A little help from her friends

THE WAY THAT ACTRESS Charlie Young Choi-nei tells it, her directorial and screenwriting debut Christmas Rose came about with no small amount of help from her friends. The film, a controversial courtroom drama that tackles sexual harassment, opens on Young’s 39th birthday (May 23).

Christmas Rose is produced by veteran filmmaker Tsui Hark, who has directed Young in five films, including classic romantic tearjerker The Lovers (1994) and the martial arts actioner Seven Swords (2005). It’s co-produced by Jacob Cheung Chi-leung, the director of Intimates (1997), an affecting women’s drama which starred Young and Carina Lau Kar-ling. The film has its origins in an idea for a book that Young was considering writing in 2008. “But then I got thinking, ‘Why don’t I try something else instead of using just words?’ And then I thought of using something visual, because I love to watch movies and I often get inspiration from them,” she says. Once she had envisioned creating a cinematic work, inspiration came quickly, she explains: “The ideas came to me very fast, and I started trying them.”

The film stars Aaron Kwok Fu-shing – who has appeared in four films with Young – as an idealistic lawyer leading the prosecution’s case against a renowned doctor (Chang Chen) who is accused of rape by a wheelchair-bound patient (Kwai Lun-mei). The patient also happens to teach piano to the doctor’s daughter and the prosecuting attorney’s fiancée. Although the doctor protests his innocence, even his wife (Qin Hailu) starts doubting him when the prosecution presents its case in court. But he has a top defence lawyer (Xia Yu), and casts doubts on what the doctor’s accuser says took place when the two of them were left alone for a few minutes in the examination room of his clinic.

Young has written columns for publications in Malaysia, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Those unfamiliar with her prose may be surprised to learn how seriously she takes it. “I always feel when writing a column that it’s a platform to communicate with the readers, and I always treasure that. I never take it lightly,” she says.

Even after she started thinking of a film rather than a book, the sweet-faced woman who’s graced more than 20 films in almost 20 years sought to make sure that it would be a “a movie that involves good writing, a good script”.

Perhaps because her focus was on ensuring that her script would be of a high quality, “Writing was the most challenging part of this production. It was the part that took the longest time, I felt that the script must be ready before anything else. So I didn’t rush it for any schedule,” she says.