No One Here Gets Out Alive: Johnnie To, Dancing While the Building Burns

Johnnie To (1955–) began his career in Hong Kong TV as a 17-year-old, starting out as a messenger while studying acting in the evenings (“I didn’t want to be an actor. My training… was just a stepping stone to directing.”) Over a decade of experience working his way up through various production roles provided him with an unusually grounded sense for how scenes work in practice, using casts and crews with little patience for mystique. A tentative 1979 debut was followed by a permanent shift into filmmaking in the mid-1980s, though his early features remained stifled by the studio system – co-directing assignments and jobs for hire for powerful, interventionist producers such as Tsui Hark and Stephen Chow.

In 1995, To formed his own production company – Milkyway Image – in collaboration with writer-producer Wai Ka-Fai, asserting that “it was time to be a director, not an engineer”. This new-found autonomy, the post-1997 handover financial crisis, and the departure of senior figures like Tsui, John Woo and Ringo Lam for Hollywood allowed To the space to develop what has since become his authorial signature: genre films focusing on characters and shot through with operatic flourishes that belie their surprisingly low budgets; a use of close-to-hand locations (often in and around his own office and studio); and extremely economical shooting schedules.

An astonishing 33 completed features between 1995 and 2009 testify to the discipline and leanness of To’s directorial approach. Balancing competing cinematic influences – the emotional expressiveness of Martin Scorsese (“my favourite director”), Akira Kurosawa (“a god”) and Jacques Demy with the spare, minimalist interiority of Kieślowski, Kobayashi and, especially, Melville – what emerges is a romanticised fatalism, where codes of honour and loyalty drenched in potent cinematic mythologies are tempered by a sober reckoning with the more realistic and banal elements of criminal life.

His action scenes, built from behaviour and character – who yields, who hesitates, who acts decisively – are as elegantly choreographed as his occasional forays into musicals, and contain emotional resonances which linger in our bodies long after the dust has settled on their protagonists.