All the right moves: Dance director on magic behind the film

Give Them a Chance. That was the title of a 2003 Herman Yau Lai-to film about a director who befriends a group of young street dancers who practise hip hop moves at night outside the Hong Kong Cultural Centre.

And giving them a chance - and more - is what Adam Wong Sau-ping decided to do with the group of youthful talents he cast in The Way We Dance. The spirited dance drama revolves around a first-year undergraduate who lives to dance, her university dance crew, and the older tai chi student who brings a special something to her life.

A visiting lecturer at Hong Kong Polytechnic University as well as a filmmaker, Wong got the idea for his latest film after seeing a group of dancers regularly trying out their hip hop moves in the open space outside a 7-Eleven near Poly U. He was surprised to find that they were a university dance crew who had not been granted a formal place to practise.

After checking out performances at a variety of dance venues, including "clubs, community halls, and college extravaganzas", the 38-year-old director-scriptwriter decided that his next foray into filmmaking, after 2007's magician-focused Magic Boy, would be "a really cool hip hop dance movie". So along with his partner, producer-scriptwriter-lyricist Saville Chan Sum-yiu, Wong proceeded to organise multi-round auditions to unearth young dance and acting talents.

"I chose all of the main cast through auditions. Not a single one of them was previously decided upon. Some films pretend they are holding auditions, to act as a promotion, when the companies already have stars in mind. Not with this movie," he says when we meet to talk at a dance studio in Kwun Tong.

"I think we had nearly 500 people audition," Wong says. To hear him tell it, it was as if they were conducting a version of Hong Kong's Got Talent. "We saw a lot of great people, the hidden talents of Hong Kong," he says.