Keep Pressing On: Soi Cheang Discusses "Limbo"

We’ve missed the primal scream that is Soi Cheang’s cinema. The Hong Kong director’s frenzied genre tales of survival—horror films, cop movies, thrillers, action movies—have been waylaid by his big budget success in the CGI-driven Monkey King franchise (three entries and counting), movies of varying quality but certainly scrubbed of the extraordinary desperation and exalting feats of tactile physical endurance that characterize such films as Dog Bite Dog (2006), Motorway (2012), and SPL2: A Time for Consequences (2015). With Limbo, the story of a wild, grieving cop (Lam Ka Tung), his young superior (Mason Lee), and an ex-convict, former substance abuser (an extraordinary Liu Cya) who become embroiled in the search for a serial killer in Hong Kong, Cheang is back and more fierce than ever.

More than that, the director visually reinvents the island city: In harsh, high-contrast black and white images Hong Kong is a garbage-strewn dystopia, as if Escape from New York’s desolate urban wasteland wasn’t the future but the present. Barring a few scenes at police headquarters and a hospital, the mise-en-scène seems to get more dilapidated and deplorable by the minute. The vividly bleak look, created by key collaborators of Johnnie To, cinematographer Cheng Siu Keung and editor David Richardson, along with production designer Kwok Keung Mak, is fitting for a film in which the victims of the crimes are “a call girl, an ex-con, and a drug addict…—all social outcasts,” as the police disparagingly note. Outcasts managing to survive under dire circumstances are hallmarks of Cheang’s cinema, and in the Hong Kong of Limbo they are left with nowhere to go and little to do but help or hurt each other. The killer is an illegal immigrant with mental health issues, only capable of preying on those already beaten down by life, and the true hero is neither of the cops (Lam plays a violent, grief-wracked wreck; and Lee an ineffective officer hilariously plagued with a toothache throughout) but rather Liu Cya’s frantic ex-con. Driven nearly out of her mind with guilt over accidentally killing the wife of the older detective, she submits to being their informant to find the killer, and in doing so masochistically subjects herself to abject terror and abuse from cops and criminals alike. Yet she continues to fight back with every ounce of her being. Giving an astoundingly arduous and exhausting performance, Liu’s character suffers all the grievous abuse and indignities of a Lars von Trier heroine, but one rooted in a social reality exploded into extreme physical expressionism.

“You want me to die?” she asks Lam’s vengeful cop, who grimly nods in the affirmative. Stumbling, bedraggled, bloody and sullied, weeping and haggard, as Liu makes her way through the story she personifies not only the treatment of Hong Kong’s “outcasts,” but also their extreme will to live, their tenacity and spirit. “Why do you treat me like this,” she wails. “I don’t want to die.” This is the cry of the spirit of the film, savagely against being dismissed and persecuted, and proclaiming her anguished drive to live. Meanwhile, a substance abuser tells the cops that, “We’re not as crazy as you. We are rubbish, so what? In this world, he’s the only one who cares,” referring to the killer, who she refuses to give up. He treats her kindly because she has a severed hand, a motif that haunts him and his crimes. This world is grim; the cops are not forces of moral good—they’re part solving the crime, part covering their asses, and part after revenge—and they only descend further. Each half of the film devolves from nocturnal investigation into a slum raid, chase, and brutal fight, frenetic and unflinching attempts by the isolated cops to find the killer, and by the woman to simply survive what the world is throwing at her.

Throughout, garbage, mannequin limbs, and sluicing rain overwhelm the caustic images, a topography of waste in a city on the verge of ruin. Limbo is the kind of film that cuts from a rape to a flat-lining monitor in a hospital to the city skyline, a stark condemnation of an ugly state of the world. Tough to take, the film’s voracious mixture of moral bleakness and human perseverance is nevertheless impossible to ignore. Even if he may not like what he finds there, let’s hope Soi Cheang stays in Hong Kong a while longer.

