G
General Veers
Guest
Singapore
Mar 16, 2010
S'pore up for ransom
WRITER-DIRECTOR Kelvin Tong wanted to make a crime thriller but there was a problem: In a country with a low crime rate such as Singapore, how do you plot a realistic yet exciting movie about a felony?
Ok low crime rate except that they are not reporting every damn case in the media.
'You can't make the Hong Kong Swat-team kind of movie. People here don't run around with machine guns,' he explained at a press conference last week. 'But an ordinary crime, like a kidnapping, would be very interesting in a place like Singapore,' he said of the film, which takes place on HDB rooftops and dockside cargo container yards.
He turned his hand to a tightly plotted crime movie like Kidnapper, which opens on Thursday, because he needed to 'take a break' from horror. The film, budgeted at $1.5 million, is his first action-thriller. After his critically acclaimed indie work, the short film Moveable Feast (1996), co-written and co-directed with Sandi Tan and Jasmine Ng, and coming of age tale Eating Air co-directed with Jasmine Ng (1999), Tong's feature film output has been largely in the horror genre.
The hit movie The Maid (2005) established his commercial credentials, earning $2.5 million at the box office. His output also included the satirical scarefest Men In White (2007) and his ambitious set-in-Hong Kong supernatural thriller Rule #1. Tong cheerfully called himself a 'sadist' for what he put the cast through. He was not working with Hollywood budgets or facilities, so there were no stuntmen, he said. For example, there is a scene when the kidnapper roughs up the captured boy Wei Xiang, played by Jerald Tan, 11. 'When Jerald is thrown against a wall, that wall is a real HDB wall and that is his real head,' the director said.
Read the full report in Wednesday's edition of The Straits Times' LIFE!.
Mar 16, 2010
S'pore up for ransom
WRITER-DIRECTOR Kelvin Tong wanted to make a crime thriller but there was a problem: In a country with a low crime rate such as Singapore, how do you plot a realistic yet exciting movie about a felony?
Ok low crime rate except that they are not reporting every damn case in the media.
'You can't make the Hong Kong Swat-team kind of movie. People here don't run around with machine guns,' he explained at a press conference last week. 'But an ordinary crime, like a kidnapping, would be very interesting in a place like Singapore,' he said of the film, which takes place on HDB rooftops and dockside cargo container yards.
He turned his hand to a tightly plotted crime movie like Kidnapper, which opens on Thursday, because he needed to 'take a break' from horror. The film, budgeted at $1.5 million, is his first action-thriller. After his critically acclaimed indie work, the short film Moveable Feast (1996), co-written and co-directed with Sandi Tan and Jasmine Ng, and coming of age tale Eating Air co-directed with Jasmine Ng (1999), Tong's feature film output has been largely in the horror genre.
The hit movie The Maid (2005) established his commercial credentials, earning $2.5 million at the box office. His output also included the satirical scarefest Men In White (2007) and his ambitious set-in-Hong Kong supernatural thriller Rule #1. Tong cheerfully called himself a 'sadist' for what he put the cast through. He was not working with Hollywood budgets or facilities, so there were no stuntmen, he said. For example, there is a scene when the kidnapper roughs up the captured boy Wei Xiang, played by Jerald Tan, 11. 'When Jerald is thrown against a wall, that wall is a real HDB wall and that is his real head,' the director said.
Read the full report in Wednesday's edition of The Straits Times' LIFE!.
