words james marsh

The director of Dance, Subaru! confirms that being a loner means one has to work harder

Lee Chi Ngai is not a name you may currently be familiar with. Yet those who cast their minds back to Eric Tsang’s 1990’s United Filmmaker Organization (UFO) may well remember such films as He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Father (1993), Tom, Dick and Hairy (1993) and Dr Hack (1995) – in which Lee’s name filled the directorial credit. The last film he helmed was 2004’s romance Magic Kitchen starring Sammi Cheng and F4’s heartthrob Jerry Yan. But now, after a gap of some five years, the director’s name is about to be front and centre in filmgoers’ minds once more with the release of Dance, Subaru! this month.

Not that the lack of notoriety particularly worries Lee. In fact, he was probably the most reticent of the UFO group, which included such well-known names as Peter Chan, Jacob Cheung and Teddy Chen. At first he even refused to join UFO. ‘I know I am not a gregarious person and I would suffer if I had to work in a collective. But they asked me a few times and I thought about it. If I had to make my own film, they would be the same people I would ask for investment anyway. So I joined.’ When UFO dissolved in 1996, Lee just continued working on his own projects. ‘It was the most creative and mature period in my life – and it happened to be the same time the whole industry went downhill,’ he says, referring to the duration between The Sleepless City (1996) – his HK/Japanese venture starring Takeshi Kaneshiro – and his current film. ‘I kept writing and in fact I have a stack of scripts sitting in the drawer at home now.’ He refuses to complain, but it was also the period he could describe as being his most unlucky – a number of his enterprises were caught up in events well beyond his control.

‘On the day of 9/11, I was right in Manhattan in New York looking for locations for a project.’ An adaptation of the biography of a Japanese artist, the venture immediately stalled because of instabilities resulting from the destruction of the World Trade Centre. ‘The airport was closed for a few days after the attack but I clearly remember I took the first flight on JAL back to Tokyo,’ says Lee. Then later when he was about to begin shooting Veronika Decides to Die, an adaptation of Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho’s novel, his lead actress Hirosue Ryoko – recently seen in the Oscar’s Best Foreign Film Departures – announced that she was pregnant. ‘Things like that kept happening to me. Plus the whole climate among the investors changed – not just in HK but globally.’ He takes a deep breath and continues: ‘In the past, films were made by filmmakers. Now the investors are lawyers, agents, businessmen. Films have become a product.’

Lee’s latest directorial effort, Dance, Subaru!, is about talent and chance. Adapted from the best-selling comic by Masahito Soda, most recognized for his work Firefighter! Daigo of Fire Company M, the film centres on the prodigy ballerina Subaru and her difficult road to success. Although he has cast up-and-coming actress Meisa Kuroki as Subaru, Lee says the film is not merely another coming-of-age film with teenage idols, dance music and street fashion with a love story woven in. It is as much concerned with the psychology of his heroine – and that may not all be good. His director notes are telling: ‘…mostly very talented people are self-centred egotists, whose successes are, more often than not, built on the sufferings of others.’ Geniuses are usually not loveable figures. ‘This is a fact – you would be quite disappointed in lots of the talented people in the film industry if you got to know them in person,’ he chuckles.

Lee denies that Subaru is drawn from the shadows of his own life. ‘I am definitely not a genius,’ he says. Does he feel any bitterness that former comrades like Peter Chan and Jacob Cheung have won such considerable success over the years, while he has remained relatively unknown? ‘Everything happens for a reason. Your personality will shape your road,’ he says. ‘I am not good at socializing, so maybe I need to work doubly hard to achieve the same thing as others in this world, where a lot of things are about connections and presentation. There is nothing like talent being left to rust: Those who complain are those without talent.’
Dance, Subaru! opens on March 26.