NOTEBOOK: Many of your early films are vividly set in Hong Kong, with action scenes roving all over the city. This is your first film made there since SPL2: A Time for Consequences (2015). What made you want to film again in Hong Kong?

SOI CHEANG: I have never left the Hong Kong market—I always want to make Hong Kong films, but of course, in the last few years I’ve been making Monkey King movies in China and they're bigger-scale movies and after a while it got a little bit tiresome. So that's why I want to come back to Hong Kong, to produce a movie of a different scale, a smaller scale, for a change. Shooting Limbo is a nice reminder of why I want to make movies in the first place.

NOTEBOOK: What makes you want to make movies in the first place?

CHEANG: First and foremost, filmmaking is my favorite way of expression. It says a lot about how I feel, about the city, about the place I grew up. Compared to making big commercial movies... you know, as a commercial filmmaker, I have to put myself in the backseat, I have to think for the audience. So coming back to Limbo was a good change for me because it gave me this chance to revisit a genre that I really like and to allow me to say how I feel about this particular genre of films and also how I feel about Hong Kong and how I feel about the characters.

NOTEBOOK: How did this project get started?

CHEANG: I first came across the novel [Lei Mi’s The Wisdom Tooth] eight years ago, and I was captivated by the story. I was trying to set it up in the Mainland, as a mainland project, but the development period kind of showed to me that it was so difficult to make the movie in China. So I put it aside, and then it was about four years ago that I decided that I wanted to come back to Hong Kong and make a smaller-scale film. And that's when the two things connected, and so I gave the novel to my writer Au Kin-yee for adaptation and to set it in Hong Kong.

NOTEBOOK: So it wasn't originally set in Hong Kong, it was set in China?

CHEANG: The novel takes place in Mainland China, but it doesn't specify which city. It just says “a southern city in Mainland China.”

NOTEBOOK: In transposing the story from a generic Mainland city to Hong Kong, what was important for you to bring from Hong Kong into the film?

CHEANG: In the novel, the author presented this southern city as humid, decayed, and filthy. And to me, it coincides with my first years in the city. I was born in Macau and came to Hong Kong and lived in an area of Hong Kong called Sham Shui Po, so it just became a very natural fit.

NOTEBOOK: You mentioned that it was many years ago that you found this book and wanted to make a film out of it. I recall seeing footage from the project a few years ago. What was the production process like?

CHEANG: It didn't take long, four years ago, to get the film off the ground and get it ready for shooting. It was about six, seven months in prep. And there was about three months of shooting, and that's when we got the majority of the photography done. It was really in the post-production side of things that this project took a longer life than expected. There was editing, and my editor David Richardson and I worked on many different versions of the film because we felt that during the photography phase, maybe what we wanted to achieve was not completely fulfilled. And then, of course there was editing, and also rewriting the script—and even this idea, this experimentation with the color tone, and eventually deciding on the black-and-white tone, all this took a long time. So you can say that the post-production side of things was really the majority of my time on this film. You know, the last four years.

NOTEBOOK: Can talk about how you and your team created this visual aesthetic of decay and the filth? Is it supposed to be realism or is it supposed to be a fantastic version of a destroyed city?

CHEANG: For me, to the creation of the filthy Hong Kong as you've seen the film... that’s all set decoration. All the garbage, that’s really set dressing. So the streets are not as dirty as they appear in the film in real life—of course, after shooting the trash for a while it really does become trash because it sits there for so long! [Laughs] The two main contributors that worked with me on the film were our art director, Mak Kwok-keung Mak, and also the director of photography, Cheng Siu-keung. They helped to dress the set, and every day before shooting we would go through and discuss again about exactly the placement of the set dressing to make sure that they appeared the way they were intended to. You can say that the idea of this filthy side of the city comes first from my memory, but of course in the film the presentation of it is a little exaggerated, because I really want to highlight this side of Hong Kong. In a way, it's both real and fiction.

NOTEBOOK: This film, like so many of your past Hong Kong works, focuses on a story around social outcasts in the city, in this case homeless and substance abusers. What draws you time and time again to stories either about, or that focus on, these characters?

