-0-1280-0-720-crop-fill.jpg?k=ca8f716555 "Tony Leung on drifting between the lines of cinema and reality for the most memorable roles of his five-decade career • Journal • A Magazine • , Life in canada")
I’m curious to ask you about this specifically in terms of your career as an actor. You’ve spoken about how, at the time when you made Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness, you were working toward a style of naturalism in performance. But as your career has gone on, including in your collaborations with Wong Kar-wai, you’ve spoken quite a bit about trying to strip away technique and tools. What helps, in terms of pushing past technique and training, in terms of recognizing when a certain acting style isn’t a way into richer performance but is instead potentially what’s blocking you from reaching it?
First of all, you need the technique. You need to train with this technique. You need to be very good. You need to reach a specific standard where you are very good at this technique; if you then, after that, strip out that technique, then it won’t become a restriction. It comes with your instinct. I don’t know how to explain this. It’s just like, in kung fu, if you learn ten moves, it’s not that you’re moving one, two, three, four, five, six. If you’re very good at those ten moves, you forget all those specific moves, and they will all come out unconsciously.
Your acting career started before the so-called “golden age” of Hong Kong cinema, in which you—of course—played a crucial part. The actor Stephen Chow was already in your life as a close friend during your teenage years. He played a role in encouraging you toward drama school, though you dropped out after a year, as well as toward TVB, a local television broadcaster, which became a training ground not only for you but also for Wong Kar-wai, Johnnie To, Andy Lau, Ann Hui, Ringo Lam—many of the stars of that golden age. What can you tell me about those early experiences of drama school and working on television?
I think that whole year of acting school didn’t help much. [Laughs] After you come out of it, and when you start to do the real thing, you can apply what you learned from school, and you start trying to refine those things. I spent around eight years on television. I worked with Johnnie To on my fourth TV series. I worked with other great actors and actresses, with very good directors, all on the TV station.
That time in Hong Kong was also the golden age of television. I got popular from my first TV series as a supporting actor, and I caught a lot of attention from audiences and directors, so I became the lead actor on my third TV series. After that, I became more and more popular. And so I worked really, really hard in those days; I would work sixteen to eighteen hours every day, one after the other. This was a really, really tough time for me. You work at six o’clock in the morning, and then you go back to your studio at six P.M., and you work until three o’clock in the morning.
Even after going back home, you still have to work on the scene that you have to do the next day, but you only have a few hours to sleep. I think that’s very tough, and it’s good training for an actor, and it really built a very solid foundation for me in those eight years’ time. But in the end, I think that’s too much. [Laughs] I cannot work in TV anymore, because that’s too much. There’s too much of it. Every audience member I meet says they wrote letters to TVB that they wanted me to be in every TV series, but I have to sleep. [Sadly] I can’t work every day for eighteen hours.
