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During a special Hong Kong Cinema panel at Hong Kong’s pavilion in the Cannes international village, “Sons of the Neon Night,” director Juno Mak and Cannes Film Festival international consultant Michael Werner spoke to Variety’s Leo Barraclough about thematic inspirations and how Mak crafted the icy, morally gray world of the films.
“It took me a year and a half to put together this cast,” Mak said. “Because we had made ‘Rigor Mortis,’ when we were traveling the festival circuit, all the buyers saw ‘Rigor Mortis,’ and wanted a sequel or a prequel.”
“Even I was one of the guys who kept saying ‘Let’s do ‘Rigor Mortis 2,’” Werner admitted. “The world’s looking for that, right?” But Mak wasn’t looking to rehash his freshman feature, despite its success.
“I didn’t want to repeat myself, I wanted to work on a cross-genre project,” said Mak. “I started scripting ‘Sons of the Neon Night,’ and it took me four years to come up with the first draft, and then I went on a year and a half span of contacting the cast and producers. Takeshi [Kaneshiro] is one of our leads, Louis Koo, Ching-Wan Lau, Gao Yuanyuan, Tony Leung.”
“It’s a spectacular cast,” adds Werner. “Neon Night” stars Kaneshiro as the heir to a major pharmaceutical corporation hoping to wipe out the family business’ sordid history.
“The family plot is one of the core storylines in the film, but it’s a multi-character story,” Mak explained. “Something happens in one night and all these characters cross paths. Part of the film is a romance for me, and a big part of it is a crime drama. It’s about addiction, addiction to power and to greed, and it’s a romantic tragedy.
“It’s definitely a generational curse,” he continues. “The father believes in a network that he built, that is based on the so-called illegal drug trade, whereas our lead, one of the sons, believes in a more modern way. It’s about pharmaceutical drugs that are completely legal, but it’s a battle going on between family members. In recent years, we get on the news a lot of people overdosing, not on illegal drugs but on pharmaceutical, legal ones. ‘Sons of the Neon Night’ is a world of its own, but there are plots that relate to the world we’re living in now.”
“It relates to the theme Juno talked about of addiction,” added Warner. “There are people addicted to illegal drugs, there are people addicted to pharmaceuticals, there are people addicted to power. The contrast between the illegal drug business and the pharmaceutical business, and the addiction to power are both important components of the film.”
For Mak, there’s a poetic beauty to the characters’ power struggles. “They have their own sets of rules. ‘Sons of the Neon Night’ has a very depressive worldview in it, but I felt there’s a certain romantic, nightmarish poetry element to it. There’s a metaphor, we’re all caged birds in this world where we’re born into families. We are born into a lifestyle that we live in. All of these characters are trying to survive in the world of ‘Sons of the Neon Night.’”
Werner added that he was particularly fascinated with the “cleaners” in “Sons of the Neon Night,” a group of fixers working for a mega-corporation. In the CIA, when something goes wrong with an operation, they have people who go in and clean up the mistakes. In “Sons of the Neon Night,” the concept of cleaners plays a significant role, and the lead cleaner is played by Louis Koo. The question comes up – do cleaners have any morality? “They set their own rules,” Werner says.
Mak says the cleaners of “Neon Night” were inspired by the real-life pawn shops of Hong Kong.
“I think the concept is quite simple. They are just doing the job where it takes them. I placed that dysfunctional family structure in that storyline, so it makes a contrast between the pharmaceutical empire and the cleaners that work in the pawn shop. There’s a lot of nostalgia in it because we walk past a lot of pawn shops in Hong Kong. That’s what gave me this curiosity for a reimagined world where we’re scripting what’s happening behind closed doors. There’s a lot of creativity there. That part, I felt, is the warmest through the whole film.”
Though the warmth of Hong Kong seeps its way into “Sons of the Neon Night,” Mak said some of the films that inspire him the most create distance, not closeness. “Growing up in the 90s, because I spent quite some time in Vancouver, I watched a lot of films from directors like David Cronenberg. The whole body horror genre inspired me, because in recent years, people tend to speak about how a story is relatable to an audience. That’s one way of feeling cinema.”
“But there’s another way – to be alienated, the distant feeling that attracted me to cinema in the first place. It’s like traveling to a space that’s… when the lights dim, I’m taken to another dimension. That’s what attracts me as an audience member. A common theme in my films, from ‘Rigor Mortis’ to ‘Sons,’ there’s this feeling of detachment, of distance, of curiosity.”
To create the cinematic fragility of “Sons of the Neon Night” Mak worked closely with cinematographer Sion Michel and drew inspiration from the film’s composers, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Nate Connolly.
“When we’re designing the angles and the shots, I felt the camera shouldn’t be a character. I felt it should be more cold. I think people that live in cold places, it affects the way they act, the way they live in a psychological sense. We had to be in a world where it’s extremely cold, where it contrasts the deeper feeling inside them. Whether they felt love or romance or hatred, the world’s too cold for them to show it.”
“That’s why we have a lot of static moments, so many long shots,” Mak continued. “Distance has a colder, more violent feeling in the air. It’s not necessarily bloody or gory. There’s just this violence, the tension in the air between dialogues, and, of course, the score.”
According to Mak, music has become an early and integral part of his creative process. “Since ‘Rigor Mortis,’ I decided the best way for me to prep myself is to work on the score before I shoot the film. I would present the score to the actors, the DP, even the crew, so that we’re not just talking about angles or how we’re going to edit it – we’re talking about the whole vibe of the scene.”
Werner added that Mak’s music-driven creative process reminded him of fellow Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar Wai. “It’s kind of a bit like Wong Kar Wai. We handled a number of his films, and sometimes you’d show up in his office and he’d say, ‘I’ve been inspired by this piece of music, listen.’ And that would become the beginning of a film.”
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