Quotes of the Day
Andy Lau, it turns out, is a lot like the rest of us. O.K., we don't have movie-idol looks and we don't make millions from crooning insipid love ballads to panting female audiences. But for a long time the iconic Canto-pop star saw his job in the same way most of us see ours: as a soul-deadening grind. Going back two decades, when he was starting in television, or to the mid-'80s, after he made his big leap into films, Lau was dogged by a sensation that he was sleepwalking through his performances. "In any movie," he says, "you showed your handsome face, maybe stood there in a smart pose, and that's it, that was enough. The hard part was already done."
He doesn't feel that way now. Four months into the shooting of the latest epic by mainland Chinese director and three-time Oscar nominee Zhang Yimou, the Hong Konger is finally discovering there's more to movie stardom than just showing up. "Sing more and you get better," Lau says. "Fight more and you get better ... But acting is hard."
That's an oddly belated revelation for a man who has logged more than 120 films in 22 years in the business, all the while maintaining a singing career that has kept him at the top of Hong Kong's fickle Canto-pop world. But at age 42, Lau is only just beginning to savor the challenges of his acting vocation. He is reshaping his career without the safely rounded edges of his leading-man persona, taking on riskier and more complex character roles such as the tightly wound triad spy he played in the hit Infernal Affairs trilogy. He'll even tackle subordinate parts if he thinks they are enough of a stretch. It's paying off. Last week, he won the Best Actor trophy at the 23rd Hong Kong Film Awards for his performance as a conflicted monk in a beefcake bodysuit in Running on Karma. In accepting the honor, Lau took the stage and proclaimed: "I love the film industry!" At last, he's developing a sense of his own worth. "The people who work in this business just classify me as an idol," he says. "But never mind. I am an artist."
Lau's more serious approach helps to explain why Zhang cast him for the role of an imperial guard with a serious Machiavellian streak, in his latest movie, House of Flying Daggers, which is scheduled for release this summer. Shot on a budget of about $20 million, Daggers is set in China's Tang dynasty (A.D. 618-906) and follows the loves, loyalties and betrayals between imperial rulers and members of an underground martial-arts society. Expectations are high: Zhang's 2002 film Hero earned an Oscar nomination and broke mainland box-office records for a Chinese movie by raking in some $27 million. Daggers reunites several key players in that winning team: producer Bill Kong (who was also behind Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), Hong Kong-based stunt director Tony Ching, and Australian visual-effects group Animal Logic, which dazzled in The Matrix.
Daggers adds something new to Zhang's successful formula: Canto-pop star power, courtesy of Lau. For a highbrow director like Zhang—who is racing to complete the film in time for Cannes next month—casting a pinup icon seems out of character. But he and Lau had been talking for a long time about working together. "Andy's a great actor," says Zhang. "He can cry on cue five takes in a row, which isn't easy—and he's improving."
In Daggers, Lau appears alongside a number of other formidable stars, including the waifish Zhang Ziyi (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and one of the region's hottest properties, Taiwanese-Japanese heartthrob Takeshi Kaneshiro (Turn Left, Turn Right). But Lau, one of four Hong Kong entertainers known as the "heavenly Kings," has been around the longest and easily commands the most attention in Asia. During shooting at Tea Mountain in Chongqing in January, scores of fans from the nearby town assembled outside the lobby of the mountainside hotel. "They're waiting for Wah-Jai," said a blushing girl behind the front desk, referring to him by his Chinese nickname. Zhang Ziyi's manager, Ling Lucas, complained that the usually jaded film crew handed her notebooks and asked for her help in getting autographs. It wasn't Zhang Ziyi's they were after, but Lau's.
Still, in Daggers Lau's character plays second fiddle to Zhang Ziyi's blind brothel singer, whose affections he competes for against Kaneshiro in a bitter love triangle riddled with Shakespearean twists and aerial spin kicks. Lau was willing to accept less-than-top billing for a chance to work in a major mainland production—it's his first—with one of Asia's most honored directors. "In Hong Kong the camera is always moving," says Lau. The cinematic trick can distract an audience, providing cover for weak or halfhearted acting. "Zhang Yimou will put the camera on you and leave it there. And if you're good, you're good. And if you're not, well ..." A virgin to Oscar-class filmmaking, Lau says the project is both daunting and enticing: "People ask why I took the part since it's not the lead—it's just such a good character."
The son of a fire fighter, Lau grew up the fourth of six kids in a public-housing estate in Hong Kong's industrial Tai Po district. Today, he commands about $1 million per movie and averages three a year; in addition, he performs several concerts annually for about $125,000 a show, and he boasts a steady stream of lucrative fees for advertisements and endorsements. This level of success "is more than enough," says Lau, whom friends describe as traditional and who lives in a house next door to his father's in Kowloon. In his spare time, Lau practices magic tricks—he once levitated a woman onstage during a concert—or goes bowling. Indeed, he's so obsessive about bowling that his manager, Lee Siu-lan, once berated him for going two years without winning an award because he wasted too much time at the bowling alley. Lau shrugs it off, explaining that he likes the game's lack of ambiguity: "The pin is there, the ball is in your hand. If you can't hit the pin, it's your fault."
But the truth is, there's not much downtime for Lau these days. Since the filming of Daggers ended in January, he's already co-starred in a Hong Kong triad movie, Jiang Hu, which is set for release in the territory at the end of this month. He's also busy running his relaunched production and management company, Focus, after previous production efforts with several partners in the '90s bombed. "For 10 years we lost a lot of money," says Lau, who admits he has lost millions of dollars on poorly vetted projects. In 1996, he staked a small fortune on What a Wonderful Life, in which he played a terminally ill cancer patient who dies photographing an erupting volcano. "I really loved that movie," he says, "but the box office... ugh." Still, his track record improved considerably when he backed the critically acclaimed 1997 film Made in Hong Kong, which was directed by Fruit Chan.
Not satisfied with being an actor, singer and producer, Lau is currently in the scripting phase of a new movie that he's tipped to star in and—for the first time—direct. But this willingness to try out different aspects of the movie business doesn't mean his newfound seriousness about acting is likely to wane anytime soon. Kicked back in a red tracksuit in a hotel suite on Tea Mountain after a long day on the Daggers set, Lau makes it clear that he is more committed to acting than ever, even if that means taking on tough challenges. "I want to have a form that fits the times," he says, "so I just keep on changing—and that makes people feel I'm a hardworking guy trying to do my best." He is like most of us, after all.
- Neil Gough | Tea Mountain
- Acting used to be a grind for Hong Kong superstar Andy Lau, but he's hitting a new high in director Zhang Yimou’s latest film