by SCHLOMO SCHWARTZBERG
Box Office Magazine
Cover Story

Asian Film's Reiging Top Gun CHOW-YUN FAT Blasts His Way Into Hollywood With His English-Language "The Replacement Killers"

He may be one of the biggest stars in the world, but Asian movie icon Chow Yun-Fat has yet to crack the lucrative North American market. That's set to change as he prepares for the imminent release of his first American action film, "The Replacement Killers," in which he stars as a conflicted hit man opposite Chinese-speaking American actress Mira Sorvino.

Upon first meeting the handsome 42-year-old, one can't help but be struck by his movie star glamour. Wearing a white linen jacket, black pants and a silk tie, the urbane, polite and soft-spoken Chow prompts comparison to the cinematic royalty of olden days; the Cary Grant references that Chow's role in the John Woo-directed "Once A Thief" evoked seem fully justified up close. And judging by the reaction of the crowds in the theatre where he appeared at The Toronto International Film Festival, Chow certainly has a star's gift of exciting people merely by his presence-although such reactions still surprise him in a hemisphere where he feels he doesn't really have that much audience cachet.

"I'm glad that they give me a lot of support. I never think about the North American [public], but the people who have seen me in John [Woo's] films, they give me a lot of respect. I'm stunned when I walk into the theatre."

Chow Yun-Fat showed up in Toronto to present a retrospective showing of one of his favorite films-the formative one, in fact, that inspired him to go him into acting. Thanks to his Woo collaborations-which include "The Killer," "A Better Tomorrow" and "Hard-Boiled," the three Hong Kong productions that made Woo's name in America-Chow is thought of in the West as mainly an action star. But if "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" isn't a title you'd expect Chow to choose as one of his all-time favorites, you probably don't know the man and his background all that well.

"Actually," says Chow, "my career started in 1974. I started out by working for TV stations for 14 years, a long contract." As a television actor, he played doctor/lawyer/dramatic roles, mostly in Hong Kong soap operas, on which he never picked up a gun. "I never, never did action-hero types, like in `A Better Tomorrow' or `The Killer,' until in 1986 when I met John Woo and made `A Better Tomorrow, Part One.' But the filmmakers who saw me first as a Hong Kong film idol holding two guns, they think of me as the action hero." Will he continue to be pegged solely as an action star? "It depends on the [performance of] my first American movie," he says. "If the movie sales come out good, then maybe I can do some comedy or drama." To prepare for that possibility, Chow numbers intense actors like Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson, Marlon Brando and Nicholas Cage among the performers with whom he'd like to co-star.

The idea of working in Hollywood isn't as alien for Chow as one might think. "When I was a teenager [in Hong Kong] I saw a lot of Hollywood movies like `The Longest Day,' `The Great Escape.' Mostly, I liked the war movies." Hong Kong barely had a movie industry then, a state of affairs that lasted until the 1970s, with the arrival of Bruce Lee and his Kung Fu movies. "After Bruce Lee, the whole market changed," Chow says.

The Lee connection is an interesting one, since Lee was arguably the first Asian superstar to attract an American audience. Now Chow stands poised for his own pass at American stardom, and he recognizes just how much is riding on his first American film. Though it features some strong action elements, "The Replacement Killers" promises to offer Chow a chance to display some of his considerable acting range: As a hit man who refuses to carry out a contract killing on a young child and ends up being hunted himself, Chow will get the chance to play the kind of complex "good bad man" that made his Hong Kong films for Woo such an international sensation.

"The Replacement Killers" is, Chow admits, "absolutely" a test case for his chances of making it in the U.S. and Hollywood. And he's very aware that his success or failure in the U.S. will impact other Asian actors who want to break into the American film industry. "I feel a little bit of pressure," he says. "I'm glad I'm the first one to take the bullet."

But he also knows he can't really predict how "The Replacement Killers" will do at the U.S. boxoffice, something he could do in Hong Kong, where his name on the marquee pretty much guarantees a hit, as it does in all other Asian territories. "I do my best," he says. "My situation as an actor in foreign productions is totally different."

If Chow breaks through in the U.S., he will be following in the footsteps of at least one major Hong Kong film personality: his old friend Woo, a director who is among the hottest in Hollywood on the strength of last summer's blockbuster hit "Face/Off" and its predecessor "Broken Arrow." Given how close the two men are, it seems natural to wonder why Chow wasn't featured in those earlier Woo hits. According to Chow, Woo would have been taking needless risks by using an actor like Chow who is little-known in America before Woo himself was fully established in Hollywood. "This is a very sensitive political question. Mostly, I have to thank John Woo. John Woo brought my name to international [attention], so more or less, people who know John Woo know me. There are always some difficulties about the politics of the studios. They won't allow Woo [the freedom to choose his cast on] an $80 million budget. He's just a small kid in this market."

