Pearl Lam: Welcome to the Pearl Lam Podcast. I’m sitting here in Hong Kong in the beautiful hotel Upper House, and here with me is the celebrated filmmaker Malcolm Clarke, who has two Oscar awards and four nominations of Oscars. And I would love, Malcolm to talk to us about a little bit about himself.
Malcom Clarke: Oh, dear. Well, that’s, that’s a kind of daunting task to start with. I spent many, many years making documentary films, which was a complete accident because it’s not what I ever wanted when I was young. I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to work with actors, which is what I’d done quite a lot of when I was at university. But I.
Pearl Lam: So you wanted to make films, but films with actors?
Malcom Clarke: Yeah, I wanted to do drama. I wanted to do drama. But, you know, any port in a storm when you’re starting your career. So I got offered. I went through two kind of training courses, one at the BBC and then one at Granada television and Granada, Washington, the company where I made my first real film, because I had a friend at university who was working for the World Health Organization when he got out, and he called me and he said, we have this bloke in South Africa, this black political activist called Steve Biko. Biko. And they. And he said, he’s in danger. He’s been threatened by the security forces in South Africa because he was kind of like. He was kind of like a rising Martin Luther King. He was a very interesting young guy. He was in his early thirties, and Steve, he was being threatened. And so my friend said, is there any way you can get a film made about what Biko is trying to do in South Africa? Because the more attention that the world’s press pays to him, the less likelihood there is that they’re going to hurt him. Anyway, I went to my boss, who was an extraordinary guy, a man called Sir Dennis Foreman, who was the, he was the inspiration for many, many filmmakers at Granada. He gave a lot of young people opportunities, including myself. And I said, I want to go to South Africa. He said, why? And I said, well, there’s this fellow, and I think we can save his life before we make a film about him. And he said, get your passport stamped. Get there as fast as possible. Wow.
Pearl Lam: He was so supportive.
Malcom Clarke: Didn’t think about the money, and he didn’t. And I didn’t think about the risk, which was stupid, because now if someone offered me the job, now, I’d probably think twice. So anyway, we went. It took us a week to get our passports stamped. My cameraman and we all went into South Africa on separate planes in secret, because we knew that Biko was being watched. And when we got there, this was in the days before digital photography or anything like that. So we actually went all around Cape Town and Johannesburg to pharmacies that sold rolls of film, eight millimeter film, because the film had to. We had to work like tourists. We had to pretend to be tourists. Anyway, cutting a very long story short, we never saw Biko alive, because about three days after we got there, they murdered him in prison. And so we spoke to a lot of people around him, and then we were the only crew at his funeral. The funeral was in a soccer stadium and just completely crammed with supporters. The security forces flew helicopters over the soccer stadium, down very, very low over the center of the stadium, where people were making the funeral orations, because they wanted to drown out any kind of political speech. So they just hovered over the funeral. Meanwhile, they were photographing everyone who was in the stadium so that they could follow up and kind of put them on a list. I guess. At the end of that, the four people went, and we went out of separate exits. We were spirited out by people in what was called the black consciousness movement, which is the thing that BCO founded. And again, we all kind of left out of separate exits. We gaffer taped all the film that we had shot to the bottom of a car, and I drove it out over a border, using my English accent on these awful border guards. And they never. They never kind of examined the car. Ordinarily, if you drive into or out of South Africa in those days, they use mirrors with lights so that they can see if you’re smuggling any contraband or arms or anything like that. Anyway, they didn’t because I guess I didn’t look like I was a threat. I was a kid, basically. And we cut the film in a weekend. We put it out on a program called World in Action, and it was a huge controversy. I mean, we proved conclusively they murdered him. And there were questions asked in the houses of parliament. And then we won the Monte Carlo Film Festival, which no longer exists, actually. It’s gone.
Pearl Lam: Wow.
Malcom Clarke: But it was a really. It was a very, very big deal to. To win that festival. And certainly for me, because it was my first job, and because of that, I. I got offered a big job in the United States. So shortly after that, I moved to New York.
Pearl Lam: Wow. So after New York, you stay four years. And then after that, when did you arrive in China?
Malcom Clarke: Oh, I didn’t. Well, I got. Again, this is all, you know, I mean, I’ve had a long career. I’m not young. I am not young. The first time I came to China, ABC sent me to China.
Pearl Lam: Oh, during the work that. And after Granada, you start working.
