Press Coverage

The SUN on Sunday's VOX 28 JANUARY ,2001

James Lee, hard boiled

by Danny Lim

Imagine if you will, the antithesis of Osman Ali: the all-kicking, all-screaming, fire-bombing, Uzi-toting, secret-nuclear-kungfu-ninja-terminator director who choreographs the action while suspended in mid-air, as KLCC is ripped asunder by an apocalyptic explosion - the dying embers of which our mutated grandsons shall bear everlasting radioactive witness to. The scene gives you a very good idea of what kind of director James Lee would sell his family jewels to be, given the budget, the chance and the looniest of producers.

As a lifelong fanatic of that strain of hyperkinetic John Woo-style action-ballet, Lee would have no qualms about dispensing with the frivolities of plot, character and narrative if he could inject his audience with a serum of pure palpitating viscera. At least, that's what you're led to believe as Lee describes his childhood cinematic fantasies - and from the circumstantial evidence of his gun-heavy, gangster-fixated short films.

'I'm a big action-movie fan,' Lee professes. 'I love kungfu movies, John Woo movies, gangster movies... Sometimes I concentrate so much on the action, wondering how they did this or that, that I don't care what the story is about!

Bollocks. In his recent theatrical debut, Lee directs a 'liberal adaptation' of Harold Pinter's Dumb Waiter. An early peek of the play in an Actor's Studio Director's Workshop unveiled a gripping character-driven performance diametrically opposed to Lee's action-man inclinations. Instead of gunplay, it was the interplay of bristling personalities that created a show prickling with tension. Guns were cocked, but no bullets were harmed in the production of the play. Hostility was verbalised, never translating into the kind of violence that Lee so passionately enjoys on screen.

Without any formal training, Lee had transferred much of his cinematic instincts, honed during obsessive film-watching, onto the theatre boards.

The dramatic turnaround came when his journey in search of John Woo-dom took a winding path from hometown lpoh through graphic design school to the Actor's Studio Bookshop where he worked for a spell. There, he was introduced to a world where acting is the best special effect, and verbal barbs the most potent weapons. He also met Amir Muhammad, who cast Lee in a leading role as a blur, benign suicidal in Lips to Lips.

On set, Lee was introduced to the cost-cutting wonders of digital filmmaking. Fed up with making videos that hardly anyone saw, Lee was inspired to make his first feature-length movie on digital film, Snipers. This resulted in a multilingual ensemble; three vignettes linked by a ubiquitous sniper rifle and starring Huzir Sulaiman, Merissa Teh and Paul Lau.

Snipers is an experience in dirt-cheap, on-the-fly film-making. A miniscule budget of RM15,000 (funded by family and friends) meant that Lee himself pointed the camera, and actors performed for free.

Sound-effects were copped off computer games, toy guns were spray-painted black, and the sniper's crosshairs was a rejigged PVC pipe. His toughest task, though, proved to be writing the script 'I'm a crap writer,' Lee admits. 'That's why most of the time I let them improvise and ad lib... a lot.'

And he admits that Snipers is rather thrifty with violence, though not for want of trying. 'You need a big budget for all the effects or else it would look ridiculous,' Lee clarifies. 'My dream is to one day direct a big-budget action-driven film that will blow away everyone's minds."

For now, KLCC remains safe.