From the eyes of a strange fruit

Fruit Chan (陳果) is the strangest fruit among Hong Kong filmmakers. He always casts unknown actors, writes his own scripts, and edits his films by himself. "You might not believe it, I even kept the production logs myself," he told the Taipei Times in an interview earlier this week. He is very much an outsider in a film industry nicknamed East Hollywood.

But he's also the filmmaker who takes home international prizes most every time he makes a film. Chan's Durian Durian (榴槤飄飄) was the biggest winner at this year's Golden Horse Awards (金馬獎), taking Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, Best Actress and Best New Performer. Chan is also the only Hong Kong director to be invited to the Venice Film Festival for two consecutive years. Without a doubt, he is Hong Kong's most prolific filmmaker.

"I grew up watching mainstream films, but when I start making a film, I'm a freak who goes against all the rules," Chan said.

A student of scriptwriting and film production, Chan began work at the Hong Kong Film Center organizing exhibitions of "contemporary classic" films. At first he only ran errands, but was later promoted and took over the glorious responsibility of keeping production logs. Later he became an assistant producer and finally worked for some 10 years as an assistant director. It was during this time that Chan decided to take his own turn at the helm.

His first film, Made In Hong Kong, was shot using 24,000m of left-over film he'd collected from cutting room floors. He employed five crews, paid no one, and spent HK$500,000 (US$64,000) in post production. But the fast-paced social critique about a drop-out teenager, garnered a total of eight awards at festivals in Locrano, Pusan, France, Vancouver, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Some critics describe Chan as a realistic director, others say he is grassroots. Chan himself eschews categories, focusing instead on the method he uses to develop a story -- which is itself a departure from Hong Kong and Hollywood norms.

To get a story, Chan says, he would stroll around the low-rent areas of Kowloon, hand camera in tow, to get a feel for the environment. Sometimes he would squat on a street corner and chat with the locals: kids, old people, drop-outs and street girls from the mainland. These people constitute the backbones of all his stories.

Two little kids in a small tea restaurant became the inspiration for Little Cheung (細路祥), a film about his nostalgic childhood memories of the downtrodden denizens of Hong Kong. Two pairs of naive eyes saw through the struggling of their parents and the harshness of being illegal immigrants to Hong Kong to find an innocent love in the back streets.

It was during the shooting of Little Cheung that Chan began noticing the mainland prostitutes wandering about the streets of Wong Kwok. "I began interviewing them, those who came regularly from Shengzhen (near Hong Kong's border with the mainland) with only a three-month visa. They'd work hard and then go back," he said. As a result, Durian Durian began taking shape.

"It is hard to catch real feelings and to set up an atmosphere to make [people] feel real," he said.

So in preparing for Durian Durian, he would sometimes set hidden cameras to film working girls, observing how they talk, walk and what schedules they keep. He went to the so-called mistress house neighborhoods (二奶村) in Shengzhen, where many Hong Kong businessmen hide their mistresses. He even went to love hotels, secretly, he said, to take some shots.