SINGAPORE – Mannequin Louise Wong makes her appearing debut starring as Cantopop legend Anita Mui in Anita. And she or he believes the late singer was watching over her as she was filming the biopic.
In an interview with native media, the 32-year-old says: “There have been loads of instances after I felt her presence. There was a live performance scene and I wasn’t feeling effectively that day. However as soon as the cameras began to roll, there was some magic that made me give my all. I believe she was watching over me.”
The movie, directed by Longman Leung, opens in cinemas on Thursday (Nov 25) and comes 18 years after Mui died on the age of 40 in 2003 resulting from cervical most cancers.
It traces her life from little one performer – along with her sister Ann on the now-demolished Lai Chi Kok Amusement Park – to Cantopop celebrity. It delves into her love life, her controversies, her philanthropy and her battle with most cancers.
The movie opened earlier this month (November) in Hong Kong and has topped the field workplace there. It additionally made greater than 10 million yuan (S$2.14 million) in China on its opening day.
To arrange for her position because the Madonna Of Asia, as Mui was as soon as referred to as, Wong went by means of greater than six months of intensive coaching, together with appearing, singing and dancing classes.
She says it was robust leaving the position behind after filming wrapped.
“I undoubtedly felt very empty. I went to be taught horseback driving, picked up cooking and did issues that Louise Wong actually needed to do to seek out myself once more,” she says.
Apart from discovering the fitting actress to play Mui, Leung, 49, additionally needed to recreate a bygone period of Hong Kong through the use of a mixture of laptop graphics and bodily units.
He jokes: “My crew by no means let me see the price range. Each time they requested me, ‘Do you actually need this scene?’ or ‘Do you actually need this tune?’. However once they didn’t let me see the price range, that is after I knew it was costly.
“Typically I advised my crew, ‘If it is too costly, let’s scrap it.’ However they did not let me hand over.”
Mui just isn’t the one late icon portrayed in Anita. Hong Kong actor Terrance Lau (Past The Dream, 2019) performs film star and singer Leslie Cheung, who took his life in 2003, 9 months earlier than Mui’s loss of life. Cheung and Mui had been shut buddies and so they starred within the 1988 film Rouge collectively.
Lau, 33, says: “I are usually a extra melancholic, delicate particular person. I believe that is much like Gege (“elder brother”, a nickname for Cheung), who was additionally delicate and had a vulnerability to him. That is why his feelings had been so fluid when he was performing.”
Malaysian actress Fish Liew, 31, performs Mui’s sister Ann, who additionally died of cervical most cancers a number of years previous to Mui. She needed to ditch her Malaysian accent for the film.
She says: “I believed my Cantonese is already fairly good, however my accent does not have the texture of a Hong Konger within the Seventies and Nineteen Eighties and my Malaysian accent slips out.”
The movie additionally stars veteran actors like Louis Koo, who performs Mui’s costume designer Eddie Lau, and Gordon Lam as document label govt So Hau Leung.
Lam (Hand Rolled Cigarette, 2020) says that wanting again at Mui’s life by means of the movie moved him.
The 54-year-old remembers a scene, primarily based on actual occasions, by which Mui asks to put on a marriage costume onstage for her final live performance earlier than her loss of life.
“She says she needs to marry herself to the stage. When you love appearing, performing and singing, you like being onstage and in entrance of the digital camera. Typically I really feel like that too, that if I died onstage, it’s going to be a very good ending for me. I used to be very touched by that scene. She is accountable not solely to herself, but in addition to her followers and supporters.”
Wong shares his sentiments.
“I performed Anita in her teenagers to her life’s finish, so I lived virtually her total life by means of the movie. I skilled the best way she confronted her lows, how she picked herself again up and, in the later stage of her life, how she helped a youthful technology of stars, and her never-give-up angle.
“I consider that she is somebody who actually loves and needs to encourage different folks.”
Anita opens on Thursday (Nov 25).
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