Perhaps a musical?

Source: South China Morning Post

Saturday December 10 2005

A musical was the last thing on Peter Chan Ho-sun's mind when he set out to make Perhaps Love, touted as the first Chinese musical in more than three decades. 'I'm not a big fan of musicals and it was exactly what I was running away from when I started this project,' says the director.

Perhaps Love - which is Hong Kong's official entry for the best foreign film category at the Oscars and the Golden Globe - started off as a remake of Casablanca. 'We were even going to call it Casablanca in Chinese,' Chan says. After 16 drafts of the script, however, he found he had a musical on his hands.

'Now, looking back at it, the film wouldn't work if I took the music out of it, but it isn't a musical in the traditional sense. For me, the people had to have a legitimate reason to be singing,' said Chan, who sat through '50 or 60' musicals before he started production on Perhaps Love. It tells the story of a painful love triangle between actress Sun Na (Zhou Xun), her ex-lover actor Lin Jiandong (Takeshi Kaneshiro) and her director boyfriend Nie Wen (Jacky Cheung Hok-yau). All the singing and dancing take place in the film that they are supposedly making within the movie.

Despite the fact that it is a genre he's unfamiliar with, Chan says the film is 'more [him]' than his other films. 'Most of them, like Comrades, Almost a Love Story, offered sugar-coated views of love. [Perhaps Love] is my outlook,' he said.

Chan's next film is likely to be a remake of Chang Cheh's The Blood Brothers, a story of love and betrayal among three brothers set against a wartorn China during the Qing dynasty. It will be his first attempt at a period piece.