Malcom Clarke: I made a couple of films for ABC. It’s all documentary, all documentaries.
Pearl Lam: What is it about?
Malcom Clarke: The first one was called Terror in the Promised Land, and it was a film about a Palestinian suicide squad. The guy who ran ABC News wanted a film. This is the reason he hired me. He didn’t hire me because he was a charitable chap. He hired me because he had no one else who wanted to make the film, because everyone else was wiser, older and less stupid. And I had just made this very successful film in secret in South Africa. So he figured that, you know, he would offer it. And of course, you know, they were paying me a lot of money compared to what I was getting in the UK. It wasn’t in New York more than three weeks. I just found an apartment and then I went off to Beiruthen, and I was in the Middle East for, I think, altogether about ten months, because we went through the process of, first of all, winning the confidence of the Palestinians because they didn’t trust anybody, and certainly not any people from the US, because the US was such a staunch supporter of the state of Israel. But once we’d finally convinced them that we weren’t bad guys and we wanted to genuinely talk about, yeah, what was going on, then it became a very different story. And they said, well, you know, we have what they call a special operation, and we’re putting all these kind of acronyms, but they said they were getting an active service unit of. Basically what that means is they were recruiting in the refugee camps. So we went with them, we shot the whole thing. They recruited the kids in two refugee camps, Sabra and Shatila, which are huge refugee camps outside Beirut, full of Palestinians. And then we followed the entire kind of training regiment. So they went to Jordan, they went to Yemen, they went to Libya, then they came back to Jordan. And then we went with them one night. It was scariest, one of the scariest things I’ve ever done. We went through a minefield between Jordan and the West Bank, and that was. I never wanted to do that again. And when we got onto the West Bank that we split from them because obviously they were going to do something not good. And we. We were very legally compromised. So what we did, we went to Jerusalem, we contacted Shin Bet, which is the Israeli FBI, if you will, and we told them exactly what we’d been doing and where we’d been.
Pearl Lam: I find out that, Malcolm, you love Audi’s adventure. A really, really adventure
Malcom Clarke: Well, you have to bear in mind, when I was doing this, I was doing this when I was you, in my twenties and thirties.
Pearl Lam: I’m sorry, you were in. You were. You filmed. You made the film during COVID time in. Wow.
Malcom Clarke: I did.
Pearl Lam: So. So isn’t that adventure of the.
Malcom Clarke: Well, you know, I mean, I think, you know, you as a filmmaker and I. I’m kind of lucky, actually, because I do get offered. I mean, it’s a certain point, you have a reputation, so. So if someone wants something done that is a little bit sketchy or a little bit dangerous or a little bit questionable, I kind of get the calls, but I don’t necessarily take the calls. And I’ve had a series of very risk averse wives who’ve said, if you continue to do this, I will quit and take the kids because they don’t like it. And, you know, and it’s not. And it’s. And it’s. And it’s. It’s rough.
Pearl Lam: Yeah, I can.
Malcom Clarke: Rough for everyone. So. But in those days, I didn’t. I wasn’t married and I. And I was. There’s a. There’s a weird thing that happens and it’s. You kind of get addicted. It’s like, can I do this? Can I challenge myself and do this and get in and get out in one piece? And I did have one, but very bad thing happen on the Palestinian film. My sound man was murdered. And it was a warning to me and my crew because we were told that we got a call warning us that if we didn’t get out of it, was Beirut. We were at the Commodore Hotel in Beirut, which is where all the camera film people, because this is during the civil war, and we had about a week of filming and left. And I. So I got everyone together and I said, I’m not making. I mean, everyone was older than me, right? So I. You know, and there are a lot more experience than me, too. So I said, I’m not making this decision alone. We collectively have to decide, you know, are we staying? Are we going? Because if you’re in Beirut, in a war zone, in the middle of a civil war, someone says they’re going to kill you, you better take it seriously.
Pearl Lam: Yes, exactly.
