Nick Chin made his start working in documentary films before directing the award winning short film Tai Tai. Following the success of that film, Chin directed his first feature length film, Magazine Gap Road, an icy noir about a former high class prostitute Samantha (Jessey Meng), who fled her former lover and client, the terrifying Hans (Zhen Shiming) and made a new life for herself in the upper crust of Hong Kong. This life is threatened when an old friend, Kate (Qu Ying), resurfaces, dragging Samantha back into Hans’s orbit. This unusually star-studded first feature also stars Hong Kong legends Richard Ng, who appeared in just about every comedy made in Hong Kong in the 1980s, and Elvis Tsui, who did the same in just about every Category III film, as well as Ng’s son, Carl. While the subject matter may be grimy, the treatment is anything but – Chin presents some of the most gorgeous views of Hong Kong I’ve seen in years and dresses his cast in high style.

Cinema Strikes Back’s David Austin recently had an opportunity to talk with Chin, who was in New York for the presentation of Magazine Gap Road at the 2009 New York Asian Film Festival, about his work as an independent filmmaker in Hong Kong and the making of Magazine Gap Road.

On His Early Career and Television Projects

CSB: I understand that you are not from Hong Kong. Where did you grow up?

NC: I grew up in London. My parents are Shanghainese. I lived in New York for about eight years and I’ve been in and out of Hong Kong. I have been in Hong Kong for the past three years because of this film.

CSB: I can hear the London in your accent.

NC: It’s a bit of overseas Chinese, is the best way of saying it.

CSB: You were in New York for eight years with your family?

NC: Yes, I was working here. I used to work in documentaries, stuff for PBS. Occasionally I would go to Hong Kong to do some work. So I’m sort of in between Hong Kong and New York, but to be honest with you, there’s more work in Hong Kong at the moment so I seem to be spending more time in Hong Kong.

CSB: Is that how you got your start in film?

NC: I worked in the BBC in London for about four years, Channel 4, but it was mainly historical documentaries. Then I came to the States and worked for production companies down in Soho, one called Ambrica, that did documentaries on Eleanor Roosevelt. I worked on one on Tojo and I did some stuff for another production company for the Dame Edna show. I did the Millennium Special (laughs). That was fun. At the same time, when digital video and Final Cut Pro came out, I did workshops at the AFI and started to do my stuff. And then I started to do web videos and commercials in Hong Kong – freelance work. And then I did Tai Tai. After that, I came back to New York to finish that up. Then I did some more freelance stuff in Hong Kong. But then I wrote the script, pretty much, in New York, and went out and shopped it and did it in Hong Kong. Since then, I have been working on another project and I did a TV series, an Asian Jackass and commercials and stuff like that.

CSB: An Asian Jackass, with people doing silly stunts and stuff like that?

NC: Yeah. We had a guy who broke the Guinness Book World Record for being shot point-blank with paint guns.

CSB: In terms of range or quantity?

NC: In terms of how many and within a certain amount of time. He got shot like 348 times. My god. This was almost like a year ago. We hit all the S&M dungeons in Kowloon, which was exciting. There are a lot of office fetishes. They have these dungeons with offices in them. (laughs)

CSB: Kowloon’s the best place to find that kind of thing?

NC: Yeah, only in Kowloon. There are three of them. And all around Mongkok. You know, S&M people take themselves really seriously. The Asian Jackass crew was like two Thai stuntmen and a bunch of young guys. But one of the mistresses there has a whole theory behind it. They had electric shocks for nipples. And there was one room that was totally black and all the sexual toys glowed in the dark. What was really depressing were the one-room dungeons. You could tell that they lived there and had just converted it into a dungeon and it was just sort of rank.

CSB: Is that going to be on Hong Kong television?

NC: No, for AXN. I just did it freelance for a month.

CSB: Were you always directing before Tai Tai or did you take on other roles.

