Richard Ng is easily one of the most recognisable faces in Hong Kong cinema. Known better for his comedic performances in such films as Miracles and the My Lucky Stars series, Richard is a veteran with over 70 films under his belt.

Our very own Richard Cooper caught up with the man recently on the outskirts of Glasgow on the set of BBC Scotland’s popular TV soap River City.

JS: When did you relocate back to the UK from Hong Kong?

RN: What happened was that I sort of semi-retired 10 years ago in 1996 because there wasn’t a lot of work in Hong Kong and my children came over to England to go to school. My wife is English and by this time she had been with me in Hong Kong for 26 years. She turned round one day and said “If I don’t go back to England and see my grandmother or my mother, I don’t know when I might see them again�. So it was a few things coming together and so I said “Okay, we’ll move back�. I say move back because I had lived in England for 15 years, from 1955 to 1970. So we all came to England and found a house nearby where we lived before we went to Hong Kong, we found a school for our youngest daughter, my oldest son was at London University. So I thought, well I’m here, I’m available for work as and when it happens and I asked around and hooked up with my agent and I said, okay, if anything comes along then fine and I’ve been doing bits and pieces since.

JS: When you went back to Hong Kong to pursue the acting back did you have any contacts over there to get work?

RN: Well I didn’t really think about it strangely, in 1970 when we went back I said to my wife “All our neighbours are dying, where we are living is full of old people, if you are not happy here, maybe we should go back to Hong Kong and see what we can do there!� My wife actually is a very good hairdresser, she worked for vidal sassoon. So we went back to Hong Kong and within a very short time we set up a salon. I ran the business side, she ran the artistic side, teaching local hairdressers her craft, how she would do it and it became a very successful salon. We went from one to two, and then three salons and even hired hairdressers from the UK to work in my salons. That’s right up to about 1975-76 and then I started working for TVB, the Hong Kong TV Channel, almost by accident. One of the Executive Producers used to be a client and we talked and she asked what I was doing in England and I said a bit of acting, and she said, “Oh, you act?� and I said yes, and she said, “I’m an Executive Producer for television, do you want to come and join us and maybe work in one of our shows?� I said, I understand you guys don’t pay much, she said “That’s true, but you are making enough money here in your salon, you don’t need more money do you?�, and I said that’s not the point, I’m a professional, and if I do a job I want to be paid, and she said, “Well why don’t you give it a try anyway?�. And so that’s how it all started, I started working for television back in 1976.

After doing that for a bit I was actually sponsored by a beverage company to have my own show, I had my own series, a sort of comedy guest show and we did a series of 13 shows, then the film career took off from that.

JS: One of the earliest films you did was the Private Eyes, is that right?

RN: Yes, I was a supporting role in with the very famous Hui brothers, whose TV show I was also involved in; it was a sort of spin off from that.

JS: Sammo Hung was credited as the action director of that film. A lot of the readers are fans of Sammo Hung, what is he like?

RN: He’s a great friend, he’s a great man, he’s a great director, but he’s extremely stern. I have seen him knock his own brother flying across the room for being late. And his theory was, “You are my bother, you have to set the example. If you are late and I let you get away with it, what’s going to happen to everybody else?�. And we were all stood, the whole set was like “Whoa!�, what happened, he went boom, he just went flying, and after that he was never late, never ever late again (Laughing).

On set Sammo is very stern, everybody is totally in fear of this man, but we know him to be different. When you are working there is no time to waste, just get on with it, everybody is very tense. He is the Director, or the Action Director, his brain is going crazy, you know just leave him alone (Laughing) it’s just that kind of thing. I have never worked with another Director who has a mind that is so clear that he can take on a shot and say, “Okay, this is shot number 5â€? and with the camera in the same position, he will say, “Okay, the next shot is 58â€?, and what happened between 5 and 58 nobody knows except him! In his mind he has worked out the whole scene, and he doesn’t do storyboards, it’s all in his head. At the end of the day he also cuts his own film, which makes it a lot easier, but you still have to give the shot a number. I have never worked with another Director who can do that and not make a mess of it. He has an incredible mind. He’s an incredible Director, which a lot of people don’t seem to realise. He’s not just a Martial Arts Director; he’s done other films apart from the fighting. Eastern Condors and Millionaires Express, big productions, and beautiful films. He beats most of the Producers in Hollywood, but it’s not appreciated.

JS: The Lucky Stars films; Winners and Sinners, My Lucky Stars, Twinkle Twinkle Lucky Stars, they looked hilarious to make. Were they?

RN: They were more than hilarious, they were really funny days, and you would wake up and say, “Okay this is another fun day!� and we got paid for this! (Laughing). It was ridiculous. The only similarity I can draw on is the Carry On films back in the 50’s and 60’s in England, I used to watch them and kill myself laughing. It’s very similar in that you have a bunch of guys, all a little bit different, all a little bit quirky. It doesn’t matter about the storyline, we were always doing something stupid, but it doesn’t matter, it makes the audience laugh from beginning to end, and when you are not laughing we are fighting, it’s like non stop entertainment, but the humour is very local. The part that I played in most of the films is like a fantasy of young Chinese guy who read comics and he thinks he can make anything happen with magical powers but everybody else can see he hasn’t. It’s that kind of thing. It’s a very down to earth kind of humour, but that is why it was so successful, we hit the right formula.

JS: Was there a lot of ad-libbing involved?

RN: Oh, always, the script was very often a shell, within the scene we know what we have to convey, and within the scenes we just used to say, “Okay, what would you say?�, a lot of improvising as well, before we roll the camera we would get onto the set and we would start improvising and make it funny, because we were all in character, we all knew what we have to say or do to make that scene come to life each time. And it was very creative for an actor, it was beautiful working on those films.

JS: How long did those Lucky Stars films take to shoot on average?

RN: The funny part was easy and it didn’t take that long to shoot, but when it comes to fighting, then it gets drawn out a bit. I think the longest one was for the ending of My Lucky Stars which turned out to be over about 5 to 6 months. In that one there was a lot of fighting and the fighting scenes were quite long, lasting about 10 or 15 minutes. To make a fighting scene that is 15 minutes on screen that represents maybe 30 shooting days. A lot of people don’t realise that, but each shot is very short and each one has to be choreographed again and again to get it perfectly right. In those days there were no digital effects, sometimes we used wires. People say how come you don’t see the wires, and that’s because the photographer lights out the wires, the wires are painted black with a pen. You would put the black ink on the wire, and a lot of it is to do with the lighting, ensuring the wires don’t show up. That’s how you get away with it, and that is why the shots are short, before you can see the wire it cuts to another shot. This is very painstaking when it comes to filming and the wires have to be very, very thin and because of that quite often they snap and people get hurt. It has happened to me a couple of times, you go flying and then, snap, and you fall.

JS: Have you ever seen your films dubbed into English? Can you understand why Westerners find it funny?

RN: Yes, but quite a lot of it gets lost, as you can imagine. But having said that, a lot of it is also very visual, but when it comes to the local dialogue kind of humour, it is gone. Even when we dub it into Mandarin, for the Mandarin speaking market, it is lost. This is the trouble with localised humour, it is in the language. A lot of English films, the use of the English language for its humour, when you translate it into French or Spanish it is gone. It’s the same kind of thing.

by Richard Cooper.

For the rest of the interview please see JADE SCREEN VOL. 4, ISSUE 3