Malcom Clarke: So we compromised. We said, we have a weekend. Let’s just do the most essential stuff. It’ll take two or maybe three days, and we can get out. Obviously, there was a spy in the hotel. Someone basically blew the whistle that we were staying because we didn’t check out. And that night, my sound recordist, who was a very close friend and had been with me through, you know, been in South Africa. He was in a hotel. He was, excuse me, in a restaurant on the Corniche in Beirut. And they pulled him out of the restaurant. They came in with Kalashnikovs, four guys, and they. They took him outside and they put him in into the trunk of a Mercedes. We know. You know, we know some details about this. And they drove him off. And then at about one in the morning, I got a call from the lobby, from the guy in the lobby who I knew a man called Shakib. And he said, Mr Clarke, this is Shakib. There’s a. There’s a. There’s a package here for you. You need to come down and pick it up. And I said, it’s one in the morning. I can. You know, I get it tomorrow morning. And he said, no, mister, cut. You need to pick it up. Up now. And I could tell she’s shifting. He was scared to death. And actually, we found out later he had. You know, he had a gun at his head. I went down in my underpants, basically, and the body of my sound man was on the marble floor in the lobby. And they put him in a garbage bag over his head, but they had taken the top of his head off with a Kalashnikov. They literally just, like, unstitched his top of his cranium. And so that was about 01:20 a.m. and we were on a plane. In those days, there was a company called MEA Middle East Airlines. And they had an early morning flight every morning from Beirut to Athens. And so we took his body off to Athens at six in the morning and that was the end of that and it was the end of him and that was a big deal for us.
Pearl Lam: Let’s talk about China. I think China is less dangerous than that.
Malcom Clarke: China is a dream.
Pearl Lam: I think after you’ve gone through this, I think this is really, you know, this, this is killing everything. I think drama definitely is a dream. Now, Malcolm, you know, I read several press before I met with you, you, first time I met with you, China loves you. But in these Western media, they, they don’t love me. They, they call you pro-China.
Malcom Clarke: Yeah. Well, I am proud of it.
Pearl Lam: But then I thought when I watched your film about Hong Kong, you’re very objective. I am the same thing about the COVID film. You were very objective. I don’t know how this pro China elements come in. Doesn’t mean that when you live in Shanghai or live in China, you approach China.
Malcom Clarke: I think there’s something that we have to just kind of cop to about the kind of rhetoric, the anti China rhetoric, which is very widespread now, and in my opinion, politically motivated, unfair, untrue, imbalanced. And certainly it makes my blood boil when I heard, you know, August legacy news organizations like CB’s or ABC or the British Press and certainly the BBC, because that is, you know, I couldn’t have got away with it when I was working in England, that kind of single minded jihad against China would not have been acceptable. We would have to accept.
Pearl Lam: I agree, because, because nowadays is not object.
Malcom Clarke: There’s no objective.
Pearl Lam: Yeah, the report is not objective, but.
Malcom Clarke: It’s a different world and we just have to, you know, cop to that. I mean, I, first time I went to China, I was, I.
Pearl Lam: Where was that first?
Malcom Clarke: Oh, golly, it was seven… it was 80, I think. 80. 80.
Pearl Lam: It’s just open.
Malcom Clarke: Yeah. And actually that was the point that, you know, I’d done these kinds of films relatively kind of in conflict zones or combat zones, whatever you want to call them. The same man who sent me to Beirut wanted me, wanted someone to go to China and nobody wanted to go because they thought it was, it was, it wasn’t because it was a combat zone. It was because it was really, really hard to work there.
Pearl Lam: Very hard.
Malcom Clarke: And really, especially when it’s just open.
Pearl Lam: Yeah.
Malcom Clarke: Because, you know, frankly speaking, a lot of these guys who work in news, they like to, they like to hit the bar at 06:00 belly up to the bar and have a gin and tonic and they, you know, they’re good journalists. I’m not. I’m not disputing that. But, you know, they like an element of comfort. They like to stay at five star hotels, blah, blah, blah. You ain’t gonna do that if you’re in China. So. And I knew nothing about China. You have to bear in mind, and I still know nothing. I mean, this is something which is, you know, people forget, I am not an expert, I’m not a sonologist, I’m not a scholar. I’m just a kind of simple filmmaker, you know? And I learn empirically through experience, but not by having a PhD in anything. But when no one wanted to go to China, and I just love the idea of going to Asia, anywhere in Asia, I was desperate to go, so I went because no one else would go. And I was there nine months.
Pearl Lam: Nine months.
Malcom Clarke: And I wasn’t making a film. I was researching a film. The ABC had paid someone, I don’t know who in the Chinese government or in one of the Chinese news agencies, a lot of money for the privilege of getting a film. They wanted a film about the cultural revolution. And there was a moment, it was just finished, and, well, that was. There was a moment of kind of real liberalization. And so they said, get in there and make this film. So I researched the film. I met a lot of people, and I traveled up the Yangtze River, and I came back down the Yellow River. I went everywhere in China. They were very generous, they were very open, they were very kind, and they facilitated me, pretty much going wherever I wanted to go. But, boy, was it a poor country. It was shockingly poor.
