Boundless

From its opening sequence, showing him bawling out his Mainland crew during the shoot of Romancing in Thin Air (2012), to quieter one-on-one interviews back home in Hong Kong, Boundless gets very close to the heart and soul of prolific director-producer Johnnie To – and certainly in a more comprehensive way than in French documentarian Yves Montmayeur’s hour-long Johnnie Got His Gun! (2010), which saw only a gifted maker of crime-action movies. Mainland-born Ferris Lin followed To around for two years, during the production of Romancing and Drug War (2012) in China and Blind Detective in Hong Kong, and the result, refreshingly, is first a personal portrait of To as a working director and only second a critical analysis of his movies. (The only critic interviewed is veteran Shu Kei, who produced the documentary.)

Though more suitable for viewers who already know To’s films, it’s still an engrossing 90-or-so minutes. Avoiding a regular biographical approach – there are no details of To’s life, nor any mention of his TV work or movies prior to setting up his own production house, Milkyway Image, in 1996 – Boundless is instead driven by a wide array of themes: To’s uneasy relationship with China and its industry, his feelings (both positive and negative) on his native Hong Kong, his support for a rebirth of its troubled industry, his way of working with his regular team, and his contention that after 30-odd years he’s still learning how to make films. With clips from a dozen movies, and interviews with almost 20 collaborators, it’s a dense but well-paced study of a professional who’s spent his whole career in the business and is still, modestly, open to new ideas and the industry’s constant evolution.

 The film is frank about To’s long disregard for co-productions with the Mainland, where he shot his first movie, costume martial arts drama The Enigmatic Case (1980), but then studiously ignored for 30 years until finally deciding to try the market with Romancing and Drug War. Those tough shoots (detailed here in unvarnished production footage) seem to have shored up his belief that the Hong Kong industry’s long-term revival depends not on co-productions with its giant neighbour but in re-strengthening its own distinct culture, partly through the Arts Development Council’s Fresh Wave programme in which he was involved for nine years. An instinctive democrat who gets angry at any government’s inability to listen to its people, To sees filmmaking as a “weapon” but, apart from occasional films like Election 2 (2006), rarely uses it in an overtly political way. Time and again, the documentary shows him as a professional craftsman, a nuts-and-bolts man, who favours a co-operative system and gets extreme loyalty from his professional family when necessary – not least during Milkyway’s early days, when the local industry was on the verge of collapse and there was hardly a cent in the company’s coffers.

 That loyalty saw him through the now-legendary The Mission (1999) (made in Milkyway’s darkest period, and with no completed script) and also Exiled (2006) (made with no script and no idea where it was going). To is not only used to flying rudderless but also, clearly, can get inspiration from it as well. These and other anecdotes keep Boundless very watchable and focused on the man himself. More detail would have been welcome about long-in-the-works Sparrow (2008) (one of his most personal love letters to a vanished Hong Kong) and anything at all about the seminal The Longest Nite (1997) (which isn’t even mentioned). But in general the documentary covers the waterfront in its freely ranging way and, most importantly, shows what makes one of Hong Kong’s hardest working filmmakers tick.