Tony Leung’s Smoldering Cool

admin-cdn16 hours ago

0 1 16 minutes read

Tony Leung in In the Mood for Love (2000).
Photo: Miramax/Everett Collection

It’s incredible to think, 40 years into his acting career, that Tony Leung is just now appearing in his first European film, with his starring role in Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi’s mesmerizing drama Silent Friend. And it was only five years ago that he made his first Hollywood movie, starring as the villain in the superhero movie Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. The Hong Kong–born star of such Wong Kar-wai masterpieces as In the Mood for Love and Chungking Express, as well as John Woo action classics like Hard Boiled and Bullet in the Head, is one of the most iconic faces in world cinema. And what a face: Leung specializes in silent characters, but his reserve has expansive thematic reach. He can be wounded and sensitive (as in In the Mood for Love), mysterious and melancholy (as in Wong’s 2046), or slick and savage (as in Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution). And through it all, he has come to define a unique kind of cool — elegant, watchful, maybe even a little haunted. This is also true of his magnificent turn in Silent Friend, where he plays a Chinese neurologist who becomes obsessed with a ginkgo tree in a botanical garden in Germany during the COVID-19 shutdown. It’s a long, deliberately paced, and quiet film, but Leung’s riveting presence helps turn it into something beautiful. During a recent (and rare) trip to New York, we talked about his new film and his whole career.

So what was it like acting with a tree?
It felt amazing. Especially after the preparation of this movie and after studying tree and plant intelligence, I have a different perspective toward them. Before, to me, plants were just plants. Trees were just trees. Now, I feel they are more like sentient beings. To some degree, they have consciousness. My relationship to them is totally different. When I was doing the scenes by myself in natural surroundings, I felt so calm and peaceful and not lonely. I felt more aligned with nature and in a deeper state of awareness. Without other distractions, only you and nature, only you with the tree, you somehow have a deeper consciousness.

You spent a lot of time researching your part in Silent Friend. What sticks in your mind from that research?
I started with early cognitive development because my character is in that field. And then consciousness, and then plant intelligence, and then some Eastern and Western philosophies. I studied that every day, and then I went to different universities to find real neuroscientists and to try to experience the EEG thing. I wanted to make myself believe I’m a neuroscientist, because I have a scene where I give a lecture. If you don’t build up that confidence and knowledge, it’s really difficult for an actor to perform in front of 100-something students. When I do this every day, and I go through all the materials the director gave me, then somehow, suddenly, one day I get into the character unconsciously.

Leung in his new film Silent Friend.
Photo: 1-2 Special

You’re famous for being the silent type. They say you act with your eyes. You’ve done a lot of parts that don’t have a lot of dialogue, but the roles are all very different. Your character in Hard Boiled is quiet but lethal, and your character in In the Mood for Love is quiet but very sensitive. Neither speaks much, but we completely buy them. Is the research you do a way of internalizing these characters so that you can convince us they are real?
I think it’s not just research but also my personality. I used to spend a lot of time by myself. I love solitude, and I don’t have many friends. I don’t talk much. I keep everything inside. I always look for perfection. Every movie I try to be better, so I never watch my movies because every time I watch one, I know where I can do better. But on Silent Friend, my director, Ildikó Enyedi, told me one day she’s not looking for perfection. She said, “Film is an act of truthfulness happening not onscreen, but in the heart and in the guts of the spectator.” And she said, “You already did that. Why look for perfection?”

How did you discover acting?
When I was around 19 to 20, one of my friends, Stephen Chow, was always dreaming to be a director. I knew him before we got into this entertainment business, and he used to tell me a lot about movies — how interesting it was to shoot a movie. He studied a lot of Japanese manga. I wasn’t very interested in what I was doing at that period. So one day, we went together to apply for the acting school in TVB. I loved acting because I could finally express my feelings in front of others without being shy. I think this is because of my unhappy childhood. When I was in school, I started to isolate myself from others, and I just didn’t show my feelings in front of others. A lot of suppressed emotions. After I got into acting, I found a way to express myself. It was therapy.

