Southeast Asia's biggest star conquers the West

As the director, writer, producer and star of Kung Fu Hustle, Stephen Chow has finally gained the recognition he deserves from international audiences.

Stephen Chow movies have been high-kicking all comers off the top of the Hong Kong box office for more than a decade.

Jackie Chan, Chow Yun Fat and Jet Li may all be better known to Western audiences, but back in Kowloon, Chow is the undisputed dan of the martial arts flick.

And, with Kung Fu Hustle now on international release, audiences elsewhere can see what they've been missing.

Chow, 42, is director, writer, producer and star of Kung Fu Hustle, set in a pre-revolutionary China of sharp-suited gangsters wielding Tommy guns and axes.

The action takes place on the grounds of a tenement building named Pig Sty Alley. Chow plays Sing, a wannabe gangster whose hapless efforts to prove himself as a hard man start a hilarious chain of events that pits an unlikely group of geriatric kung fu masters against Shanghai's most notorious gangs.

The action, choreographed by Woo-Ping Yeng, the man behind Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Matrix and Kill Bill, is joyfully overblown and frenetic. Kung Fu Hustle's influences are an eclectic mix of Busby Berkeley musicals, Bruce Lee, Takeshi Miike comic violence and Charlie Chaplin. The result is a breathtaking, tongue-in-cheek kung fu movie.

Having broken box office records in South-East Asia, and already taken US$20 million ($28.9 million) in the United States, Kung Fu Hustle may be the film that finally allows Chow to make the transition to international superstar.

It has been a long time coming. On his home island in 1992, four out of the five biggest-grossing movies of the year starred Chow. Quentin Tarantino was calling him the best actor in Southeast Asia.

Hong Kong cinema, through the work of directors Chow Yun Fat and Wong Kar-Wai, was being feted as the most exciting in the world. Chow seemed set to make the jump to Hollywood.

Yet he stayed at home while his less successful domestic rivals got the big American bucks. The failure to break the US market was not through a want of trying. Instead, there was a general consensus that Chow was a peculiarly Hong Kong phenomenon.

The films he was starring in were parodies that quickly became termed mou lei tau - "nonsense" or "meaningless talk" - action films mixed with slapstick comedy, in which the characters would frequently converse in a seemingly incomprehensible tongue that was a bizarre mix of Monty Python-speak and Shakespearean rhyming couplets.

When deciphered, the conversation was usually packed with obscure pop-cultural references that only those well versed in Hong Kong life could understand.

In a London hotel, Chow is sitting on a huge white sofa, which envelops his tiny frame. Officially, he is 1.65m, but he seems smaller. Off-screen, he looks his age.

Chow says of mou lei tau: "That is my style, and I have no choice but to act in this way because it represents the way I think about life. And I like it. Why, I can't tell you. It's the same thing with kung fu - I cannot tell you why I love it. I was just born to do it."

Like many children of his generation, Chow fell in love with martial arts while watching Bruce Lee movies and was inspired to learn wing chun, a discipline invented by a woman, characterised by small movements that deflect and utilise the power of the opponent.

It is the comedic influences on Chow that are more unusual for a Hong Kong native: he is aching to tell me why Charlie Chaplin is so much better than Laurel and Hardy: "Charlie Chaplin is my all-time favourite, alongside Buster Keaton.

Laurel and Hardy for me is slapstick with no innocence and no heart: it is all just jokes. Charlie Chaplin is somebody who has jokes and slapstick, but it's motivated from the heart, with a sense of goodness and humanity.

"So I don't really mind that people call my films 'nonsense' or 'slapstick', or whatever they choose to name it, but actually, something in my movies I always pay attention to is that I give my audience a movie with a heart. No matter what packaging you give a movie, a kung fu film or a romance, it has to have heart; otherwise it is only a movie."

Chow began to put that theory into practice after director Jeffrey Lau, who had worked with him on Love on Delivery, suggested he try his hand at writing and directing. He took a co-directing credit on the film Love on Delivery in preparation for his first job as writer/director, on From Beijing with Love.

This James Bond parody starred Chow as Ling Ling Chai, sent to locate a dinosaur skull. It was another domestic box office success.

But the American door remained firmly shut, and the death knell to Chow's global ambitions seemed to have been rung when he was refused an application to move to Canada in 1995 because of his supposed links with the Triads.

Chow states: "I'm not going to talk about the influence of the Triads on Hong Kong cinema. You know there was definitely a link between the two in the past - I agree with that. That is how I came to be one of the victims, wrongly accused of having links with the Triads.

"A long time ago I was an actor, hired by a film company, and I was only interested in trying to work as an actor on a movie. I did not care what the company background was or who it had links with. That was not my concern.

"Actually, what I don't get, or understand, is how the Canadian immigration department did not see the difference between being an employee of the company and being a director who could make decisions. The whole thing was totally nonsense."

The Hong Kong public saw the US's loss as its gain, especially as Chow was proving to be brilliant gossip column fodder. But in spite of the supposed turmoil in his private life, he was going from strength to strength as a filmmaker.

His films God of Cookery and Forbidden Cop followed the winning formula of the man overcoming the odds to get the girl and winning the day through a devilish use of martial arts.

Chow's following expanded out of Hong Kong and on to the Asian mainland.

Yet the urge to make it in the West remained, and Chow's next directorial effort, The King of Comedy, was inspired by the Martin Scorsese film of the same name.

It was then he had the brainwave of making a movie merging football with kung fu, and the result was the spectacular Shaolin Soccer. It featured a defender with a sumo wrestling physique wearing a shirt emblazoned with David Beckham's name, a goalkeeper sporting Bruce Lee's famous yellow tracksuit, and footballs that magically turned into flameballs and hurricanes.

When it smashed the box office record held by Titanic in China, the Weinstein brothers bought the film for Miramax. Chow's conquering of the American market seemed close but was not to be.

Harvey Weinstein sat on the film for three years, then cut it to shreds. When it was eventually released, most of its target audience had already seen a pirate version.

In those three years, Chow was working on Kung Fu Hustle, and China was becoming an increasingly important market for corporations.

Chinese audiences seem to prefer Asian films to the quota of 20 foreign films shown each year. Chow is one of China's biggest stars and Kung Fu Hustle has broken the box-office record held by Shaolin Soccer.

It took US$7.7 million ($11.1 million) in the first weekend, more than double the US$3.3 million ($4.8 million) taken by Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith.

So it is not surprising that Sony is now pushing Chow as an international superstar. But Chow admits he is becoming less interested in appearing on screen.

"I would like to focus on directing instead of acting," he says, "no matter where my next film takes place - be it in the East or the West. That's because I think I can develop more as a director than as an actor. As a director I have more control."

I ask him which director he most admires and would like to emulate. "Steven Spielberg," he replies. "You know why? Because you can find a heart and innocence in all of his films."

- INDEPENDENT