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14 BCMAGAZINE 06MAY2010 One of Hong Kong’s long-lost directors returns with a story of alternate realities It has been a long five years, but Clara Law is back – and dreaming. The director of such movies as Farewell China (1990), Autumn Moon (1992) and Temptation of a Monk (1993), Floating Life (1996) and The Goddess of 1967 (2000) built a considerable reputation for award-winning films of both substance and beauty. But then the death of her mother, her father’s chronic illness and other family setbacks put her movie career on hold for half a decade. The film with which she chose to end her cinematic exile, Like a Dream, immediately re-stakes her claim to being a character- or theme-driven storyteller rather than one driven by plot. Like a Dream follows Max, a New York businessman played by Daniel Wu, as he continually dreams of a mysterious, angelic Mandarin-speaking girl in a strange city pining for a lover who had jumped to his death from a tall building. One day on a business trip to Shanghai, Max thinks he sees the girl but, on meeting her, finds someone very different from his dream. Nevertheless, he and the girl have enough in common for the Shanghai look-alike to agree to help him find the girl of his dreams, who, he is convinced, is an actual person. It may sound like a hide-and-seek type of expedition, but Law’s film explores obsession and realities – Max’s obsession, the dream realities he (and we) enters during sleep and the reality of his everyday waking life. And because it is not the usual kind of narrative-dependent sequence of events we are so used to, Law felt she had to find a new way to make her off-mainstream production. As she explains to bc, ‘From the start we moved from the old process, which is analytical, to a new phase of creation, relying more on pure intuition. We felt dissatisfied with the old way, as it wasn’t able to describe what we are trying to do. We gave up everything we were accustomed to, that we felt was safe: Analysis makes you feel safe because it gives you a handle and, if something doesn’t work out, you just analyze further. But when you’re totally open, there is nothing to fall back on. It’s free fall. The risk is that at the end of three months, it all comes to nothing – no fruition. It’s exciting, for as we come to our workroom – actually it’s more of our fight room – we work with a blank piece of paper. We try to locate the story through feeling, let feelings take us into the story.’ That meant a lot of work with her three main characters: Her actors had to be open, versatile and, as she says, possess a certain something she calls ‘essence’. ‘I’d been watching Daniel’s work for some time and some of it was really impressive – and he’s got an interesting face. When he read the script he wanted to talk, so I flew to HK and we met. When I cast a film, I always go for the essence of the person, I don’t go for the face. In Daniel I found something really pure, very unpolluted, that I was sure would work. Same with Yolanda.’ Law cast Yolanda Yuan as both the ethereal figure of Max’s dreams and the much more earthy and boisterous girl he meets in Shanghai. ‘It was not very easy to find someone that has her essence – a little bit classical, a little bit sad and a little bit distilled and quiet. But I also knew she had to play two characters: I’m very comfortable with her playing the dream girl, but the challenge is the real girl, the polar opposite, the kind of character Yolanda has never done before. ‘It wasn’t easy for her to do a seemingly brainless kind of girl because she has a lot of brains, and so, of course, it’s a difficult challenge. But I thought she would able to reach it – I can imagine that if she’d just had to focus on the dream girl, the whole performance would have been different. I do think her theatrical training helped: She can use her body more than just her face in her portrayal of a character. Anyway, we had two weeks of rehearsal, so by the time we started the actors were ready to get into their roles.’ It is unusual for filmmakers to spend much time on rehearsals as movie production schedules often don’t allow time for more than a few takes. However, in her last few films, Law has taken a more theatrical approach with her actors. ‘In Australia we have rehearsals,’ she says. ‘I first found it necessary to rehearse in Floating Life. When you’re on site, it’s very hard to shoot chronologically; sometimes you have to shoot front to back and back to front. If you’re not sure about your entire journey, it’s close to impossible to get the result you want. Unless, of course, the actor has already rehearsed everything at home – that’s what happens in the States. Actors rehearse at home and when they arrive on set they are well prepared and all ready for the shoot. Also I didn’t think in Asia we would be given the time and space to rehearse. ‘Floating Life was a family drama with so many characters. Some were pro, some amateurs and so we really needed the space to make them feel like a family; we had to train the amateurs to get to another stage. I felt and still feel that rehearsal is very important.’ Law found that rehearsals even benefited her very experienced lead male actor. With his martial arts background and films like Gen-X Cops, One Night in Mong Kok and New Police Story on his resume, Daniel Wu is hardly the geeky type. Even with nominations for the best actor award in the Hong Kong Film Awards and the best supporting actor title at the Golden Horse Film Awards, his challenge, Law says, was to become a nerd. ‘He started out not finding it, then slowly we talked and lived the experience of the guy,’ she explains. ‘Conversations and some discoveries later we explored A Law for Dreamers words wilson fok
