The Business Times
15 April 2003

Charismatic and yet charmingly down-to-earth, he is a martial-arts master in the same vein as Jackie Chan in his latest film, Bulletproof Monk

WHEN the organisers of the Hong Kong Film Awards handpicked Chow Yun Fat to close the ceremony two Sunday nights ago, they could not have chosen a better man.

If anybody could convince the crowd that things were going to be okay in spite of the economic dip, the Sars epidemic and singer-actor Leslie Cheung's sudden suicide, Chow - the good-humoured, heroic icon of Asian cinema - could.

Dragging singer Alan Tam with him, he took the stage and spoke of his birth as a 'country boy' and of his joy, till today, in 'going to Kowloon City to buy vegetables'.

Chow is superstar as regular bloke: charismatic and yet charmingly down-to-earth.

The morning after chatting with Life! on the line from Hongkong, he sounds just as jovial and sensible.

Chow, who turns 48 next month, is staying away from the United States because of its war with Iraq.

Rather, he is staying put in Asia to promote his latest Hollywood picture, Bulletproof Monk.

The actor, who has gone from making 10 movies every year in the late 1980s to making one every two years now, divides his time between his work in the US and his life of leisure - photography, taiji and other past-times - in Hongkong.

Is he not scared of the outbreak of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome?

'It's nothing. It's curable. It's harder to cure people of their panic,' he drawls in Cantonese.

PEOPLE'S ACTOR

PANIC-STRICKEN is the last thing he is, although he has yet to become a box-office draw like compatriot Jackie Chan, since crossing from Hongkong to Hollywood in 1996.

Born to an oil rigger and a cleaning woman in 1955 on Lamma Island, off Hongkong's Victoria Harbour, Chow dropped out of school and job-hopped from bell boy to postman to taxi-driver before joining broadcaster TVB as an actor when he was 18.

'I think when people look at me, they see themselves. If I'm playing a cab driver, I'm the real thing,' he said in an earlier interview.

He attained TV dreamboat status on the wave of soaps such as: Hotel in 1976, Man In The Net in 1979 and The Bund in 1980.

Moving on to movies, he displayed his talent in diverse roles in wacky comedies (Chasing Girls, 1987), winsome romances (An Autumn's Tale, 1987) and tender tales (All About Ah Long, 1989).

'In the 1980s, I was lucky to get to make movies with good directors,' he says.

But the film that won him the most fans in Hongkong and beyond was John Woo's A Better Tomorrow in 1986, where he played Mark Gor, or Brother Mark, the coolest Chinese gangster ever.

In 1996, he packed his bags for Tinseltown, armed with an arsenal of gun moves he had perfected in Woo's other bullet ballets like 1992's Hard-Boiled.

He put the moves to use in his first two English-language films - 1998's Replacement Killers and 1999's The Corruptor - and gave up his guns to court Jodie Foster in his third, 1999's Anna And The King.

Ironically, his greatest hit in the US is Lee Ang's swordplay romp, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, in 2000.

Does the success of Crouching Tiger make him think twice about making English-language movies to go international?

'You can say that, but how many Hongkong movies can go to Hollywood, you know what I mean?... If you shoot a modern crime drama, the US has a lot of these. You shoot a futuristic film, they have a lot of these,' he says.

Which is why he heads back to Hollywood for Bulletproof Monk. The movie, which is based on an American comics series, opens in Singapore on Thursday.

In it, a Tibetan monk (Chow) tasked with protecting a powerful scroll discovers, to his disbelief, that his successor is an American punk (American Pie's Seann William Scott).

Going by its trailer, the movie seems to sell Chow as a martial-arts master in the same vein as Chan.

But if Chow is worried that he has been wrongly typecast as a gongfu guru, he hides his unease well.

'Errr, it is what the market needs. You want a job, there's no choice, yes? You're just working, yes?'

Gamely, he describes the horrors of dangling from wires for hours to shoot an action scene.

'You go up, the wire is thin and your weight goes to your two hips. It's painful at the waist. The longer they throw you around - the longer they suspend you - the more painful it is.'

Wirework is worse than having to speak in English in movies, he jokes, 'because I am not a lightweight'.

You laugh at his wisecrack and he laughs with you.

In the next breath, he shows his famed concern for his colleagues when he says: 'The people down there are working themselves to death. The people pulling you up have a hard time.'

His compassion surfaces again, when you ask him about the death of his friend Cheung.

'It's a pity. The way he departed broke the hearts of many people who loved him. He didn't consider the feelings of his fans, his loved ones, his friends.

'There is so much misery in Hongkong. Every day, you've got fans at the door of the Mandarin Oriental, weeping, weeping, weeping. It's miserable. It's sad.'

Chow himself is grateful to his wife of 17 years, Singaporean Jasmine Tan, 44, for keeping him grounded.

He says: 'Artistes face so much pressure. When you start your career, you hope for fame, yes? When you get famous, you fear your star will fall... The pressure you face is many times more than if you were an ordinary person.

'I'm lucky. Before I knew my wife, I had my Mummy to take care of me. After marriage, I have a good wife to share my feelings with.

'You don't see the things you have done. It takes a bystander to tell you, hey, you can't do this, you can't do that. You know what I mean?'

Laughing, he adds: 'My wife is like a mirror, reflecting all the bad things in me.'

Chow, a bad person? It might be the one role the actor of actors cannot play well.

Bulletproof Monk opens on Thursday.

©remains with the writer/publisher. All rights reserved.