Playing with ma---Jingle Ma's Playboy cops(摘自08年2月BC杂志)

花花鱼~~~

He may be an old hand in making films but
Jingle Ma is still young at heart.
At one point during his interview with bc, veteran movie man Jingle Ma announces, “I don’t want to talk too much, I don’t want to explain, I don’t have any time!” Rather than signal the end of our conversation, however, those words are meant to give a sense of the working style, philosophy and attitude of someone who has been the cinematographer for over 60 feature films and the director of a dozen (including the upcoming Playboy Cops), in the little more than three decades since he entered the local film industry.
The words provide one reason Ma has continued to work as a cinematographer even though he made the move up the command chain to become a movie director with Hot War (1998). The award-winning director of photography of Peter Chan’s much beloved Comrades, Almost a Love Story (1996) and Mabel Cheung’s nostalgic City of Glass (1998) has such a clear vision of the visuals he wants and how to create them that if someone else were to take them on in his film, he becomes distracted from the script, actors and drama and finds himself thinking, “It’s been a long time. Why isn’t the lighting here? Don’t waste my time!” and “Come on, okay, okay, one light here is enough!”
The longer one talks with Ma, the more one gets the sense that cinematography is his true vocation. It is not just that he openly states, “I really enjoy cinematography. It’s really good work. It’s professional.” Rather, he is also so very happy, eager even, to share the story of how he became a cinematographer when, some years ago, he came across a “gweilo” cinematographer and a director shooting a commercial in Tsim Sha Tsui and was thoroughly impressed by the sight of it all.
Ma’s personal path into the movie industry has been long and somewhat winding. Starting out as a hairstylist by day and drummer for a band by night, he first became a cinematographer for TV commercials and only later feature films – with some time spent as a window dresser to boot! He says it all served its purpose in the end, though. For example, the five months he spent in window displays turned out to be good practical training for cinematography, as he picked up quite a bit about colour matching and what constitutes art sense. And over the course of his more extended stint in TV commercials, he was taught a lot about lighting by industry insiders from Australia, England and America.
Since Ma continues to work on the cinematography of the films he directs, all that hard-earned knowledge is still useful. At the same time though, since he made his directorial debut in 1998, Ma has also had to devote a significant amount of time on set to cultivating such intense relations with his actors that he says, “The actor and the director, it seems like they marry and fall in love!” Furthermore, his interactions with his cast has had to include teaching some of them how to act!
With a laugh, Ma recalls how the first time he worked with Shawn Yue, the lead actor of Playboy Cops, he found that through nervousness Yue over-acted. But after gaining the young man’s trust and pointing out to him that, unlike acting on stage, “the movie has a lot of big close-ups. So you don’t need to exaggerate!” Yue’s acting became very good. And as a bonus, not only is he tall and handsome, says Ma, but his knowledge of martial arts helped in that most important factor of Hong Kong movies, the star’s action.
Their latest film together, Playboy Cops, was originally envisioned as a straight comedy about “two rich cops and
how they show off their money”. But when Yue was paired up with what Ma sees as another very good (and eye-catching) actor in popular Mainlander Aloys Chen Kun, the director of romantic dramas like Fly Me To Polaris (1999) and Happy Birthday (2006) decided to add drama, romance and action to the movie.
“Maybe I’m getting older and I think my fans, [those who] like my movies, they’re getting old too!” Ma muses, in describing how he decided to make plot changes and additions so that the movie also shows how the two main characters become good friends. And seeing that a lot of his fans are female, Ma decided to add a love triangle which called on local actress Linda Chung – “a nice girl, like from school, very clever, very pretty!” – to play the ex-girlfriend of one of the cops who is the current object of affection of the other!
As Ma points out, “There were no love triangles in my movies before. In my previous movies, it was very straightforward. No more!” And he again cites growing older as the reason he now thinks more complicated storylines are better than simple ones. Yet, in response to my query why he has gone with such a young cast for Playboy Cops, he says with a twinkle, “I’m a young guy!”
Then on a more reflective note, he says, “Sometimes, [I am] very mature; sometimes it seems like I’m a kid.” Put that together with his obvious delight in confounding people who think they have him pegged as a director (how can a single individual be behind a diverse body of work that ranges from the breezy Summer Holiday (2000) to the serious Goodbye Mr Cool (2001)?) and what Jingle Ma comes across as, more than anything else, is a self-described happy guy who remains young and playful at heart even though thoroughly experienced in terms of what life and the film industry have to offer.
Playboy Cops will open in local theatres on February 28.

花花鱼~~~

:funk:
翻译软件是个可怕的东西哈~ [/quote]
确、确、确实、

花花鱼~~~

希望HK滴朋友多多留意香港杂志
好想看到花花拍滴杂志照:sms11