Sub head:
Cinefile: Five Questions For ...
Alexi Tan, director of John Woo-produced gangster drama Blood Brothers

Alexi Tan’s star-studded directorial debut, Blood Brothers, can be described as a character-driven period film with a modern attitude. Entirely shot in China and set in the 1930s, the film concerns three friends (Daniel Wu, Tony Yang, Liu Ye) who move from the countryside to Shanghai, a glittering city of vice and decadence. There, they do whatever it takes to become rich, risking their friendship in the process.
Educated in London and New York, young director Tan has impressed with a string of award-winning commercials and short films. One of these – Double Blade (2003), shot in LA and starring Taiwanese idol Jay Chou – convinced filmmakers John Woo (The Killer, Bullet in the Head) and Terence Chang to help produce Blood Brothers, a film that Tan sees as a tribute to various film masters.
Indeed, the gangster drama was inspired by themes of honor and brotherhood from Woo’s Hong Kong films, storytelling from Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, and modern attitude from the likes of Quentin Tarantino. Tan sat down with that’s Beijing to discuss his Chinese answer to the western genre.

that’s: Is this a John Woo film or an Alexi Tan film?
Alexi Tan: It’s a combination of all my collaborators' work [costume designer Tim Yip; action director Philip Kwok; cinematographer Michel Taburiaux; producers John Woo and Terence Chang]. John’s hand is there and every time he had an opinion or a say, I would always tell somebody beside me “a master touched my soul.”

that’s: How did you work on the story?
AT: I actually wrote the film with female writer and Beijing native Zhang Dan. I am not a native Mandarin speaker so I was not comfortable with writing a Mandarin script. To be honest, at first I was very wary about working with a female writer, because I was doing a movie about brotherhood and she knew nothing about Sergio Leone’s films. [But] I made the right choice because she was able to inject a lot of things from a woman’s point of view into the female characters. Even if this is a film about brotherhood I made sure that women are not merely fixtures. As a matter of fact, we researched Shu Qi’s character, Lulu, extensively.

that’s: How about the action?
AT: John Woo’s very strong with action and he would tell me how he thought the action of a scene should be done. However, I would tell him I really see this movie like Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West where the action is real and fast; it’s all about the build up. Like the long wait for a train in the film opening and then the kill is made in a second.

that’s: Indeed, you build tension, whereas Woo can do a non-stop action scene for 30 minutes.
AT: Yes, and … because he can do those things the best, there is no need for me to do a B-grade level of that. This is what would have happened if I had done it that way. He’s done the two guns and dove thing; we have too much respect for him to try and redo it ourselves.

that’s: Did you ever imagine what your directorial debut would be like?
AT: I dreamt about it, that’s for sure. When I was shooting the film it was really strange; it never really occurred to me what was going on. After the film, I really realized that John Woo produced the film and he was telling everyone he was supporting me. When I am watching the film now there are, of course, many elements that I’d like to redo. If they let me re-shoot now I would delay the whole premier – I am my own worst critic.

Blood Brothers hits cinemas across town on August 16.

(c) that's Beijing Magazine
Deputy Chief editor: Oliver Robinson
August 2007 issue