CHEANG: You can say that I relate to these people, these marginalized people, because they are in my memories, when I was growing up in these neighborhoods. My father, for example, often still goes to Sham Shui Po, which I mentioned earlier, one of the poor areas of Hong Kong. And I remember one day, I was going to Sham Shui Po for location scouting, and I saw my dad in the area, just hanging about with other people—the people that you may see in Limbo, for example. They have stories that we don't know about, and I relate to them. So I feel they naturally have a place in my films.

NOTEBOOK: These characters are ones that I associate, generally, with the kinds of movies that are specifically about them: “social message” films—a drama about homelessness or drama about substance abusers, or a documentary about what it's like to be a drug addict living in a city. What stories can genre filmmaking tell about these people that a documentary about the homeless in Hong Kong cannot do?

CHEANG: For me, the aim is the same, because whether it's a documentary film or genre film, we show who these people are and what they go through. But it's really just a matter of presentation, the way they are presented. In my films, of course, I'm not trying to preach any social message. But through the flow of the story, the audience can gradually discover who these people are, and what they go through. Through the progression of the story, even if they may not be the focus of the story. But on the other hand, I think it's really interesting in these genre movies to take a risk by making these marginalized people the main character of these films. To me, it's not normally what genre movies would do, making these people the main character. So that's what I want to achieve.

NOTEBOOK: You mentioned working with David Richardson before and I would like to ask if you can expand on that collaboration. He's a bit of a mysterious crew member to my mind, because I see him in the credits of your films—I know you've worked with him since Accident—and I see him in the credits of Johnnie To’s films. Can you tell me how you collaborate with him in general and perhaps specifically on this film?

CHEANG: Normally, in the past, David and I would sit down together and, of course, we'd work on the film together. But this time, because this is more of a personal project… What I decided to do was something different from before, on Limbo, which was that we would edit separately. So I would edit a version, I'll send it to him, and then he will see where I'm going, and then he will do his version and send it back to me. So there's a lot of back and forth. Of course, when I edit a version that doesn't mean that he has to accept what I have done. It’s just kind of observing each other. Because, for me, I don't want to really say what I want, but I really just want to use the image, the sound of the film, to show him what my vision is. And then of course he would observe that, and send it back to me—so we'll do like a question/answer, back and forth. And that's why the editing process was longer than expected. Eventually, I think the final shape of the film really fits my vision. It’s what I want for this picture.

NOTEBOOK: I would like to talk about Cya Liu’s performance, which for me is one of the great on-screen performances I have seen recently. Her character goes through everything one could possibly imagine, physically and emotionally. How do you collaborate with someone on such an extremely physical and dedicated performance? You see this throughout many of your films, these characters are almost tumbling through the movie, getting pushed all over the place, and yet they persevere, they still keep going, they don't collapse under pressure. It's an amazing evocation of human endurance.. But I imagine that bringing that out of an actor is very challenging, every day on the set there’s something very physical and arduous and distraught. How do you work with an actor to elicit a performance in a role like this?

CHEANG: Cya Liu, she's a very emotional and very powerful actress. When she signed on to the project she read the book, and she was ready, she knew what the character needed. So as a director, I didn't really have to have a long, deep communication with her. It was more about knowing that she was ready. As a director, I needed to prepare the set, so that she can feel the moment of these things, and that can stimulate her and bring the performance out of her. Just to be a little bit less abstract, if her character is going to be attacked by people, I want to make sure that the actors around her are not just faking it. They really have to put some energy or put some force into their performance, to make her feel that threat. And then that will help her to channel her performance, and channel her emotions to do what she wants to do. So, for me, my job was really to make sure all the elements around her on this set are ready to give her that feeling that she needed.

NOTEBOOK: You mentioned earlier in shooting the Monkey King movies, of feeling a bit in the backseat. I'm curious about this dialectic between shooting on the streets of Hong Kong and shooting on a green screen—to be the general about it—with the Monkey King movies. When working with so many computer effects on the Monkey King movies, are there things that liberated your filmmaking?