Tell me more about your childhood.
When I was 3 or 4, my mother and father fought every night. My father was an alcoholic, and I was very scared, and I didn’t know what to do. I could not focus in school. One day, when I was 6 or 7, my father suddenly disappeared. My mother didn’t talk about it. Nobody talked about it. And at that age, you feel very insecure. My dad didn’t say a word before he left. My mother had to work very hard to support me and my little sister. But sometimes, she would express her emotions to me. My father, after a year or two, came back suddenly. And everybody acted like nothing happened before. He did that like three times when I was a kid. He was actually very much like Leslie Cheung in Days of Being Wild. I felt like I didn’t have any connection with this person. Even when he sometimes brought me out to a circus or playground, I didn’t feel happy at all. At school, I needed to pretend that I had a healthy family with a good father, so I couldn’t express any emotions. Even until I was grown up.

Did you ever see your father again after that?
No. I don’t remember when I last saw him. Maybe when I was like 12 or 13 years of age.

What was your acting training like?
I’m not a natural. I studied from nine to five. We had lots of training — singing, dancing, acting, how to write a script, and also how to use our body language. And kung fu, a little bit. We had to watch classic movies every week that we needed to discuss.

Hou Hsiao-hsien was a big influence on you, because he gave you a part in A City of Sadness early in your career.
He really inspired me. I’d never had the chance to do a film like that. The camera didn’t move. Actors just going around, sometimes even offscreen, but we can still hear their voices. And the nonprofessionals were so natural. I can’t see any hints of acting in it. But they had that kind of emotion, especially my counterpart, Hsin Shu-fen. I loved her acting so much. I told Hou Hsiao-hsien, “I want to act like her one day, without all my skills in acting.” I seldom went out after work, and I spent a lot of time in my hotel. Hou Hsiao-hsien knew I loved to read, so he gave me a lot of Japanese literature, and then all kinds of other literature, which opened up my imagination about acting.

Hou Hsiao-hsien’s style is so controlled. As you said, the camera in A City of Sadness doesn’t move. Does such a precise style make it easier or harder for an actor? Do you have to be very cognizant of where you are at all times?
I think it’s more liberating. You can have more freedom to move around, and it’s more natural than what I did before. It’s a different way of shooting. He never told me how to act. He’s very good at leading nonprofessionals, and I found he doesn’t quite tell professionals what to do. He creates a very special, very real atmosphere for every scene. It’s a nice playground for actors.

You worked with him again years later, on Flowers of Shanghai, which stylistically is quite different than A City of Sadness.
He was using a different DP, and we started to have some movement of the camera. To him, it was a new challenge. There were a lot of professional actors that he needed to deal with. With nonprofessionals, it’s easy to adjust or tell them what to do. But professional actors already have a specific kind of acting, so it’s really hard to change their habits. There are a lot of characters in that movie, and we drank real wine and ate food that was freshly prepared. And after we finished all the shooting, we went back home, and after three months Hou Hsiao-hsien asked us to come back to shoot again from the very beginning! I think he felt that all the actors were now in the right state of mind.

Right after A City of Sadness, you do John Woo’s Bullet in the Head and Wong Kar-wai’s Days of Being Wild, two very different directors and two very different films from City of Sadness. Bullet in the Head is such an ambitious, crazy movie, and a very personal one for John Woo. What was it like working on that film?
John is a very nice person and a great director, and his theme is always about brotherhood, and he’s very good at the romantic action of this movie. Bullet in the Head was one of his dream projects, but I don’t know why. I haven’t asked him. Maybe it was something linked to his childhood. When he’s shooting, he knows very well what he wants. Acting-wise, he needs a lot of input from the actors to develop the drama. In Hong Kong, movies were more flexible. We could improvise, not just with action, but also with drama. Sometimes we’d change the core of the story in between. When I worked with Peter Chan, sometimes we encountered a bottleneck and we had to get together and think about what we should do.

This was an incredibly creative period in Hong Kong cinema, with Tsui Hark and John Woo and Ringo Lam making some of their greatest films. How did this golden age come about?
There was a great demand from Hong Kong cinemas and from Asian communities all around the world, so Hong Kong films were exported everywhere. We had so much money coming from all these other countries that we had the chance to produce 300 movies every year, so there were a lot of chances for the actors and directors to create whatever they want. This gave us so much freedom and flexibility.

