Filmmaker Ma has global perspective
Old Stone director says nationality, geography should not impose limitations
Johnny Ma still remembers the neon lights that kept him awake during a childhood growing up near Yonge and Bloor in downtown Toronto.
“The Brass Rail,” says the 34-yearold, naming one of the city’s famous strip clubs whose signage shone through his bedroom window. “It was that and the Uptown cinema.” He grins: “Luckily, I chose the right path.”
Born in Shanghai, Ma came to Canada at the age of 10, living in student housing while his mother pursued a PhD at the University of Toronto.
“My first cinematic experience in North America was there,” he says of the Uptown, which closed in 2003. The film was The Air Up There, a 1994 Kevin Bacon comedy with a 22 per cent score at rottentomatoes.
“Other people talk about 2001: A Space Odyssey,” Ma laughs. “I guess for me it’s Kevin Bacon.”
He’s come a long way. After studying at the University of British Columbia, he worked unhappily in the financial sector, then spent two years with an Italian fashion company in China before finding his passion in filmmaking. “Even when it’s tough I remind myself that I made money before, and that didn’t solve anything.”
Ma’s peripatetic film career includes shorts shot in Australia (The Robbery, 2010), and Brazil (O Genio de Quintino, 2011). His feature debut, Old Stone, was shot in China. It won the best Canadian first feature film prize when it played at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, and was just named one of the top 10 Canadian films of 2016 by the same group.
The gritty drama tells the story of taxi driver Lao Shi (his name means Old Stone), who injures a man when a drunken passenger causes him to lose control of his cab. Ignoring witnesses who tell him to leave the victim on the road, he takes him to the hospital — and winds up on the hook for the man’s health-care costs.
Ma says he was inspired by several real-life cases in China. In one, an old woman who had fallen and broken a bone successfully sued the passerby who stopped to help. More insidious is the practice of “hit-andkill” accidents, in which wounded pedestrians are finished off by drivers who know that vehicular homicide carries less of a penalty than causing a long-term injury.
“Everybody’s thinking about it but nobody’s saying it in a piece of art,” Ma says of his thoughts about turning this kind of evil-Samaritan behaviour into a movie. “We’re all afraid to do good things now.”
But he knew he was ready to write the screenplay when he heard about a Chinese truck driver in the mountains who admitted to such a “double-hit” case. “It wasn’t what he said that shocked me; it was what I felt. Because I understood him, I understood exactly what he did; if I had the same lot in life as him I probably would have done the same thing. And I felt that’s why it deserved this film to talk about it.”
The low-budget, independent shoot did not always go smoothly. Ma had his lead actor walk away from the project barely a week before filming was to begin; the booming film industry in China means actors can command high fees, and this one clearly felt he could do better.
“We had to find an actor who needed us as much as we needed him,” Ma says. Gang Chen, recently retired, fit the bill, and delivers a superb performance in the role of the cab driver. “He took on this project like it was his last film.”
Old Stone was shot in Anhui Province, famous for the bamboo forests where Ang Lee made Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. “Local people kept taking us to those trees,” he remembers. One windy day the undulating forest reminded him of the opening shot of Apocalypse Now, and also of Kurosawa’s use of nature imagery in his movies.
“People feel something when even nature is reacting to it,” the director says. The rippling bamboo has since become one of the movie’s more talked-about images.
Ma would be happy to make another movie in China, but he’s not wedded to a specific location, and doesn’t want to be labelled a strictly Canadian or Chinese filmmaker.
“I do think there’s a new generation of filmmakers coming out who are more global; the backpacker generation,” he says. Canada, Brazil, China and elsewhere are just locations for stories to be told. “Why can’t I make a film, as long as I do it honestly?”