How to Beat a Bully
Derek Tsang’s controversial thriller Better Days made it all the way to the Oscars, but what the Hong Kong director really won was the respect of his critics
Derek Tsang was lying on his sofa at home after a long day on March 15 when his phone started lighting up with messages from friends who were congratulating him, just at the moment it was announced he had become the first native Hong Kong director to be nominated for best international feature at the Academy Awards.
“I knew it was going to be that day, but I didn’t know there was a live broadcast,” Tsang says, and although he was hopeful for a nod for his teenage film noir Better Days, which handily swept the Hong Kong Film Awards and received multiple international prizes, he was not watching the news very closely. “That’s when it hit me that we were in the final five, and I just became elated, hugging my wife and jumping around and screaming.”
In the highly competitive, overly scrutinised world of the Oscars, they say it is an honour just to be nominated, and in this case, they would be correct. As anyone following that horse race would know, from the moment the awards were announced, it was the Danish drama Another Round, starring Mads Mikkelsen, that would be “hard to beat”, as The New York Times columnist Kyle Buchanan politely assessed, and which would ultimately win the award. Still, Tsang saw the nomination as an opportunity to expand his already considerable mark in cinema well beyond Chinesespeaking audiences. Better Days was a phenomenon in China, grossing US$230 million, and was the highestgrossing film in the world upon its release, driven partly by its mystery thriller plot centred around a bullied high school student, and partly by the popularity of its leads, Zhou Dongyu and the Tfboys superstar Jackson Yee.
“It’s kind of conflicting in a way, because on one hand, you know the film travelled well because of how prevalent the issue of bullying is, which is why people from different countries and cultures can relate very well,” Tsang says. “But on the other hand, it’s very satisfying as a filmmaker to be so well-received across different places for your work.”
While the success of the film has opened many doors for Tsang, and sparked media interest in the story of how the young director, the son of the controversial Hong Kong actor and producer Eric Tsang, paved his own way in the industry to achieve what is arguably a greater glory, Better Days has been dogged by controversies and setbacks from the beginning, most notably for running afoul of censors throughout China’s stringent film screening process. But Tsang also represents a new generation of Asian directors who have learnt how to work within the system while maintaining their integrity and, in the case of Better Days, creating what could still be described as a biting social commentary that highlights real-life problems within the contemporary education system in China.
“If you’re willing to go and seek out the story, there are a lot of very interesting ones in China that are very worthwhile to tell,” Tsang says with characteristic delicacy. “I honestly believe that there are a lot of things that you can do as a filmmaker in China. There’s always that issue of the censorship that you have to learn. That’s just the rules of the game.”
Tsang is certainly smooth. Having grown up with some knowledge of the inside workings of Hong Kong’s film industry, he is adept at navigating potential landmines and online barbs while maintaining a smile on his face. Tall and handsome, and famous in Hong Kong as an actor who appeared in more than 50 films before directing his own, Tsang, who is 41, seems simultaneously humble and glamorous as he describes his life and family, from his half-sister, the Taiwanese singer and actress Bowie Tsang, to his wife, the actress Venus Wong, whom he married in a Japanese forest in 2019. He is hardly square. In place of wedding bands, Tsang has nine lines tattooed across three fingers of his left hand and Wong has six lines across two fingers of her right hand, representing their wedding date, September 6.
Tsang’s upbringing was somewhat unusual in that, although his father remained married to his mother, Rebecca Chu, until her death last year, the family lived separately and for many years he was largely out of the picture.
“Every family is unique, but my family is unique in the way that we don’t often see each other,” Tsang says. “But even though we were always separated, we’ve been very close from day one.”
Chu raised her children in Canada, where Tsang fell in love with cinema through the films of Wong Kar-wai and completed his studies at the University of Toronto before moving back to Hong Kong as a young adult. “That’s when I had that naïve notion that if you are in love with watching films, you immediately have the ability to make a film yourself,” he recalls. “I just really