In Hong Kong, the anticipation was huge for The Last Dance, largely because it saw comedy legends Michael Hui and Dayo Wong working together for the first time in over 30 years. However, no one expected it to become a commercial behemoth, smashing most box office records for Hong Kong films and earning a remarkable 18 nominations at the Hong Kong Film Awards. Ahead of the long-awaited release of the film’s 139-minute extended cut, writer-director Anselm Chan shared why he wanted to use the film to smash traditional beliefs, how he cast the film’s three stars, the criticism he received for being pessimistic, and the process of creating the new extended cut.
— To Hongkongers, “breaking hell’s gates” is a very popular funeral ritual. Why is it so popular in Hong Kong?
“Breaking hell’s gates” is a Taoist ritual. But in Hong Kong, Taoist rituals have become entangled with folklore religions. As a result, most Taoists in Hong Kong don’t believe in traditional Taoism, but rather different forms of folklore religions. So, the Hong Kong version of “breaking hell’s gates” includes elements from those folklore religions, such as the burning of paper offerings. Hong Kong is a very special place in how religiously diverse it is. Every kind of religious ritual is possible. However, most people in Hong Kong don’t have very strict religious beliefs. Naturally, there are some who are devout followers of very specific religions, but those who don’t follow a specific religion will use “break hell’s gates” as the de facto funeral ritual. That’s why it’s so popular in Hong Kong.
— Your first two directorial efforts and your film scripts were comedies. Why did you decide to write a serious drama about death?
Because I always thought I’m better at writing dramas. I don’t think I’m very good at comedy. However, I did really like comedy when I was young, and I’ve always thought that I’m pretty funny. I met director Vincent Kok in 2010, when I was working as a television scriptwriter in Beijing. He saw my humorous side and invited me to work with him on his Lunar New Year comedies. When I wanted to try directing in 2016, I actually wrote a thriller about hypnosis. But that script couldn’t get investment because every actor and film company saw my portfolio and asked me why a comedy writer wrote a thriller. The script never got made.
The first company that I signed with was Universe. One night at dinner, the boss said to me, “Sometimes a director just needs an admission ticket. Since you’ve been doing comedies, most people see you as a director of comedy. Would you consider directing a comedy for your first film?” I didn’t believe him at first, so I tried for a little longer. But when it kept getting rejected, I finally decided to write a comedy and see if it would really get investment right away. That’s when I wrote Ready o/r Knot, which really did get made.
— Will you make that thriller now?
Yes, because of The Last Dance! Investors suddenly love that script now. I’m grateful for that.
— The first half of The Last Dance is made up of several incidents strung together. Did those incidents come from your research, or were they creative work?
When I told Dayo Wong the story, I told him his character’s Chinese name takes after the monk Daosheng (who found enlightenment after seeing the world), so the first half is the story of “Daosheng sees the world.” I wanted to use a protagonist who learns a revelation after seeing the world, so telling a story about “seeing the world” is a very part of this film.
That said, some of these stories are based on fact. For example, the mother embalming her deceased son is real, though the real case involved a daughter embalming her father.
The other stories came from research as well. For example, I was surprised to find that a city as developed as Hong Kong has some very stubborn policies. For example, I cannot hold a funeral for someone unless I’m a member of the immediate family. That means since there is no law protecting same-sex unions, partners cannot hold funerals for their significant others. That led to me wanting to use the film to define what “family” is. There are different forms of families present in each of the film’s stories. Does living under the same roof, seeing each other day-to-day, and sharing the same blood make people a family? What about those who don’t share the same blood, but share a mutual love?
— The film also uses funeral traditions to explore misogyny in Chinese culture. Did you want to explore the funeral business first, or did you set out to explore the idea of misogyny first?
I wanted to explore misogyny first. Because I saw that it still exists in a developed city like Hong Kong.
During the pandemic, I lost many loved ones. I had a loved one whose entire immediate family were women. The mother passed away, and she only had two daughters to see her off. While we were helping with the funeral, the Taoist priest kept asking for a male to handle the rituals. This was the final thing the two daughters could do for their mother, but they couldn’t do certain things, and did they really have to stand at the back because they are female? I kept hearing that women were forbidden from touching some things because women are “tainted”. I hated that. That’s why I wanted to write about that in the film.
In my own family, my mother, who is 70 this year, washed her own undergarments all her life. One day, I finally asked her why she didn’t put them in the laundry. She said it was because her father, meaning my grandfather, told her that women’s undergarments are tainted and cannot be washed with men’s clothes. If they’re mixed together, the men would suffer ill fortune. That’s an extremely ridiculous belief. My grandfather washed his clothes separately from his wife and daughter’s clothes, but he’s never been rich. The scary thing is that because of that one thing he said, my mother, to this day at the age of 70, still washes her undergarments by hand.