Pearl Lam: Yeah, if you go there. Early eighties. Of course it is.
Malcom Clarke: But when I got back to Beijing, I was told that the political winds had changed.
Pearl Lam: So you were there after the gang of four?
Malcom Clarke: Yeah. And they basically said, you can. We’d love you to make a film. We’d love you to make a film, but we’d like it to be about music and dancing. So, you know, it was cutting to the chase. They had changed their minds, but they kept the money.
Pearl Lam: You mean ABC?
Malcom Clarke: Yeah. No, the Chinese paid for it.
Pearl Lam: Okay. They don’t want to. Okay
Malcom Clarke: So I went. I lost my temper and I got kicked out.
Pearl Lam: Oh, you lost your temper?
Malcom Clarke: And I got kicked out. And they drove me to the airport and they put me on an airplane, and I went to Japan, whereupon I called my boss and I said, I got kicked out. They don’t want to let us make the film. The political winds are blowing in a different direction. Just, you know, it’s a bit of a mess. And I said, I’m going to spend two days at the Okura Hotel in the shower, because I hadn’t had a shower in months, and then I’m coming home. And she said, in the immortal words of an ABC News executive, where are you? And I said, I’m in Tokyo, in Japan. At the Okoro Hotel was a very nice hotel, always liked it. And I was treating myself after nine months. And she said, there’s a long silence. And she said, well, Japan’s like China, isn’t it? Why don’t you just make a film there? So I spent the next seven and a half, eight months in Japan making.
Pearl Lam: A film of China.
Malcom Clarke: In China? No, no, no, about Japan.
Pearl Lam: About Japan.
Malcom Clarke: She had a slot. She had a hole in her schedule which was supposed to be filled with this China film. The China film was clearly not going to get made. I was in Japan. Make a film there.
Pearl Lam: So what film do you make about?
Malcom Clarke: I made a film. It was called Myths Behind The Miracle. And at the time there was something called the Japanese miracle. Extraordinary. Economic.
Pearl Lam: Yeah, economic.
Malcom Clarke: And it was freaking out the Americans. I mean, they were.
Pearl Lam: Yeah.
Malcom Clarke: The amount of racism that you heard, which is history repeating itself now.
Pearl Lam: Yeah.
Malcom Clarke: But in the early eighties when. When the. When Japan was rising, they were making better, better cars. They were making Sony Walkman. They were making all kinds of fantastic televisions. Trinitron televisions, they were called. They were much better than anything that the Americans were making. And the Americans were getting scared. And there was a huge anti Japanese push in the American government and amongst the American people. We’re seeing it now.
Pearl Lam: We’re seeing it now for China.
Malcom Clarke: Yes. But I love being in Japan. So I enjoyed making the movie.
Pearl Lam: I love Japan.
Malcom Clarke: But then I didn’t go back to. I didn’t go back to China for years, actually, I got asked to make a film. I was asked in 2012 and 2013 by two guys who were both, I wouldn’t say close friends, but they were people I knew pretty well. One was Henry Kissinger and one was a man called Robert Mundell, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1999. He’s the guy who invented the Euro. And Bob and Henry were both.
Pearl Lam: They love China.
Malcom Clarke: They were friends of China.
Pearl Lam: Yeah.
Malcom Clarke: Bob helped China in the nineties with monetary policy. They loved him. And Henry could walk on water in China.
Pearl Lam: Yes, absolutely.
Malcom Clarke: Since Nixon.
Pearl Lam: Yes, since Nixon. Since 1970, when they live up the embargo in 1973.
