Probably the worst nightmare for any film director is to receive a call from your financier telling you that the plug is being pulled on your HK$40 million movie.
That's what happened to award-winning director Mabel Cheung Yuen-ting one Christmas in the mid-1990s when she and her crew were stuck in the snow in the mainland's north scouting for locations.
'It was a nightmare. We had already hired a whole team of people to identify locations in Changchun to shoot the film,' Cheung said. 'Then one day, the company called up and said they would no longer support the project and asked us to stop.'
But Cheung did not give up on the project. The Soong Sisters, a film about the three most influential sisters in China at the turn of the 20th century, was dear to her heart.
She stayed on and completed the choosing of locations, flew back to Hong Kong and then waited outside various Christmas parties to talk to potential investors. 'That was a hard time as it was Christmas and no one was in the mood to talk about film investment,' she said.
After a long wait, she finally found a Japanese film company to finance the movie, which was completed and went on to be a box office hit in both Hong Kong and Japan. The experience was a hard lesson that the life of being a director was not just about red carpet award presentations and cocktails at the Cannes film festival. 'That is life: I did not take it as a nightmare but as a challenge. As a director, you always have to find investors to support your project,'' she said.
Cheung had quite an easy start in getting funding for her first film, Illegal Immigrant, in 1984. As a film student at the University of New York, her script was good enough to convince Mona Fong Yat-wah, the boss of Shaw Brothers, to give her HK$1 million to complete the movie for her thesis. Illegal Immigrant, based on the real life stories of her migrant friends, eventually won Shaw Brothers five times its investment: a return of HK$5 million at the box office. It also won Cheung the best director award at the Hong Kong Film Awards and ensured her smooth entry into Hong Kong's film industry.