by ROBERT ITO
Asian Week
5-11 February 1998

A veteran of more than 70 films, Chow Yun-Fat plays professional killer John Lee in The Replacement Killers, his first major project for release in the United States.

Who is cool? For Hong Kong film star Chow Yun-Fat, who has been dubbed "the coolest actor in the world" by the Los Angeles Times and whose own unmistakable brand of cool has made him the hottest dramatic film actor in the Pacific Rim, lots of folks fit the bill. Sean Connery, Humphrey Bogart, James Dean--all cool. "Elvis is a cool guy," he tells me, before adding Japanese film legends Toshiro Mifune and Ken Takakura to the list.

But Chow's next mention--Popeye, the animated sailor with the weird eyeball and the guttural laugh--comes as a bit of a surprise. Popeye? Is it the confident swagger, the monstrous forearms, the spinach-induced violent rages? Not for Chow. "People love Popeye," he explains, "because he always loves his girl."

And millions of fans around the world love Chow, a fact that Hollywood is banking with the release of The Replacement Killers, the international film star's first major American project. In the film, Chow plays John Lee, an assassin whose refusal to make his final hit puts him in mortal danger from his former bosses. Teamed up with actress Mira Sorvino, Chow looks great, and cool as always--how else to describe an actor that can get coated with flour from head to toe (see the 1992 Chow classic Hard-Boiled), have blood sprayed all over his face from a point blank shot to an enemy's face, and still end up looking really, really good?

On the film set, the cavernous, aging Orpheum Theater in downtown Los Angeles, Chow is clearly excited about making an American film, particularly after escaping the grueling schedules of the Hong Kong studio system. In 1988, Chow made 10 films in Asia, often shooting on three different film sets on the same day.

But today, with only one film to worry about and all the perks that come along with making a major American film, Chow looks fit and relaxed. And for a major film star, he seems pretty excited about his trailer--not his film trailer, the action-packed two minute ad now in wide release, but his actual trailer on the set, a fairly unimpressive white RV that looks just about the same as all of the other trailers dotting the downtown Los Angeles parking lot.

It's big, he tells me, and air-conditioned. Has it's own bathroom. And best of all, he can have food brought in, or he can just step outside to the crew area and get his fill of coffee, tea, cookies and other snacks. In Hong Kong, Chow explains, nobody gets a trailer. The location areas in that notoriously congested region are just too small. When he needed a break during shooting, he'd go out to the street and take a quick nap in his car. Chow can still laugh about the hard times. "I'd turn on the air conditioning in the car, and ahhh," he remembers, tilting his head back in mock enjoyment, "what a great trailer!"

If Chow can still laugh about the hard times on Hong Kong film sets, it's probably because of the much harder times he went through before he became a film star. Chow spent much of his childhood in a small village on Lamma Island, an area he likens to the boondocks of Tennessee. His family then moved to Kowloon, where his father worked on offshore oil rigs and his mother cleaned houses. "I grew up pretty poor," Chow remembers, "but it taught me to work hard." After dropping out of high school, Chow worked a variety of odd jobs before answering a newspaper ad for an acting school organized through TVB, one of Hong Kong's largest television stations. After a series of bit parts, Chow landed a starring role in 1976 on a popular TV series called Hotel, appearing in over 90 episodes. He also starred in several other television series and feature films, and has mostly fond memories of this period of his life. "It was very tiring," Chow recounts, "but in the studio system, everybody was working hard together, so it really felt like a family."

Then Chow's career went south. After a series of his films bombed in the early 1980s, he began to look for a new screen image. As fate would have it, action film director John Woo was playing around with an idea for a new type of Chinese hero. Woo wanted to create a "modern Chinese knight," a mixture of the best elements from Chinese period pieces and modern gangster epics, an old-style kung fu hero with an updated look and major firepower. In 1986, Woo and Chow debuted their creation in A Better Tomorrow, a wildly popular film that spawned two sequels and catapulted both men into the upper echelon of the Hong Kong film industry. Theatergoers were blown away by Woo's frenetic action sequences and the intricately choreographed scenes of "balletic violence" adapted from the kung fu film genre. And they fell in love with Chow's sympathetic portrayal of triad member Mark Gor, a gangster with a strong sense of duty and honor. Hundreds of fans in Hong Kong copied his now trademark look: the long black jacket and sunglasses, and the endless series of cigarettes, matches, and toothpicks that Chow seemed to be gnawing on in every scene.