Malcom Clarke: So, you know, they. And they were getting worried then, which is 2012, and 10 years ago, because the kind of relationship between America and China was going off the rails during the Obama administration. And it wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t the kind of happy go lucky years of earlier in the new century. And so they said, you know, we want a film to explore one possible future for America and China, this rising power and this established global power. And I thought that was a lovely idea. And I, you know, and basically, because it gave me a chance to explore China in a lot more detail, it was going to be an 18 month job, originally turned into four years because I was. Well, and this is telling a story slightly against myself here, but I really didn’t know what the hell I was doing and what I didn’t appreciate. Even in 2014, when we started making this movie, China was by then a global power. And if you wanted to make a film about China in that decade or what had happened in the previous decade, you kind of had to go everywhere. You couldn’t just make it in China. So we went to Ethiopia. We went basically anywhere where China was, we had to go. And simultaneous with making this film, we were dealing with this appalling imbecile in the White House who was waging a jihad against China, first in his campaign and then in his presidency, just doing everything possible to defame and destabilize and kind of destroy China’s reputation. So by the time the film came out and, you know, which film is this?
Pearl Lam: Better Angels.
Malcom Clarke: It’s called Better Angels.
Pearl Lam: It’s Better Angels, which I have been trying. I know it’s not online because I wanted to watch them before. Before the podcast. It was not possible.
Malcom Clarke: No, I know, I know. It’s quite difficult to find it now. And the reason, I think, for that, and this provokes a different conversation about the control of information in the West. And there used to be a time when you could criticize a country or you could support a country or a political position or a politician or whatever, you could examine both sides of the issue, the good points, the bad points, and China certainly has both. But, and we, that’s the way we made that film. We. We were critical of China, but we were always constructively critical. And that’s the position I’ve always taken. You know, I have huge respect for what the Chinese government and the Chinese people have achieved. It’s not a perfect place, but extraordinary. I mean, the change in what has happened in China, the quality of people’s lives in the last 30 years, is an exponential change, I think, for you.
Pearl Lam: Especially because you saw the world of China in an early 1970s.
Malcom Clarke: Well, that’s the point, because I was.
Pearl Lam: Yeah, I mean, 1976, Marci Tung passed away and then there was a complete political upheaval and there was a gang of four. And I think when you were there, they just settled. China was so poor. So you saw this and then you went back 30 years ago and then you saw China has lifted, has lived up.
Malcom Clarke: When I came back, I remember the first time I came back in, I think it was 2013, because I didn’t take on this job easily. I needed a bit of. You needed to kick up the pants to do it because I honestly didn’t think I was capable and I didn’t think I had the standing to make it, you know, because, you know, you can’t opine about huge geopolitical subject like this and know nothing. Now, after four years, I did know something because I lived it.
Pearl Lam: Yeah.
Malcom Clarke: But as I say, I still, it’s just what I’d seen. It was experiential rather than book learning or, you know, getting a degree in it or something. But the problem was, by the time Trump got into the White House, there wasn’t a place, there was no safe place for people like me. Because if you were not anti China, you have to be pro China. You can’t stand in the middle and say, well, you know, it’s not as easy. It’s a lot more complicated than that because I’m not anti China. But by being not anti China, that must mean I’m a kind of pro China zealot and there’s no middle ground. The center doesn’t hold.
Pearl Lam: So do you think that it is because of this and that YouTube does not even have your film because they see you as a propaganda?
Malcom Clarke: Well, my colleague, my producing partner is in a bitter and continual war with you, YouTube, because they, they keep taking our stuff down and they say it doesn’t adhere to community standards. Well, you know, the community standard is that you have to be anti China. That’s the standard. And so they keep lifting it up.
Pearl Lam: I agree. Because even for Hong Kong, when you did your Hong Kong protest, you did this, you did the two side of the story. So when I was writing letter to all the western media saying my part of the story, because I actually wrote a letter over 2000 words putting the perspective of how Hong Kong became like this. And then they said, I’m pro China, I was just being very objective, telling people, you know, why we arrived in this and how misleading everything is. It’s absolutely true, because, yeah, I’d say there’s no objectivity.
Malcom Clarke: Well, no, you need, you’re either with them or against them, but you can’t. But as I say, it used to be that there was a center, you could be right wing, you could be left wing, you could be in the middle and say, well, you know, I like this about that and this about that. That’s gone.
Pearl Lam: Unfortunately, there’s a lot of misunderstanding between the China and the west. And the west has no understanding about China.
Malcom Clarke: Well, yeah, I mean, the thing is that the Chinese do have a lot of understanding about, I mean, you know, they’ve been sending their kids over to, you know, study in European and North American universities. There’s a, you know, there’s a tertiary educated kind of upper class, if you will, in China. And they have real regard for America and American values, American education. I mean, it is a part of the soul because part of their kind of institutional memory is growing up in America with Americans. But unfortunately, that isn’t the same in the west because people have not taken an interest in China. Chinese is a very difficult language. I still don’t speak it. I’m useless. So they don’t come to China, they don’t explain, they don’t come as tourists, they don’t have any real kind of experiential context to think about China and that. I think if you don’t understand something, it’s very human to fear it. That fear grows, of course.