CHEANG: When shooting CGI green screen, I can really let my imagination go wild, without any limit. And of course, shooting on the streets of Hong Kong is different. But the difference between shooting for example Limbo and Monkey King is that, as I said before, when we go on a set of Limbo you know we will prepare the set to make it as real as possible, as extreme as possible, so the cast can really feel that they're there. But when you're shooting green screen, there's nothing except for the green screen. So as a director my job is to help the actors imagine the things that are not there so they can get into the performance.

NOTEBOOK: Despite the extreme difference in these two kinds of productions, is there something that you took from your experience making the big-budget computer-oriented Monkey King fantasies and then brought to your experience shooting Limbo?

CHEANG: You can say that there is no influence or nothing I took from Monkey King that was put into Limbo. I would even argue that I tried to separate them because they're two very different kinds of films. So when I decided to come back to Hong Kong to make the film, Limbo was going to be a Hong Kong film, made in the Hong Kong way. And just to make it even more schizophrenic, when I was making Limbo, after finishing shooting in the daytime, at night I’d go back to the office and have meetings to discuss the Monkey King effects shots. But for me they are two separate things. So after I finish my meeting, when I go back out to the set of Limbo, I just focus on making the movie the Hong Kong way. So the two things are not interconnected. I remember that when I was shooting the rape scene in Limbo, because I had not had a meeting with my Monkey King team for two days, one of the guys that came to the set with his laptop, trying to show me the progress of the latest effects shots, so there I was looking at a monitor of the rape scene, and I pointed to the monitor to the guy and said: “hey, so this is what I'm working on.” And the guy took a look and closed the laptop and just left the set. [Laughs]

NOTEBOOK: To ask my original question the other way around: Have you been able to bring a Hong Kong approach of filmmaking to a big budget, fantasy Mainland cinema context?

CHEANG: Shooting in Hong Kong, always on actual locations on the streets, gave Hong Kong filmmakers this quick reflex when facing different problems. Because on the streets, there are always things that are unknown that will happen. We're trained to react quickly, and solve problems quickly. That's kind of the way we are in Hong Kong. And when you bring that to other kinds of projects, other places, it’s still very helpful. So for example, on Monkey King, when I was working with a team of people from not just Mainland China but from other parts of the world, the U.S. and Canada and Korea, for example—one day, the lead the actor only had two hours to shoot, so I went on and shot his double for eight hours. And of course, everybody said: how could that be done? But you know, from the Hong Kong logic, being very flexible and always anticipating problems, you know… it's just a very natural solution. So this kind of attitude is helpful in all kinds of filmmaking, because we're not in the studio.

NOTEBOOK: Your career has really run the full range, doing AD work for 80s masters in Hong Kong cinema, then yourself directing in many different genres, Hong Kong movies, Mainland movies… What has been the most personally fulfilling production experience? Which film meant the most to you to make?

CHEANG: For now, of course Limbo is the one that’s most memorable to me, and another one would be Accident. You can see that the [Hong Kong production company] Milkyway Image’s influence on me is huge.

NOTEBOOK: As a Hong Kong filmmaker returning to Hong Kong to make a true Hong Kong movie, how do you see the future of Hong Kong genre cinema?

CHEANG: For me right now, me and my colleagues in the industry—you know, we keep making films, we try to make films as long as we can. But you know, Hong Kong is really going through difficult times right now. So we really don't know what will happen. We know it will go on but we really don't know the future. But we’ll keep pressing on.

NOTEBOOK: That's great to hear. What are you making next?

CHEANG: I will go back to commercial movies [laughs]. Really, there's not that many filmmakers in Hong Kong nowadays to make martial arts movies, action movies. I will try to make more while I can. So I have two action projects lined up: the new SPL and also City of Darkness, based on the Hong Kong comic book. These two projects will be my next step.

NOTEBOOK: “City of Darkness,” that could be another title for Limbo.

CHEANG: Yes, same feeling! [laughs]