NC: Oh no no no. I was a coffee boy for years, then assistant editor, PAs. The documentaries were never my documentaries; they were me learning the ropes. The reason I left London was that I spent three years on this huge documentary about China which in the end never got funded. I started out as a researcher. My boss then had just done something called The People’s Century, which was this big thing about the 20th Century, and when we started he had a whole office in the BBC, and when it ended it was just him and me on the kitchen table. As it became apparent that the funding was being pulled, he just promoted me; he said, “Oh, Nicholas, you’re now an associate producer.” (laughs) So I came to New York and I was like “I’m an associate producer” and I was applying for jobs as an associate producer. I got this one job, down in Soho, and after the first week, the boss was like “Nick, you don’t know what you’re doing” and I was like “NO.”

On Tai Tai

CSB: Can you tell us a little bit about Tai Tai (2002)?

NC: It was an early film done with Josie Ho. She’s been in a lot of Johnny To films since then. I had the idea for the script and someone knew her. We talked and she liked the idea. So I shot it. And it was great. I think most of the people who worked on it had just graduated from the APA, the Academy of Performing Arts in Hong Kong. The cameraman, Charlie [Charlie Lam, who has since gone on to shoot a number of films for Ann Hui and Pang Ho-cheung, including Pang’s Exodus, also playing at NYAFF 2009], is now one of the top cameramen in Hong Kong but then it was literally his first film out of school. It was a fun group of young people. It’s a story about a Tai Tai, which is slang for a lady who lunches. It’s about what goes on behind the gated door and what’s in her mind – the claustrophobia and the frustration of that sort of high society world. I got a call and it went into competition in Cannes, I think in 2002 or 2003, so that was a mini-break. And then it won an award at Kodak. After that, I took about a half a year to get my head back to normal again, and I was trying to work on a script about that. And while doing that, I ended up working on Magazine Gap Road.

On Magazine Gap Road

CSB: How did Magazine Gap Road get started?

NC: I have a friend who has a similar background to Samantha in film. We were hanging out one afternoon and I overheard this conversation she had with this friend from her past. The conversation sort of struck me. And it wasn’t until half a year later when I was thinking of trying to do a script that it sort of started the script. And the relationship she had with the woman in the past was a bizarre one. She was still in that world while my friend was out of that world. But when they talked it was a weird conversation where they’re both in and out. I’m sure it’s the same with junkies, people who don’t do drugs and people who do drugs. There was a coldness about it, but you could tell they were very close friends. That got the whole Kate and Samantha thing going.

CSB: Did you talk to her a lot while you were preparing the script to get the details and milieu correct?

NC: Not really, no. Where the film takes place, on Magazine Gap Road, I know through other people in Hong Kong, a little bit. The main thing was that I fell in love with the Peak, and a lot of it came from that.

CSB: You mentioned before that the Peak is really a very upscale neighborhood that overlooks the main part of the city. In the film, is the Peak essentially the life that Samantha is trying to get for herself?

NC: Yeah. It is. In Hong Kong, in that world of Hong Kong society, living on the Peak is very prestigious. It’s the same as people who live in penthouses in New York, there’s this weird sort of thing where you live at the top and you’re just looking down at everybody and they look like ants. There’s a certain feel, an isolation. And that area is not the Hong Kong that I know or you know. It’s not crowded, it’s not chaotic, it’s not loud. It’s different. So I’m trying to do a film in Hong Kong but it’s a different side of Hong Kong.

CSB: Given the subject matter, Magazine Gap Road could have been a message film, but instead it felt like a noir, a character-driven piece. Did you think of it as purely a character-driven piece or did you also think of it as trying to get out a message about the situation.

NC: I’m not a big message person. The films of the genre I like, I like Paul Schrader a lot, I remember watching a lot of his films when writing it. The noir stuff – I read thrillers. I need to read to go to bed at night so the noir sort of thing is in my head a lot.

CSB: Any particular ones in your head when making Magazine Gap Road?

NC: In terms of specific films, it was Light Sleeper, the Paul Schrader film, and American Gigolo. Touch of Evil, it didn’t really come through, but I liked a lot. The filmmaker I like a lot is Max Ophuls. They are very beautiful films and they take place in a similar world but it is in Viennese high society. But the subject matter is just really f—ing brutal. You know, really dark, and it’s very different than what you see and it creeps in when you watch the films. How much of those influences came through, I doubt, very little.