— What made you think of casting two very famous comedy actors to play such serious characters?
I believe those who can do comedy are great actors. Look at the Leung Sing-po from the black-and-white era, to Sun Ma Sze Tsang, then on to Michael Hui, Stephen Chow, Ronald Cheng, Dayo Wong... Although they’re all comedy actors, I think they’re also great actors. However, because they chose to make audiences laugh, audiences don’t necessarily see their acting talent. I wanted to show audiences that comedy actors have acting chops, too.
Of course, casting Dayo also had commercial considerations. He was the most bankable actor at the time, and I needed an actor with the intelligence to play my Daosheng. I don’t need to waste time to convince anyone of Dayo’s intelligence. Also, since he studied philosophy, I thought he’d have his own way of conveying the film’s issues about life and death in his performance.
I thought of Michael Hui for Master Man around the same time. To me, Michael Hui is really the grandmaster. At the Hong Kong Screenwriters’ Guild annual banquet, the tradition is that the greener you are, the further back you sit. The more experience you gain, you get to move further up. But Michael Hui always sat at the head table. He’s a legend. I saw him in a Taiwanese film called Godspeed. It showed how good he was in a serious film, and I thought this character [in The Last Dance] could show another side of him that no one has seen before. So, I told my investor that I wanted to cast him.
It was only after I cast the two of them I realised that they had worked on The Magic Touch together. It turns out that they hadn’t worked together in 30 years.
— I have to mention Michelle Wai, because she’s starred in all three of your films as director. Can you talk about the evolution of your working relationship, from Ready o/r Knot until now?
She’s a very smart and hardworking actor. When Michelle took on Ready o/r Knot, she hadn’t done a lot of comedies, especially the type of comedies I do. It takes timing and performance skills. She was so confused on that film. After three days of shooting, she called me in tears, telling me she had no idea how to play her role. She said she felt like everything she did was wrong, because I had to correct every one of her lines to fit my rhythm and my dialogue style.
But when she got to the sequel, Ready o/r Rot, she started to loosen up. She started to offer input. On Ready o/r Rot, she was recognised with a Best Actress nomination [at the Hong Kong Film Awards], but I think she made an even further leap with The Last Dance. I think the biggest change I saw from Ready o/r Knot to The Last Dance is that her confidence has finally come and she has grown more mature.
When I told Michelle about The Last Dance, I wanted to write Kwok Man-yuet for her, but we’re close enough for me to admit to her that I wasn’t sure if I wanted to give it to her. The next morning, she called me to ask me for the role. She said she told her manager that she would focus only on this character for the whole year and not do anything else.
Before I even finished the script, Michelle and I went to meet Taoist priests for training. For three months, no Taoist priest would teach us “breaking hell’s gates” because they had no idea what we were doing. They downright rejected us, saying “women don’t break hell’s gates.” Three months later, I gave them my treatment, explaining why I was telling this story and why a woman would “break hell’s gates” in it. Finally, we convinced two Taoist priests to help us. All in all, Michelle trained nine months to do it. I think she bravely threw herself into this film.
— It’s been three years since you started this project. Has your understanding of the film’s themes changed?
I had always been a very pessimistic person. At first, the script’s conclusion was basically saying that life has no purpose. As the film said, life is a countdown the moment it begins. We build relationships and accumulate them over time, but when we earn a certain amount of affection, our time is over. What’s the point of existing in this world, then? That’s so stupid. I started wondering what the point of life is. The point of life is that life is pointless. Those of us who work in film or other creative cultural industries, we have something to document our existence in this world. But for most, the only things that prove their existence is their physical presence and the people around them. When our bodies return to nature, only the memories in those who remember us remain. When the last person who remembers us dies, it’s like we never existed. In that case, what’s the point of coming into this world?
When I finished the script, everyone got mad at me, including my co-writer, my entire crew, my producer, Dayo Wong, Elaine Jin, Michelle Wai, Rachel Leung, Chu Pak-hong, everyone. Dayo and Elaine came after me the hardest. Michelle, Rachel and Pak-hong, we all came up together from Ready o/r Knot, so they’re very considerate of my feelings. My co-writer was shocked. We were talking about Everything Everywhere All at Once at the time, and I said that I hated its Hollywood-style, wishy-washy ending. It’s not realistic to me. The film should’ve ended with the rocks. If I directed it, I would’ve ended at the rock, fade to black, followed by 15 minutes’ standing ovation guaranteed. My co-writer said that attitude would never work.