While Chow's look--particularly the oral props--owes a lot to Clint Eastwood and the Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns, Chow insists that the cigs and toothpicks come right from the streets of Hong Kong. "Chinese people smoke a lot," he explains, "and every morning they have dim sum. Then after the dim sum, they like to use a toothpick for a long time. Then they have another cigarette."

Other physical gestures are also borrowed from people on the street. In several scenes from his earlier films, Chow and the other actors squat down to have discussions, resting on their haunches while they discuss business or enjoy a smoke. When I mention that one rarely sees actors squat for extended periods of time in American films, Chow is unsure about what I'm talking about. "What is this word, 'squat'?," he asks.

So I squat down. Immediately Chow is squatting down beside me, as curious crew members look on. "Why don't American actors squat?," he asks. "It looks funny? Not polite?" Pressed for an answer, I mention a theory I heard years ago about how non-Asians can't squat comfortably for long periods of time, something about the relative lengths of Asian leg bones. Chow politely ponders this for a while, both of us still in a squatting position. "You see this all the time in China," he tells me. "People talk to each other like that. When you want to draw something, you can just draw it with your finger on the ground."

An assistant comes by to tell Chow that lunch is ready, and he invites me to join him. I'm about to grab a sandwich off of the crew table, but Chow quickly herds me into his trailer, where we continue our talk over a large lunch. Chow isn't eating much, but he keeps insisting that I eat more, and even tries to scoop some of his own food onto my plate. While we're eating, I ask him about Jasmine, his wife of twelve years, whom I had spoken to briefly inside the theater. "She is my best friend, my advisor, my manager, my everything," he tells me. "I can never find another lady like her."

Almost on cue, Jasmine enters, and tells Chow he should be eating more. She has a quick wit and a gregarious nature, and the crew clearly loves her. When Chow is called back to the set, I ask Jasmine to rate Yun-Fat as a husband. "There's no 100 percent," Jasmine says slowly, "but he's about 99 percent. So you can imagine how good he is."

At first glance, it's an odd match: the dirt-poor dropout from the sticks whose mother was a maid, and a woman from an upper-class family in Singapore who grew up with servants who cooked and cleaned for her. But Jasmine feels that all the differences only make their relationship stronger. "Personally, Yun-Fat is a very quiet person, and I'm the person who likes to talk and talk. But I think he's learned to open up more, and he's taught me to be more patient and to appreciate life."

When Chow returns to the trailer, we talk about some of John Woo's recent American projects. While Chow really liked Face Off, Woo's most recent film, he admits he was disappointed in Woo's first two American features, Hard Target and Broken Arrow. Always diplomatic, Chow refuses to openly criticize Van Damme's acting abilities in Hard Target or the huge plot holes in Broken Arrow, but he does admit that the studios were slow to see Woo as anything but an action film director. "In John's films," Chow explains, "he always wants to say something about the character, about dignity and loyalty. He needs an actor that can carry both the action and the drama, and a story that will explain why he is doing what he is doing."

Meanwhile, Chow has his own plate full, choosing between a variety of different film projects. He recently signed to do a film with Mark Wahlberg called The Corruptor, is considering doing a film with Oliver Stone, and is in talks to do a film version of Anna and the King. But Chow seems most excited about working with John Woo again, although he would like to ultimately move out of the action film genre, at least for a time. What kind of characters would he like to play, besides the terminally cool assassin with a heart of gold? "I would love to play a blind guy, a mute, even a very evil character," Woo says excitedly. "An actor should be able to play any part. I'm just waiting for a scriptwriter to propose this kind of role."

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