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SINGAPORE: Hong Kong Star Louis Koo wants you, the viewer, to feel connected to him. Or at least to Bob, the good Samaritan who inevitably finds himself racing around Hong Kong like a headless chicken in the hope of saving a kidnapped stranger and her family.
That’s why he chose to do most of the stunts himself in Benny Chan’s Connected, the Hong Kong remake of Hollywood’s Cellular (2004), currently showing in cinemas here. It’s hard to take anyone tanned so unnaturally orange seriously, but Koo is adamant about giving real reactions.
“Bob is just an ordinary man and definitely not a hero. I watched the Hollywood version, but my character is different. I wanted all my reactions to be real” said the 2006 Hong Kong UA Film Awards Most Beloved Actor in a Mandarin interview with TODAY held at Orchard Cineleisure Kbox last Tuesday.
The man is dedicated. It was Koo — not a stuntman — who was strapped in the driver’s seat of a car that was precariously perched on the edge of a cliff in one of the more exciting scenes in the film. And again, it was Koo finding the right moment to jump out of the car before it plunged to the ground.
Said Koo: “All the expressions you see on my face — the fear, the nervousness, the panic and the terror — it was all real. I told Benny (Chan) that I wanted to do it so that the scene will be a lot more believable. There were no rehearsals. For what? I told them, ‘Let’s just do it!’”
This gung-ho attitude will most certainly serve the actor, who turns 38 later this month, well in future. His manager revealed that there are two possible Hollywood projects in the pipeline, hinting that any Tinseltown aspirations might be a reality by 2009.
Director Benny Chan had only praise for his daredevil lead. “He was certainly very hardworking. He was my first choice to play Bob, which was the role I felt was most difficult to play in the film,” shared the Hong Konger who is famous for his box-office successes like Gen-X Cops and New Police Story.
Chan, who last worked with Koo on Rob-B-Hood, also co-wrote the screenplay, as he wanted to make the characters more plausible and accessible than the Hollywood version.
“When Warner China Film (the Chinese-based arm of Warner Bros) approached me about doing the Hong Kong remake, I immediately said yes. I thought that it would be really easy to do since everything — the story, the characters and all — are there already, but I was wrong!” he shared with a laugh. - TODAY/ra
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