Elaine, who’s like a mom to me, called and yelled at me for two hours. “Why would you write something like this?” she kept asking. She then called me out for dim sum, which we routinely do once or twice a month. She said the saddest script she had ever read before this was Wong Chun’s Mad World, but at least Mad World had a small ray of hope. She said that my original script had no hope at all. It’s a dead end. I told her, “There IS a flicker of light in it.” “But it’s as small as a flame from a lighter!” she said.
Then, Dayo Wong saw the script and asked me if I could change the ending. He said, “As filmmakers, we have a social responsibility. You’re not promoting any negative behaviour, but what if an audience member gets the wrong idea and makes a foolish decision? We’ll have to live with it for the rest of our lives.” He then spent all 30, 40 days of the production consoling me. He kept asking me to reconsider the ending. When we weren’t shooting, he asked me out to chat. We didn’t talk much about the script. Instead, we talked about life, how we saw life and death, and our life experiences. He told me that he felt similarly in his 40s, and he assured me that I’d think differently in 10 years.
I’m not sure when it happened, but he slowly changed me. We were filming in Hung Hom one day. We had already shot the original ending. I was waiting for a car, but the car broke down all of a sudden, which never happens because we usually inspect cars before they come to set. I was waiting at the intersection outside the funeral parlours, looking into a tunnel that leaves the neighbourhood. I told my co-writer, “Leaving the neighbourhood through this tunnel looks someone’s soul being liberated from the underworld. In the film, we say that life is like a ride. What if leaving through this tunnel is like being reborn? We then go to an aerial shot of cars on the highway, signifying lives moving along side-by-side. I think it’s really meaningful.” Then, I told him to shoot this ending. After making countless edits, I finally decided to use this ending. I think that was because of Dayo.
— Why did you decide to go back and make this extended version?
That’s because of Dayo. He promised audiences if the film broke the all-time box office record, which he held before (with A Guilty Conscience), then there would be an extended version.
While we were editing, we held a lot of focus groups and received a lot of feedback from general audiences to arrive at this 127-minute theatrical cut. I think this is the version that audiences would be the most receptive to. But when the film came out, people loved the film so much that they kept asking for more of it.
Actually, I told audiences at Q&A’s that they wouldn’t like the film more if I made it longer. If longer is better, then that means [co-editor] William Chang and I were wrong all along. However, I knew a longer version would flesh out some characters, so I made this extended version.
— How did you choose which scenes to reinstate? You put back two scenes that I found very pivotal: the scene with Kaki Sham (as Dominic’s half-brother) and the scene of Elaine Jin talking about her late husband.
I wanted to fulfill the audience’s curiosity about the characters. You find more about Lin and Dominic. Originally, the focus groups told us that the film’s pacing slowed down in those scenes. That’s why we took them out. The pacing would’ve been tough on certain audiences if they were watching it for the first time. I want the film to reach the widest audience possible. For more avid film viewers, the film may not be artistic enough or the messages are explained too explicitly, but I didn’t want to leave too much unexplained because I wanted people who don’t watch many films to watch this film. I think I found the best balance I could.
— The wording is very careful to state that this is an “extended version” rather than a “director’s cut”.
Because the theatrical version is already a director’s cut. If I call the extended version a “director’s cut”, it’d sound like I had wanted the film to be this way. The theatrical version is already what I wanted. Creative work may be subjective, but I produce films objectively. My film has to face audiences. I held focus groups because I wanted to get audience feedback. If audiences say that version provides the best experience for them, believing them is part of my judgment, too. Letting people think that the extended version is the film I was supposed to make would be unfair to my crew, my editor and my investors. The extended version is just a longer version of the film.
— You said before that you wanted to take this film abroad to film festivals. Do you think you have succeeded in bringing what you wanted to bring abroad?
I believe so. The most memorable screening so far was the one in Rotterdam. We did three screenings. The first one had a lot of Hong Kong audiences from all over Europe, but the second and third screenings were really made up of foreign audiences. After the screening, they asked me a lot of questions that surprised me. I was happy they understood it, and they saw things that I didn’t think of. All the great audience questions reminded me that when we Hong Kong filmmakers make films, we’re informing foreign audiences about what is happening in Hong Kong. We have a responsibility to tell people that there are still things worth saying in this place. That’s the sense of satisfaction that attending film festivals gives me.
Kevin Ma