A King of Kung Fu Films Savors Work and Honors
Lit Ma for The International Herald Tribune
By JOYCE HOR-CHUNG LAU
Published: July 1, 2010
HONG KONG — Respect is paid when Sammo Hung lumbers down the streets of Tsim Sha Tsui, the neighborhood where he first learned martial arts as a boy.
Mr. Hung in “Eastern Condors,” which was shown at the New York Asian Film Festival.
Women ask for his autograph at a cafe where he has his black coffee. Laborers stripped to the waist in the summer heat crowd against the edge of their truck and wave. Tourists snap photos as he strolls along the Avenue of the Stars — a sort of Hollywood Walk of Fame here — where his hand prints are between Jackie Chan’s and Brigitte Lin’s.
Not particularly well known among mainstream American audiences, Mr. Hung, 58, is known as the “Big Brother” of the Hong Kong kung fu film. The famously hefty actor did not go the Hollywood route that Mr. Chan has pursued but has stayed mainly in Asia, where he has directed, produced, choreographed or acted in about 200 movies. He is best known as a fight choreographer, working behind the scenes with stars like Mr. Chan and John Woo, and playing an integral role in the development of the kung fu genre.
That earned him a lifetime achievement award last week at the New York Asian Film Festival, which runs through Thursday. It is showing four of his works: “Eastern Condors” (1987), a darkly humorous Vietnam War-era film that is said to have been an influence on Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds”; “Kung Fu Chefs” (2009), a comedy; and the two “Ip Man” movies (2008 and 2010), based on the life of Ip Man, a grand master of the Wing Chun style of martial arts who taught Bruce Lee, and for which Mr. Hung did the fight choreography. A sold-out screening of “Ip Man 2” opened the festival.
The entertainment business runs in Mr. Hung’s family. His grandmother, Chin Tsi-Ang, was one of the first sword-wielding martial-arts actresses, and his grandfather was a director.
Born Hung Kam-bo in 1952, he was trained in the old Peking Opera School tradition, in which parents sent young children to live on campus and to apprentice under a master who taught them martial arts, acrobatics, singing and dancing.
“I was never good at school and was always fighting in the streets,” Mr. Hung said. “So they sent me to learn to fight.”
At 9 he was sent to be trained in the Tsim Sha Tsui neighborhood of Kowloon, where he met a younger student named Chan Kong-sang, who became Jackie Chan. Under the school’s management they became child stars in a performing troupe.
“We woke early in the morning and worked until 11 at night,” Mr. Hung said. “There was a small, square wooden stool, and we had to do a handstand on it for an hour. Of course they beat the children. I lived there for seven years.”
Decades later, in 1988, Mr. Hung played his former master in “Painted Faces,” a drama that depicts the boys’ spartan life. “Our real suffering,” he said, “was much worse than what we put in the movie.”
Mr. Hung said he did not learn kung fu specifically until after he left school. He also spent years studying a variety of fighting styles from China and other Asian nations.
He established himself as an action director, choreographing the elaborate combat scenes for which Hong Kong films are known and sometimes fighting himself. He plays the portly Shaolin monk, for example, whom Bruce Lee battles in the opening of “Enter the Dragon”(1973).
Through the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s Mr. Hung was involved in scores of movies, which the Hong Kong studio system was churning out quickly and cheaply. He specialized in the B-films so beloved by audiences here.
Hong Kong cinema began developing its own look and moving away from stylized Mandarin-language costume dramas. Filmmakers started using bawdy humor, urban settings, tight hand-to-hand combat shots and the rough Cantonese of the streets.
“Kung fu films have to move with the rest of the world,” Mr. Hung said. “You couldn’t keep on doing sword fights in historic films. People wanted superheroes. They wanted something fast and new.”
From 1998 to 2000 he starred in “Martial Law,” a CBS prime-time TV drama, in which he played a kung fu-fighting Chinese cop.
Like everyone in the Hong Kong movie business Mr. Hung is doing more work in China, as it opens up and as its entertainment industry grows. That said, he noted that “the local Hong Kong flavor is getting lost in some films.”
“I wish there were more kung fu films,” he said. “They are a part of our culture. But there are no young new stars out there. Who’s making a new generation of kung fu films now? If all young actors want is to star in romances, what do they need to learn kung fu for? The sex scenes?”
Mr. Hung’s three sons — Timmy, Jimmy and Sammy — have acted in various projects with him, but he said he was not going to push them. “I want them to see the world for themselves,” he said.
Nor did he see the film festival award as the culmination of his career. Once the festival ends, he plans to return home to Hong Kong, he said, and start shooting again.
“I’m not quite ready for a lifetime achievement award,” he said. “It makes it sound like I’m going to retire soon, and I feel like I’ve just started.”
The New York Asian Film Festival continues through Thursday with screenings at various locations. Information: subwaycinema.com.
