Actors - Tsui Hark

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	Actors - Tsui Hark

Tsui Hark () (born Tsui Man-kong (徐文光) on February 15, 1950) is a New Wave film director in Hong Kong who is also a highly influential producer, often likened to Steven Spielberg for a similar galvanizing effect on his country's cinematic scene.

Birography

Early biography

Sources, and Tsui himself, differ on whether he was born in Canton (Guangzhou) province of China or in Vietnam. He was raised in Saigon by his Chinese emigre parents, in a large family with sixteen siblings. Tsui showed an early interest in show business and movies; when he was ten, he and some friends rented an 8mm camera with which to film the magic show they put on at school. He also drew comic books, an interest that would influence his cinematic style.

He took his secondary education in Hong Kong starting in 1966. He then studied film in Texas, first at Southern Methodist University and then at the University of Texas at Austin, graduating in 1975. He claims to have told his parents he was studying to follow in his father's footsteps as a pharmacist, and that it was here he changed his given name to Hark ("overcoming") (Dannen & Long, 1997).

After graduation, Tsui moved to New York City. He worked on From Spikes to Spindles (1976), a noted documentary by Christine Choy on the history of the city's Chinatown. He also edited a Chinatown newspaper, developed a community theatre group and worked in Chinese-language cable TV. He returned to Hong Kong in 1977.

Television career

Tsui immediately found work directing in television along with a number of his future New Wave compatriots, first at pioneering station TVB and then at CTV. His 1978 series for CTV, The Gold Dagger Romance, was the start of Tsui's long association with the time-honored genre of wuxia, or martial arts swordplay. It is still considered a groundbreaking classic for the unusual energy and cinematic sensibility it brought to TV drama.

New Wave period

Upon turning to feature filmmaking, Tsui was quickly typed as a member of the "New Wave" of young, iconoclastic directors. His debut, The Butterfly Murders/Die Bian (1979), was an eccentric and technically challenging blend of wuxia, murder mystery and science fiction/fantasy elements. His second film, We're Going to Eat You (1980), was an eccentric blend of cannibal horror, black comedy and kung fu.

But it was his third, Dangerous Encounter of the First Kind (1980), that put him beyond the pale. The thriller about delinquent youths on a bombing spree was nihilistic, grisly and pregnant with angry political subtext. Heavily censored by the British colonial government, it was released in '81 in a drastically altered version titled Dangerous Encounter - 1st Kind (or alternately, Don't Play with Fire). Unsurprisingly, it was not a financial success. But it helped make Tsui a darling of film critics who had coined the New Wave label and were hopeful for a more aesthetically daring cinema, more engaged with the realities of contemporary Hong Kong (Teo, 1997).

Turn to blockbuster cinema

But then Tsui's career made an unexpected turn. In 1981, he joined Cinema City, a new production company founded by comedians Raymond Wong, Karl Maka and Dean Shek, that was instrumental in codifying the slick Hong Kong blockbuster movies of the '80s. Tsui played his part in the process with pictures like the 1981 crime farce All the Wrong Clues (for the Right Solution), his first hit, and Aces Go Places III: Our Man from Bond Street (1984), part of the studio's long-running spy spoof series.

For top studio Golden Harvest, Tsui made the wuxia fantasy Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain
(1983). He imported Hollywood technicians to help create special effects whose number and complexity were unprecedented in Chinese-language cinema. He has since made pushing back the boundaries of the industry's effects technology a continuing preoccupation.

Many former champions were disappointed by this turn to crowdpleasing pop films. He is still regarded in some quarters as a sellout and a prime example of Hong Kong film's inability to rise above vulgarity and commercialism (Bordwell, 2000; Teo, 1997).

Mogul and trendsetter

In 1984, he formed the Film Workshop production company along with wife and sometime producer Nansun Shi, making it home base for a tirelessly prolific roster of directing and producing projects. Here he also developed a reputation as a hands-on and even intrusive producer of other directors' work, fueled by public breaks with major filmmakers like John Woo and King Hu. His most longstanding and fruitful collaboration has probably been with Ching Siu Tung. As action choreographer and/or director on many Film Workshop productions, Ching made a major contribution to the well-known Tsui style (Hampton, 1997).

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