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Otakon |
| Ching-Siu "Tony Ching" Sung
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| 2004 |
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 In
the 1980's, a collection of television-trained directors and producers
invaded the Hong Kong film industry. The result was a blast of
innovative cinema, featuring stories and scenes that have been ripped
off by mainstream filmmakers worldwide. Ching-Siu "Tony Ching" Sung is
one of the people who led the revolution, working as a action sequence
director on films such as "Chinese Ghost Story" and "A Better Tomorrow
2." It's been a lifetime job for Ching, the son of an actor and a film
director, who grew up in the Shaw Bros. compound in Hong Kong, attended
a performance school as a child and performed his first on-screen role
at nine. "When I first started working with my father on `The Fourteen
Amazons,' I worked as an assistant action director," said Ching at
Otakon on Sunday morning. "I learned that the director had the control
over everything, and I just followed that." At that time, the
movie-making economy in Hong Kong was soft. so Ching started working in
television, a blessing in disguise because that gave him a venue to
develop his acting and direction skills.
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 Ching's
career has given him to work as an equal with Asian screen legends such
as Stephen Chow, Chow-Yung Fat, John Woo and Jackie Chan. It's also
nearly gotten him killed, on `The House of Flying Daggers' when the
director decided to use real weapons for all the stunts. "There is a
shot where the arrow was supposed to go past my head but it hit me in
the head I still have the scar. It was a very difficult movie to make
because of the environment, and a lot of people got injured."
Ching's first directing effort was `Duel to the Death,' a film from the
Golden Harvest studio. `I used what I learned from TV and applied that
to this movie...I created a different style. After that, it earned an
award as one of the top ten Chinese movies.`
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 That
work encouraged director John Woo to hire Ching as an action sequence
director for 1987's `A Better Tomorrow 2,` the sequel that some felt
was superior to the original. `John Woo thought that my style would be
more appropriate for his movie; that's why he picked me for the second
film...since he was a director, I had to respect his ideas. I liked to
listen to him tell how he wanted to make a movie, and then I would
parade my ideas and we would decide the outcome. When Ching worked with
Jackie Chan on the comedic martial arts movies in the 1980's, he was
part of a wave of comedy films that even reached the U.S. and led to
Ching making similar films that used fight scenes to maker the audience
laugh. Fight sequences have become a major part of the story of Hong
Kong films, something that makes the movies easier to understand, Ching
said. `Martial arts are part of Chinese culture. It's seen in the U.S.
as a cultural thing instead of a violence thing. Movies such as `The
Matrix and `Spider-Man have incorporated this, so it's part of a mixed
culture.`
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