CSB: Visually, to me, in terms of that sort of lightness and darkness, it felt almost like a Jacques Demy film, like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, though the umbrella in one of the scenes may be a tip-off on that. Just visually, was that the kind of look you were going for?

NC: Yeah. Color. Yes. In the beginning, I wanted to keep this color saturation but have the contrast of black and white film. Like Touch of Evil. We were comatosing for a week and you can’t do it. There’s a reason why black and white films have that look – it’s because they’re black and white. And we were trying to put color in. But no, we talked a lot about the color palette before, with the clothes and in the locations. I wanted it colder – I mean, it’s a cold film. In terms of the colors we wanted to use, it had to have that in there.

CSB: You have acknowledged before that there is a glamour and a sheen to the film, and you could not have shot it any other way. Is that because it was necessary for the plot, or is that just your preference and you wouldn’t do it any other way?

NC: First, because of the script and the world it is in – that world of rich people - it’s all quite pretty looking. Film is a visual medium. I like films that do something to the eye. The things that I wanted in the picture I could do with this glamorous sheen. The clothes she wore and the places she went to - we shot the real locations in the film - are the real locations in real life. Some of the bars and the hotels match.

And, in Hong Kong, it’s a little different. You don’t call them high-class hookers. They’re mistresses in Hong Kong. There’s a lot more ambiguity and the rituals behind it are a little different, which I didn’t really go into in the film but it’s much more gray than in the States, where it’s escorts and street hookers. Out there, it’s mistresses, they’re longer-term relationships that these tycoons or sons of tycoons seem to have.

CSB: Are we to think that the Samantha character is someone who would have had a very select list of clients?

NC: She would have had one client. It would have been Hans. That type of character wouldn’t want her to be with anybody else.

CSB: I think I misunderstood that. I thought of Hans as more of a pimp or procurer. I understood they had a relationship but not that he was necessarily her client, precisely.

NC: I see that. I think in the original in my mind he was more like a client, but I suppose he comes off as a bit of a pimp too.

CSB: It’s probably the air of menace that does it. On another topic, I know you got Elvis Tsui, who I love, to be in the film. Did you ever think about using him as Hans instead of putting him in the role you did, as a policeman who assists Samantha.

NC: I could have, but approaching Elvis – I liked his stuff, particularly Viva Erotica. In the script, the policeman was a bigger character than Hans and I like the idea that Elvis looks big and has all this baggage with the sort of films he’s done before – a sort of type. And to have him be soft seemed to work more with the policeman character.

CSB: I liked seeing him cast against type.

NC: Also, the producers were involved in getting him and we talked about it and the policeman seemed a better choice.

CSB: Did you always have him in mind?

NC: From very early on.

CSB: How about Richard Ng? Was he always someone you had in mind for the film?

NC: Yes, but we didn’t think it was possible in the beginning. He’s a star, he’s done all these films, and he was in London. We wanted Carl Ng to be in the film, so it was like “Can we get them both?”

CSB: Were you tempted to throw in some slapstick for him?

NC: (laughs) I couldn’t add it to the script. Anyway, Richard has done a lot of more serious roles recently. It actually helps when casting him if you can say it for something different.

CSB: Giving him an opportunity to avoid typecasting?

NC: Right.

CSB: I understand that the budget was around $300,000. How did you put that together?

NC: There were three different producers. I also have some of my own money in the film. Early on, Lee Chiu-wah, who helped produce The Mummy 3 [Tomb of the Dragon Emperor], 2046, Lust, Caution, came aboard. The film could not have been done without him. He helped out a lot and I was able to go to him with questions during the process. In order to work with his timing, the pre-production had to be very short. Post-production took much longer. The film spent a lot of time with Oriental Post in Thailand. The actual filming took about a month.

CSB: Is the film screening in theaters or is it still making the festival circuit?

NC: It’s at festivals now, and it will get a “limited release” in Hong Kong before it comes out on DVD.

CSB: Are you going to try to release it in the US at all?

NC: I would like to, but it’s a hard time for Asian films in the US, as you know.

CSB: One last question. Has your friend seen the movie?

NC: No comment.

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Thanks to Nick Chin and to Grady Hendrix for arranging this interview.

© David Austin