2.07 pm– Tsui Hark is late, and the crowd is getting restless. An announcement has been made in Korean, which your reporter cannot understand. So we will just have to wait.

2.15 pm– He’s here. 13 years ago he came to Pusan, and now he’s back. Tsui Hark takes the microphone. “My Life, My Cinema” This is a very large theme, that I still don’t have the answer to after 30 years, so we’ll just try our best then, okay?

2.17 pm– A five minute interval for photo taking, and Tsui Hark’s hamming it up for the audience.

2. 23 pm– Tsui Hark speaks: So how do we begin? We chase after emotion when we make movies. In the process of production, we may make decisions that people question. Some of the times it is easy, but many times even we don’t know why. Most of the time, it is our life experiences that colour the decisions we make in our films. Many time my answers are not what I think they should be.

2.25 pm– So I think the best place to start is at the very beginning, in my childhood. I decided in 1967 to go to America, I wanted to study cinema in US. It is a very important time of my life. My family had many siblings, 20 people in the family, things were very noisy and festive. My parents were always hopeful that their children would be professionals, stable lawyers, doctors, engineers, etc.

My family is from Vietnam, I was raised there. When I was seven, next to my house, and opposite it, were two cinemas. We would play whenever it rained, in the puddles that formed in the streets. Probably due to the bad plumbing, it would always flood in the streets and we would go swimming.

Our games then moved from the puddles to the cinemas. Our games were basically to try and sneak into the cinemas. We would hold the hands of cinema patrons as they were walking into the cinemas and get in. Of course some adults did not like it, and some didn’t care, either way we still got into the cinema.

So if 2 out of the 5 children got in, then the responsibility would fall on the 2 to tell the rest the plot of the film when they got out. Obviously, some of the children would tell the story badly, or in their own viewpoints. And once another batch of children went in to the same film ,the story would be different. So this game became our game. Other times, we’d wait for the house to be packed and squeeze in under the legs of the adults.

Once in the cinema, we’d have to go and find a place to hide, because the ushers would often flush us out with their powerful torchlights and throw us out. At times, they’d just let us in when the house wasn’t full, since they lived in the area and knew all of us anyway.

Another game we had was to imitate the actors that we saw in the movies. I remember the cinema I was at often showed Indian films, which had a lot of song and dance, as they still do. So all of us children became Bollywood actors. For a long time, the street on which I lived had a lot of child Bollywood actors.

Godzilla was a film that came out when I was seven. So then Godzilla became the boogeyman for us. And when someone shouted, Godzilla is here, we’d have to go and hide.

One more special point about my childhood is that the rooftops of our houses were linked, which meant that the children had a special street of their own to play in. So the roof, the streets, the drains where we swam in, all became our playground.

One day, we discovered that a photographic store had opened in our street. The boss allowed us to use a still camera that he owned. So we’d shoot stills of us in various Bollywood themes. And I also at that time used to learn magic. The boss, when he saw our stills, asked us if we wanted to use his Beaulieu Super8 camera.

So we started to make films then. I remember, some of my friends, at 12 or 13 would call back to tell their parents “I won’t be back for dinner. I’m shooting a film.” Every film that we shot, we financed through putting together all of our pocket money for the film and development.

So from 7 – 13, I had a very happy, contented childhood.

(To be continued...)