John Woo told me didn’t have a script for much of Hard Boiled. Do you remember what he said to you about your character?
I don’t remember if there was a script. He just said that I’m an undercover cop who is alone, and it’s very tragic because sometimes I have to kill policemen, too. He’s a sad guy living on a yacht by himself, and he has gone all the way undercover, so he is very conflicted about whether what he’s doing is right or wrong. So it’s a very stressful character.

Leung in Hard Boiled (1992).
Photo: Rim/Everett Collection

This is also when you do Days of Being Wild, your first film with Wong Kar-wai. It’s a fascinating part. You show up right at the very end of the film, very silent, and then suddenly the movie’s over! I know there was supposed to be a second film. What would have happened in that?
The story would have started with me. I was working on two movies: In the daytime, I worked for Johnnie To, and in the nighttime I worked for Wong Kar-wai. So I always fell asleep on the set, and Wong Kar-wai never woke me up. He’d just let me sleep for a while. The story starts with me and Maggie, and my sister, and I’m a gambler, a con man. Then, after a month or two, suddenly something happened in my family, and I said, “I cannot shoot anymore. I have to stay with my family.” He said, “We’ll wait for you.” “Don’t wait for me. You go ahead.” So then they started Leslie’s story. They had a lot of footage of mine. I remember the last scene of the film, I shot on my last day, only three takes. I didn’t expect to have any scenes in Days of Being Wild. But when I went to the premiere with my wife, who was the lead actress in it, I was so shocked when I saw myself at the very end. And I thought, This is the kind of acting I want. Very similar to the nonprofessionals. Without me saying anything, people seem to know a little bit about this character because of the poker cards and how he prepares and how he goes out at night and then sleeps in the daytime. It’s this guy’s routine. After that, I decided Wong Kar-wai and I were going in the same direction. So I started building my craft with Wong Kar-wai for 20 years, to find my own style of acting. Because it’s difficult: If you want to do something like this, others have to compromise, and if they don’t understand why you want to do this, they don’t like it.

How did your relationship with him develop?
If you want a director to know how to shoot you, you need to let him know everything about you. I spent a lot of time with him outside work. I went to his office almost every day. He was always trying to write. I’d bring two bottles of wine and then go to his office. We shared our music, and we shared what kind of movies we loved. He introduced me to some movies that I had never seen before, like Jim Jarmusch and stuff like that. For almost one year, we’d hang out like that in his office, just the two of us. Four or five hours every night. That’s how we built up our trust.

When he came to you with In the Mood for Love, was that something you’d worked on together or that you’d talked about before he offered you a part?
He was inspired by short stories by Liu Yichang. Same as before: He didn’t have a script, but we’d already done some movies together. The short stories were about a couple, they have affairs, and they go to a hotel and kill themselves. This story inspired Wong Kar-wai to do In the Mood for Love, about another pair of people who have a special relationship and who try to understand why their partners are having affairs with each other.

So since he improvises a lot, and you don’t have a traditional script, when you’re working on the movie, are you thinking at the end that your characters are going to kill themselves?
No. When I work with Wong Kar-wai, I never think of what direction we are going in. Every night, we receive like one or two scenes, so I just try to fill out the scenes with the same character. It’s like an adventure working with him. You don’t know where to go, but you just follow him.

That’s another film where your character is silent, but his emotions are so vivid and so believable. How do you prepare for something like that? Do you need to be a little bit in love to be able to express that?
Of course, you need to love your partner in order to have such feelings. But I don’t know how I do it. I go with my instinct, my feelings on set, and not with something that happened before.

Did you already know during In the Mood for Love that 2046, a sequel, was going to happen?
I had no idea. In the middle of shooting In the Mood of Love, Wong Kar-wai told me, “You are taking revenge on Maggie. You don’t really want to do what you do with her, but you just want to take revenge, make her love you and then dump her.” That’s why we have 2046. That guy, I think he felt very sorry, and he really loved Maggie, so he wants to forget about his past. He tries to be somebody else and lead a new life, but that doesn’t work, and that’s how 2046 starts. I don’t remember how long we shot that movie, but quite a long time. On and off.

