All's well with Raymond Wong

With appearances in 64 films stretching back to 1978, Raymond Wong Pak-ming is a familiar face to viewers of Hong Kong movies - all the more so since the baby-faced filmmaker doesn't look to have aged much over the years.

For most of his considerable career, the 66-year-old veteran has been associated with comedies, whether the Happy Ghost series (in which he played the eponymous character) or the All's Well, Ends Well movies, the first of which had a star-studded cast that included Stephen Chow Sing-chi, Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing, Sandra Ng Kwan-yu and Teresa Mo Sun-kwan.

So it's disconcerting to see Wong, seated at the head of a conference table at his office in Quarry Bay, reeling off financial figures - until you remember he is not only a famous comic actor but also a prolific film producer (83 movies) and presenter (101 films), as well as a film industry heavyweight who has founded three successful movie companies.

And he still has time to make films: his Lunar New Year offering, Hotel Deluxe, is up against Chow's Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons and Eric Tsang Chi-wai's I Love Hong Kong 2013.

In 1980, Wong was one of three enterprising comedians who co-founded the Cinema City film company, under whose aegis 1980s classics such as Tsang's spy spoof, Aces Go Places, and John Woo Yu-sum's crime drama, A Better Tomorrow, were made. "In 1992, I started another company called Mandarin Films because my two [Cinema City] partners, Shek Kin and Karl Maka, retired," Wong says. In 2009, he established Pegasus Entertainment with his son, Edmond Wong Chi-woon.

This was also the year Wong senior returned to making comedies after a stint producing action movies that targeted the mainland market, following the implementation on January 1, 2004, of the mainland and Hong Kong Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement (Cepa).