Now that he's made his own American film debut, Chow has noticed other interesting differences between the American production system and that of Hong Kong. "Hollywood is totally different from the Hong Kong style," Chow says. "Our working schedule [on `The Replacement Killers'] was very systematic, everything fixed, you cannot change a line anytime. In Hong Kong, you shoot 20 hours and 40 hours straight. Here, they make sure it's 12 hours a day. [The Hollywood system] is much better, physically, for actors. In Hong Kong, you can [be shooting] four or five films, all at the same time!"

Budgetwise, the $28 million "Replacement Killers" towers over the average $1.2 million Hong Kong action epic. (Hong Kong budgets can go up to $6 million "if they belong to the Jackie Chan level," adds Chow.)

In general, Hong Kong actors are far more likely to do their own stuntwork than are their American counterparts. Chow did attempt to do most of his own stunts in "The Replacement Killers:" "More than 80 percent of the time, I tried to do it myself." But unions and the film's stunt coordinator often decreed otherwise; Chow estimates that he finally got to do only about half his stunts in the finished film.

He is basically happy with how he comes across in "The Replacement Killers," "except my English. At the very beginning, I was so afraid of the pronunciation, so I took great care." For Chow, the trade-off was that concentrating on the mechanics of the English language occasionally deflected him in his search for his character's "anguish" over his plight in the film. Co-star Sorvino (who has a degree in Chinese culture) helped a lot, especially as she and Chow could speak Mandarin to each other. "I'm glad that I had the privilege to work with her for my first American movie," Chow says, "because she never made me feel nervous at all. We had fun on the set, we talked a lot because sometimes Quentin [Sorvino's boyfriend, Quentin Tarantino, an acknowledged Chow Yun-Fat fan] would come to the set and say hello to everybody."

Chow's new experiences in the American industry do excite him, though he says he could live without the current fixation on a film's first weekend take at the boxoffice. "I think the problem is the [emphasis the] studio will put on the numbers, how much you get back from the market," he says. And while Hollywood may be physically easier for actors, it restricts the kind of films they can star in, feels Chow. "Hong Kong movies are not about reality, we're talking about fantasy. Mostly, in Hollywood, a lot of the audience and scriptwriters will stick to very physical or very logical ideas-they say, `you cannot do that.' In Hong Kong, we're so free, we can do a drama with action and comedy together, we can do comedy with action and romance together, we can mix it together. But here, action is action, romance is romance. Hong Kong movies try to attract different kinds of audiences, so they put every ingredient in the soup."

Chow chose the part of the hit man in "The Replacement Killers" because it differed from the run-of-the-mill scripts he was being offered by Hollywood. "In the last few years, my [American] agent and my manger tried to set up a lot of different roles for me. But usually a lot of studios sent me the same [type of] scripts, with me as the gangster of Chinatown, the big brother. This is not the way to do it. So fortunately, my producer Max Baer proposed a different kind of script [which became `The Replacement Killers']. I had to do this character-it seemed like a very good role for my first American movie." Choosing to work with a first-time director as he did with Antoine Fuqua on "The Replacement Killers" may have seemed risky, but Chow insists his relationship with Fuqua was rewarding. "He's a very nice man, a very talented director. He gave me a lot of freedom to influence my character. And I also got involved in developing the script. I talked a lot to the scriptwriter." Chow took a hands-on approach to fleshing out his character, who was initially more generic. "More or less, I tried to get a sense of this guy, his own [reality as] a killer who is from China. His background, very clearly, is very Chinese, he's a soldier from before his life of crime."

Unlike most of his Hong Kong roles, in "The Replacement Killers," Chow doesn't get the girl. "It's not a romance, more of a buddy [relationship], no sex scenes, no kissing. It's very clean," says Chow with a laugh.

Depending on the performance of "The Replacement Killers," Chow may next star in a new version of "Anna and the King" (the drama on which Rodgers and Hammerstein's "The King and I" was based) or in a Hollywood movie directed by Woo. The Woo project is being developed under the title "King's Ransom;" Chow describes it as a caper comedy in the vein of Woo's "Once a Thief." Recent reports of a declining boxoffice for indigenous productions in Hong Kong worry him. "The market is dying because the production is worse, we don't have a top writer, director. We need some new blood, including new stars." The home market matters greatly to Chow because, unlike other Hong Kong luminaries such as Woo and director Tsui Hark ("A Chinese Ghost Story"), both of whom have left the territory, Chow has no intention of emigrating from Hong Kong now that it has returned to Chinese rule. "We still have our freedom of speech, the economy is picking up faster than under the British, and the film market is picking up from this summer. I think [unless] you make a very serious film that goes against the communist party, things will be fine."

©1997 Boxoffice Magazine. All rights reserved.