Confession of shame

The writing credit on the IMDB fooled me. Stupidly, I assumed Alan Mak had worked on The Departed — the Hollywood re-make of Mak’s creation: Infernal Affairs. Mak sounded confused.

“Um, no, I don’t think so,” he offered over the phone.

“Oh, but they’ve credited you,” I returned, thinking perhaps he didn’t quite grasp my mumbled English.

“No, no,” the co-director and co-writer of Hong Kong’s second-highest grossing film ever assured me. He had nothing to do with the Hollywood script, aside from taking a look at it just prior to filming last year.

I silently cursed myself as I mentally jettisoned most of my questions. I’d had to cram for this interview after my colleague passed the buck in the morning. I had been excited to discover Mak had worked on The Departed and subsequently structured my hurriedly-compiled questions around crossing the boundaries between Hong Kong and Hollywood, language and cultural differences, and all that sort of ‘Lost in Translation’ guff. This early setback, then, sent me firmly into what I fondly like to call ‘Wingville’.

“So, ah, what, ah, what did it feel like to have your film picked up by Hollywood?”

And here is where the beauty of being a journalist in Hong Kong — where, as one academic put it to me recently, people can get by in both Chinese and English but are good at neither* — kissed me square on the mouth.

“It made me happy. I was glad somebody liked the movie,” he said.

What the hell do you do with an answer like that? (It was clear this man, the brain behind twisted-like-ivy plot of IA, had something more to say than that, but the language barrier ensured it got, ah, lost in translation.)

“Ah, okay, cool.”

The ensuing 15 minutes was spent with me using crowbar questions to try prise out any gems I could from this obstinate mine. (If only I had the pick-axe that is Cantonese, I’m sure I could have dislodged a few more sparkling jewels.) Then, after I had scraped together a few flakes that would eventually come to form a not desperately shabby story, he asked: “How many more questions do you have?” He was putting the finishing touches on his latest film, the US$10 million Confession of Pain, and he was keen to get back to it.

I let him go.

* And how good was Mak’s English? Well, when I asked him what he thought of the new title, The Departed, he had to ask me what it meant.