Black Sunglasses Leslie Louie

Halloween · March 3, 2022

The best.

Shah of Persia · March 3, 2022

43 minutes ago, Nani mo Iranai said:

The best.

thank a you-hou

Shah of Persia · March 3, 2022

Famous film director moves to Los Santos

We’re invited into a poor man’s home in Little Seoul. Unpacked boxes fill the hallway. The smell of smoke and incense fills the small home in an alleyway off Palomino avenue. The apartment window looks over the side of neon-lit “Dream Tower” that sent a tidal wave of emotion over Leslie, he told us later. But don’t be fooled by this halfway home and the basic presentation. Very few people rise to be idolized by the public and even less are idolized by their own colleagues.

Although owning only a small cult following in the international scene, Leslie Louie is a star among stars. In the late ‘80s he gained cult fame writing and directing a handful of Hong Kong gangster films. And in the early ‘90s, he moved on to direct some more obscure films that became stylistically very influential on the movies probably everybody has scene.

Growing up in Seattle to a Taiwanese father and mother of Hong Kong descent, he spent most of his teenage years in the United States. Leslie moved to Hong Kong at the age of seventeen to work for his grandfather at a theater. He landed a job as a playwright. In Hong Kong, the film industry at the time was non-existant. But at the time nobody knew Leslie was going to rock people’s world.

At a young age, Leslie watched tons of movies. Some ‘60s italo gangster movies had a great impact on him. Leslie was introverted, and when his maternal grandfather, who was a theater owner in Hong Kong, one day sent him a Super 8 film camera as a present from overseas, Leslie did nothing but film in Seattle.

Film was still quite expensive at the time, so during his time in high school he worked in a local grocery store and watched martial arts movies with his uncle from Seattle. He used the little money he made to buy film and would record in the evenings in the streets of the Chinatown-International District in Seattle.

Back home, he would cut up and edit the film together to make mysterious montages. Sometimes he followed specific people and imagined stories about these ordinary Chinatown residents and what they were up to — or more importantly what they were feeling. But Leslie was too shy to film with friends.

At the age of 25, he had written several plays for theater. These were mostly low-budget productions that only showed in his grandfather’s theater. A friend of his grandfather’s who was an assistant producer at Three Mountains Studio landed Leslie the opportunity to work on a story with one of their senior screenwriters. This eventually became A Night Apart (1986). A strange mix of gangster cinema and romance where a triad gangster falls in love with a girl and gets in trouble when he tries to break ties with the Wo Shing Wo.

His work on A Night Apart wasn’t a box office hit, but it landed him the opportunity to work on another screenplay. He wrote Shanghai Superfly (1988) and Trouble in Mong-kok (1989) — a story about a teenager at a martial art’s school that rebelled against his dai lo.

“Just when I thought this wasn’t going anywhere— I felt like I lived in the shadow of all these great people. I was still working as a waiter at a coffee house. And at the time in Hong Kong, you worked loo—ong shifts. So I did most of my writing in the evenings. And one of the directors dropped out. He was angry about his pay. And they landed me the opportunity to write and direct my own film.”

On a very small budget he ended up writing and directing Lost in Kowloon (1990), the story of a young modal man from Kowloon who ended up toppling the old generation to establish a new one, with fresh ideas and prosperous outsights. “Maybe I was angry about some things in Hong Kong at the right place at the right time. It resonated very strongly with the youth—” Lost in Kowloon became a domestic box office hit.

Leslie’s moment of fame allowed him to write two more films: Moon over Sham Shui Po (1992) and Brother Number Three (1996) with obnoxiously vivid color palettes (that were not something the scene had seen before) and dreamy stories about love, life and the human condition. All set against the backdrop of a Hong Kong in transition, looking for its own identity in and around 1994, when the British Empire finally closed a chapter.

Brother Number Three was a big-budget film and a box office hit. The studio thought Leslie would be the right name to headline the project. But these past seven years that passed by in a flash, burned him out. Leslie turned down the next project in a moment of existential dread.

Leslie went on a small hiatus. And what was supposed to be his creative reconciliation with film and his style, made him a giant among giants. He wrote and directed the passion project Songbird and it was distributed in a limited domestic showing. The film was released in 1997 and debuted Eugenie Mok, now one of Hong Kong’s biggest film stars. The story of a teenage girl that falls in love during summer break, craves to radically change something in life, and roams the streets of Hong Kong in a few weeks of adventure. He wrote two more films after that to complete the trilogy that became his most influential work: Lovely Contemplations (1998) and Wild Devotion (1999).

‘The Grandmaster’, a nickname that Leslie rejects, is known for writing stories about very ordinary people that want to go out on an adventure. He himself says that his stories “deal with primal emotions that anybody experiences, but most people refuse to listen to. Or dreams that don’t seem realistic to pursue. But I really believe that life is a spiritual adventure, and even when a leap of faith seems too risky, I think there’s peace found in that you will eventually land on your feet and become a more resilient spirit.”

Surprisingly, Leslie hasn’t completed a film since 1999. He disappeared off the scene for years and lived a relatively secluded life, moving to London and later living in Paris and Madrid, interspersed by years in Seattle where he reconciled with his family and sought out different creative ventures such as fashion. “I think I never really felt like I belonged anywhere. Not in Seattle because of my parents’ background, or Hong Kong because people saw me as a spoiled western teenager from abroad, even despite my moment of fame. I stayed in Europe because I was always fascinated by the idea of it, even though I had never been to Europe. I scored Spanish flamenco and pasodoble in my films and was inspired by photographs of the streets of Paris, without ever being there. And Europe seemed very multicultural.”

When asked why he came to Los Santos, Leslie told us he was mostly looking for “a different headspace”. “I can never stay in one city for too long. I think my longest, outside of Hong Kong, was four years in Madrid. But I travel a lot and keep coming back to places that I like. I don’t have a lot of material things.”

Curious about what artistic endevours he is working on right now, he told us: “Well, I’m working on a passion project right now. I’m still looking for distribution. But it’s about a group of drugged out teenagers in a fictional San Fierro who’s party that was supposed to be the best night ever turns into a nightmare, and a megalomaniac Chinatown gangster who takes on the biggest criminal syndicate the world has ever known.”

And about that ‘Dream Tower’: “When I moved to Little Seoul— because I wanted to stay with the local Asian population— I was in a taxi on Palomino Avenue and saw this brutalist apartment complex emerge.” he says with waving arms. “Almost like a scene from Blade Runner. It reminded me of the Ping Yuen complex in San Fierro on Stockton Street, where so many teenagers were liquidated, crushed by late capitalism. And it was called ‘Dream Tower’, which is what I would call such an ugly building cynically if I ever wrote a dystopian science-fiction film. I love it.”