to work at the Shaw Brothers studio. 
'The studio system was at an end and morale was already very low when I went there - and when Golden Harvest lost its own studio [in Diamond Hill], you could see it was the end of an era for Hong Kong cinema,' he says. 'So I concentrated on my own property development business in the early 1990s. The film industry was in a pretty chaotic time then anyway  and I saw it was probably not a good time for me to wade into the scene.'
It was movie mogul Charles Heung Wah-keung who helped Law enter the industry. Heung introduced Law to directors working on the films his entertainment corporation, China Star, was producing, and the novice filmmaker began his apprenticeship by attending screenplay-developing conferences for various projects before gaining access to the set of Herman Yau Lai-to's  2004 comedy Papa Loves You.  
It was around the same time when Law met Johnnie To, who was then looking for someone to invest in his cash-strapped Milkyway Image. Law bought the controlling stake from To and spent two years with the company, travelling overseas to film festivals to promote films such as Election, Election 2  and Triangle. 
'I met with buyers and distributors who watch and purchase the rights of Hong Kong films,' he says. 'It was then that I realised that the only genre in demand out there was action films.'
That explains Law's decision to concentrate on making martial arts thrillers when he left Milkyway in 2006 to start his own company, Point of View  Movie Production. Describing his first two teen comedies (the other being Love @ First Note, a pop-idol showcase dressed up as a romantic drama) as 'experiments', he regards 2006's Fatal Contact, a film about clandestine, no-holds-barred boxing matches in Hong Kong, as his first proper film. 
'I was quite disappointed when it didn't do well in Hong Kong,' says Law, referring to the film's dismal HK$4 million box-office  take here. 'But good news arrived soon after. My agents called and said how the film was bought by video-makers in the US, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, South Africa and Hungary.' 
Such success led to the gory Fatal Move, which boasts the appearance of veteran stars Sammo Hung Kam-bo and Danny Lee Sau-yin  in leading roles. 
Violence also features in Law's next film, A Very Short Life.  But in a very different way: steering clear  of the fight-fests of the previous  two films, it's a low-budget production about a young girl's death at the hands of an abusive step-father. 
'I read stories about paedophiles and domestic abuse and  that was something which, as a filmmaker,  I wanted to stir up discussion about,' says Law. The story unfolds as a flashback, with a police inspector revisiting the case at the request of her friend, a property developer-cum-filmmaker called ...  Dennis Law.
Played by veteran actor Eddie Cheung Siu-fai, the character signposts what Law describes  as his  empathy for people  around him. 
'Or maybe you could say I'm quite inquisitive,' he says. His penchant for drawing inspiration  on real stories also drives Bad Blood: he says the murderous fighting in the film was  based on the rumours he heard of the disputes among his distant relatives.
Law has already finished a new film, a horror flick called Womb Ghost, and plans to launch co-productions aimed at mainland audiences - a market he has failed  to break into, owing to  the violence and bloodshed in most of his previous films. 
But his property business is standing in the way of him achieving his goal. 'There's  no way I could give up my property development business and head up to the mainland on a three-month shoot. I couldn't even afford to do that in Hong Kong. I love films, but I have to make money as well - it's too much of a price for me to pay.' 
For the time being, the pragmatist still has the upper hand over the idealist in the battle in Law's multitasking mind. 
Bad Blood opens today




But wait ...  there's gore