I think it was four or five years in the making, and as I understand, you would do another movie, then you’d come in and shoot more of 2046. Was it hard to get back to that character when you’d return to the set?
Yeah, it takes time. Usually, it takes like a week or two, and then you can get back to that character. Not in the first few days. And Wong Kar-wai knows this, but we’ll still shoot. We’ll use the real shoot as a rehearsal.

One of my favorite stories is 2046’s Cannes premiere, because people didn’t know if Wong Kar-wai was going to finish the movie in time. There are legends about how he was still editing the final reel while the film was premiering, which is probably not true. When did you first see the movie?
I only watched it at the Cannes premiere, and I was looking for the missing parts. “Where are the parts that we shot in Macao?!” We shot tons of footage, so he could edit the movie in different ways. Even after the first time, I had no idea what the story was about, because I always focused on myself. I had to watch it like three, four times to understand it.

You got an American agent in 2005. But you didn’t do any American parts after that. Were there projects that you considered?
Yeah, I received a lot of offers, but I didn’t like them.

Were there any movies that you said “no” to and then later regretted after seeing the final film?
No. I believe my instinct.

You finally made a Hollywood film with Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. I imagine that was quite a different production from the Hong Kong action films you’d done.
The production was much bigger than what I had experienced before, and the people were very professional, and we had to finish everything on time every day. It’s very efficient, but you can’t improvise. You can’t change even a word. At the very beginning, I argued with the director: “If a guy comes from a thousand years ago, the way he fights must be a combination of all martial arts, like MMA today, because he lived through all that time.” And the director said no. I said, “Why not? Why just typical kung fu in the ’70s?” He said, “This is Marvel.” I said, “Okay,” and I didn’t argue anymore.

At the same time, your part is delightful in Shang-Chi because even though you’re a villain, it’s still a very romantic part. I think people were surprised to see a Marvel movie that had a character like that.
I remember one day the director suddenly asked me a question when I just passed by: “Do you love your kids?” I said, “Yes, but I don’t know how.” So that’s the relationship between me and my kids in the film. Because I immersed myself with the death of my wife. I don’t care about any other thing. So maybe that brings the romance of that character. He is always living in the past.

Even though Silent Friend is your first European film, Ildikó Enyedi said that she wrote the script with you in mind for it. Do you know why?
She said one time she watched some interviews of mine, and she saw something in me that she hasn’t seen before in other movies. Something innocent, childlike, very pure. But actually, I have no idea. We didn’t talk about the character. When we first met, I was amazed by a quote that came with the script from a neuroscientist: “We are all hallucinating all the time, but when we agree with the hallucinations, we call it reality.” I said, “Are there any philosophical layers in this script? It reminds me of something from the East, this Buddhist idea that life is just an illusion. Is that something spiritual?” Then she turned her laptop around and showed me the image of a Buddha.

She also said that the script she wrote didn’t really reflect what the movie would be like.
No, it didn’t. I had no idea. That’s the reason why when I received the script and read it, frankly speaking, I didn’t have many feelings about it. I had no idea what the story would look like. I knew the tree is the protagonist. It shifts perspective from humans to the tree, and the tree witnesses three eras, and the script is just one story after the other. So it’s not very interesting. But after I watched two of her films, On Body and Soul and The Story of My Wife, I really wanted to work with her. I try to feel the directors I want to work with. I don’t calculate. I just try to talk to them. She is intellectual, humble, but very confident. She’s very down-to-earth, but she knows what she wants to do. I liked her as a person. I believe my instinct.

In the U.S., for example, a script is so important. People look at it and say, “I can’t do this movie. I don’t like the script.” Or, “I will do this movie, but you have to rewrite my character,” stuff like that. But you, having worked with people like Wong Kar-wai or John Woo who will throw out the script and sometimes not even have one, probably understand the script is not necessarily what the movie is going to be.
To me, the script is not important. The director is more interesting. They have their own way of interpreting the stories. If the story goes to the right person, it will be interesting. If you go to someone less interesting, then it’s not a great movie at all.