Overcoming the Odds Filming Initial D

By MICHAEL CHEANG (TheStarOnline)
Director Alan Mak:

Initial D reunites one of the most successful directorial teams in Hong Kong, Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, the duo behind the Infernal Affairs trilogy, for which they were both crowned best director at the 22nd Hong Kong Film Awards and the 40th Golden Horse Awards in 2000. However, the pair found filming Initial D, which took place in Japan and Hong Kong, to be more complicated than their previous films, mostly because of the difficulty with filming racing cars in action.

The film took 18 months to shoot, and at the time the foreign press met them at Shanghai early last month, the film was still a week from completing post-production. Director Alan Mak: Filming cars can really make you go mad. Filming cars can really make you go mad. It takes a lot of time and energy, and sometimes we would not feel like starting work at all, said Lau. Street car chases are a lot easier to shoot, but hill-racing and drifting down slopes are very difficult to capture on film properly.

According to Mak, they faced problems with certain scenes because they couldn't get proper angles and shots. It was a good thing that we have computers to help us plan the shots. We used them to plan some of the scenes, and to show how the cars would move and so on, he said.

Lau added: We spent a lot of time planning the shots in order to bring out the exact atmosphere shown in the script and the source material. We were under a lot of pressure to make this film as good as possible. Besides worrying about the camera angles, they also had to pay a lot of attention to safety, especially that of the cast and crew. Making a movie about cars can be very dangerous. In this movie, the cars-related scenes took up at least two thirds of the entire show, and what gave me the most pressure was worrying about the safety of the actors and the crew, said Lau. We had many accidents, and crashed some of the cars during filming. But thankfully there were no major accidents.

Although the actors came through the shoot unscathed, the same could not be said about the cars. Only five out of the 20 used were still in good condition by the end of the shoot. The ones that were worst hit were the Toyota AE-86 cars driven by Takumi Fujiwara (played by Jay Chou). It was quite hard to find AE-86 cars and we were lucky to find so many eventually, said Lau. We spent a lot of money buying them from second-hand dealers.

While professional stunt drivers executed most of the more dangerous stunts, the directors also allowed the actors to drive the cars as much as possible. I wanted the actors, especially Shawn (Yue), Edison (Chen) and Jay to be able to do some driving as well. So before filming began, we went out of the way to find a suitable location for them to practise, and hired professional drivers to teach them, said Lau. However, as the young actors got better at driving, they became more enthusiastic and daring, which caused Lau to worry. When asked the bold move of casting the amateur Chou in the lead role of such a major film, Lau said that they had full confidence in the Taiwanese singer.

We wanted someone who could play the character as himself, and we felt Jay's personality suited the character well, said Lau. When we met Jay in Taiwan to show him the script, he only uttered two words throughout the entire conversation good and ok. Fortunately, Chou came through with flying colours, and the directors were full of praise for the debutant. Most first-time actors have problems visualizing something that is abstract, such as emotions. Some things just can't be demonstrated, like cutting oneself with a pair of scissors. We can't really cut his finger so that he could feel the real pain and act it out. So the actor has to imagine it. Jay is very good at that. He can visualise the abstract scenes and situations very well, and that his greatest asset. Because he is a composer, and a very creative person, his ability to imagine is very good, said Lau.
Chou also made an impression on the more seasoned actors, especially Anthony Wong who heaped praises on him. I have never seen Anthony having such high regards for a new actor. He even said that Jay is a prodigy!

(Source www.Star-ecentral.com)