How legendary Hong Kong action film director Ringo Lam broke into Hollywood but reserved his best for home
- Lam made three Jean-Claude Van Damme movies in America, but his biggest successes all came in his hometown
- He said real action and stunts, and the feeling of genuine danger, were always the forte of Hong Kong films, not the CGI technology of Hollywood
Ringo Lam Ling-tung (1955-2018) was a prolific Hong Kong film director, producer and screenwriter, whose best works, such as City on Fire (1987), put stunts and stark, unstylised violence to the fore.
Although enmeshed in the local Hong Kong industry, his films were frequently critical of the city. He often looked abroad to America throughout his 33-year directing career, making three Jean-Claude Van Damme movies there. But if the martial arts used across his films were mixed, the reviews were even more so.
Lam started out by joining the actors training programme run by Hong Kong broadcaster TVB in 1973, on which he met Chow Yun-fat – who would later star in several of his films – before becoming the assistant of legendary producer Wong Tin-lam. He befriended Tsui Hark, already a director at TVB, and the pair would watch black-and-white films together. “They were always in German, Russian, French, and we would never understand what they were about,” he confessed to Asian film site Eastern Kicks. “Visually, it was really interesting though.”
After a stint in Toronto studying film, he returned to Hong Kong, where Hark offered him a job, and began directing comedies such as Esprit D’Amour (1983). The success of Mad Mission 4: You Never Die Twice (1986) bought him creative freedom which, tellingly, he used to make cop thriller City of Fire – that most American of genres.
“At first I didn’t know what to film,” he told The L Magazine. “Eventually I decided that I enjoyed the realistic aspects of The French Connection and that I wanted to create a film containing similar grit.”