Lau Ho-leung's directorial debut "Two Thumbs Up" recently roared onto the screen at its world premiere at the Hong Kong International Film Festival in March. We checked out its screening in London and caught up with its director/screenwriter on May 17.

Lau Ho-leung [Photo/China.org.cn]

The film is imbued with a youthful energy reminiscent of the heyday of Hong Kong cinema back in the 1980s and early 1990s, where honor among thieves is paramount. The film's plot twists an archetypal scenario into something fresh. An out-of-luck gangster, Big F (Francis Ng, who comically mines his typically brooding style), gathers together three of his old friends (Simon Yam, Mark Chen, Patrick Tam) to rob a delivery van filled with corpses they know to be stuffed with cash. These four popular, older actors have all been acting for decades, and Lau says he picked them over younger faces because he wanted actors with a combination of rich life experience and a cool look. The four gangsters decide to deck out an old minivan to look like a police van and dress up in cops' uniforms. Equipped with BB guns, they descend into the night. Naturally, things don't go according to plan, and their naiveté becomes apparent when they encounter another gang dressed in police uniforms who had the same idea they did. This ruthless, AK-47-equipped gang will stop at nothing to get their cash. What follows is a cat-and-mouse game between the two gang, during which the fight between the two gangs escalates, Big F's gang rescues a kidnapped woman and a young girl, and in the end they throw in their lot with a real policeman to combat the deadly gang. The message is clear: Anybody can be a hero, regardless of his or her identity, and one should never be judged by the uniform that one wears.

Lau Ho-leung has been a scriptwriter in Hong Kong for 14 years now, and he has a huge amount of experience in the film industry. When I asked him why he decided to make his directorial debut with a film in the classic cops and robbers genre that 1980s Hong Kong cinema is so famous for, he replied that when he was in the United States quite a few years ago, he met an Argentinean reporter who asked him why Hong Kong films always feature so much chaos and are full of gangsters, thieves and guns. This made the reporter think that lots of bad things must be happening in Hong Kong. The reporter's questions made Lau realize that Hong Kong cinema was in some ways defined by chaos, so a story revolving around cops and robbers would be very suitable.

Lau recounted a humorous anecdote to explain where the idea of thieves dressing as cops came from and why he had one of the gang of thieves end up fighting for justice.

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