Mabel Cheung is currently in London with her new movie 'A Tale of Three Cities' playing at the London Film Festival, whilst also serving as a juror for the festival's Official Competition. She kindly carved some time out of her busy schedule to sit down for an interview with us on October 15, 2015.

Throughout her career, Mabel Cheung's films have focused on Chinese history and what it means to be Chinese. Her latest film is set in China during the war-torn years of the 1940s and 1950s, and depicts Jackie Chan's parents eventually making their way to Hong Kong. Mabel Cheung and her scriptwriter-director partner Alex Law have made three films in some way related to Jackie Chan: "Painted Faces" (1988), a film about the Peking Opera School Jackie Chan trained in, "Traces of a Dragon" (2003), a documentary about Jackie Chan's parents, and her latest film, "A Tale of Three Cities." She said that this wasn't actually planned.

"For 'Painted Faces' we were very interested in the Beijing Opera school and it is more about an opera school than Jackie Chan. He is just one of the students. 'Traces of a Dragon' was initiated by Jackie Chan. In the early 2000s, his father told Jackie that he was getting old and wanted to tell him his life story before he passed away. Jackie invited us to go listen to his father's stories," which eventually became the documentary. Due to Cheung's fascination with these stories, in 2003 she finished writing the dramatic story that would become "A Tale of Three Cities." It took twelve years to realize due to funding difficulties.

Cheung stated, " I actually wanted to make a story about my parents and their generation (they moved from the Chinese mainland to Hong Kong in the 1950s). I think they deserved a film to record their generation's effort, about how they survived the civil war and eventually started from zero (in Hong Kong). But being a bad daughter I didn't have time to listen to my mother's stories and I thought she would always be around. But then she passed away in 2003." Instead, Cheung wrote the film script based on Jackie Chan's father's stories as a dedication to her parents' generation.

Mabel Cheung stated her first three films could be seen as an 'immigration trilogy' because these films focus on Chinese characters immigrating to different countries. Cheung, who was born in Hong Kong in 1950, said this is simply a reflection of her life. "Hong Kong was a British colony at that time and back then, many Hong Kong people felt that they were rootless and didn't belong anywhere and so a lot of them went overseas. From the time I was born, there has been a long history of immigration for Hong Kong people."

When asked why she wanted to cast Chow Yun Fat as the loveable gambling addict in her classic 'An Autumn's Tale' (1987), Cheung said it was because "he was the only guy who could play a bum but could also be very romantic at the same time - he's a terrific actor." At the time Cheung asked Chow to star in her film he was box-office poison, and that is why she said she could get him, since she was just a new director then who had no money to hire big stars. "Fortunately for me, Chow agreed to star in my film before the overnight success of 'A Better Tomorrow' in 1986...at that time all the mafia and gangsters had their eye on Chow because of this success and he had so many offers." Chow however honored his agreement despite much pressure from other production companies, and travelled to New York to shoot.

Given the current number of Chinese-language filmmakers currently making wuxia (swordplay) movies, and Mabel Cheung having helped Sammo Hung out by filming some of the non-action scenes in a wuxia film he made called 'Moon Warriors' (1992), I asked her if she had any plans to make one herself. It turns out that she wrote a script for one ten years ago inspired by 'The Romance of the Three Kingdoms', but was never made due to insufficient funding. It would have told the stories of the women who populate the 'Three Kingdoms' from a woman's point of view. "I would design a new style of fighting for the women warriors." We hope it one day sees the light of day.

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