Pearl Lam: Of course, if you don’t know.
Malcom Clarke: And I think a lot of what I mean, I think I feel that if people understood China much better, a lot of this kind of this negative mythology about China, that China is going to eat people’s lunch, they’re going to smoke their cigars and they’re going to carry their women off. I mean, it’s utter nonsense, but it’s easy to believe when you don’t know anything about who these people are. And they are a remarkable nation, they’re a remarkable culture, and they deserve far more respect for what they’ve achieved. We can fear them or we can hate them, but we should at least be giving them credit for a system which is not perfect and certainly not perfect by western, all those kind of Western metrics, free speech, there is none. You know, you have to be careful what you say. Your life is monitored. It is a surveillance state. But let me just remind everyone that Edward Snowden said a lot of things about America which they do not and should not be proud of. Don’t say that China is a surveillance state and America is not. That is nonsense. Britain used to be the biggest surveillance state on the planet in the sixties and the seventies. So every country has, you know, has a tarnished reputation. There’s real politic. But, you know, I go to, I go out, I travel around China. People are happy. They are content. They are, you know, they love to shop. They’ve got the money to shop. They’ve got disposable income. It’s like shopping is the national religion.
Pearl Lam: Yes, yes. Is the national hobby.
Malcom Clarke: It’s. But the point. And, you know, it’s interesting because I’ve, I’ve always had pets, right? Chinese never had pets because they couldn’t afford to feed them. Now, you see, everyone was everyone. People are starting to. That’s, that’s a sign. I only say this, it, it sounds ridiculous and kind of like a silly thing to say, but it’s the way you measure the rise of the middle class because they have enough disposable income to do stuff like buy a poodle, which is actually a really interesting economic indicator of a certain level of economic maturity in a society. So I have just tremendous admiration for that. And so, you know, if I admire China, I’m accused of being a pro China zealot in the pocket of China, having, you know, being bought and paid for, being a propagandist for China. All of which is absolutely untrue.
Pearl Lam: Bollocks.
Malcom Clarke: Yeah.
Pearl Lam: Because I saw your film on Hong Kong protest. I love how you end the film. I love Hong Kong. I love Hong Kong. I love Hong Kong. I did not feel that you were not critical of China. I mean, I thought the film is very fair. And then I find out from you that it wasn’t accepted by any film festival. So I thought it was petty. For me, it’s very upsetting because I want the world to actually see what exactly has happened in Hong Kong. Instead of I go to different foreign countries, go to USA, I go to UK, poor you. Hong Kong has no more democracy, which is not true. And then the next thing now, of course, the big issue is the National Security Law, so. But your film is actually really honest. So I was upset that why isn’t been accepted by any festivals.
Malcom Clarke: Well, we were. I was shocked, frankly. I mean, I thought I was, you know, where China is concerned. I thought I was pretty unshockable that, you know, I could predict that, you know, I would poke the hornets nest and, you know, people would buzz around a little bit and get, get their, get themselves into tizzy because they thought I was being, you know, either intellectually dishonest politically or just stupid. But in fact, those three festivals that we. That we’ve submitted, the. The film’s called Rashomon Hong Kong. There’s a reason for that. Rashomon was a movie made by Akira Kurosawa, a very eminent Japanese director. It was about a crime that was committed. It was a period film, and a lot of people saw the crime. And when the trial happened, everybody who saw the crime saw something different. So everybody had a different opinion of what they were seeing. And that was the kind of inspiration behind this film called Rashomon Hong Kong, because I think everyone’s Hong Kong. You know, the people in this room, the people out there in that building, and that everyone’s Hong Kong is different. The one thing, if people are living in Hong Kong, the one thing that is uniform is ubiquitous. Everybody loves it for different reasons.
Pearl Lam: For different reasons.
Malcom Clarke: But people love this place. It doesn’t matter about political ideology, whether they’re rich, they’re poor, whatever. People are here, and they adore it. So what I wanted to do was to make a film about the turmoil in the streets, because this was the biggest news story of that year. I mean, it was a huge thing in 2019, and we couldn’t talk to people because so many people were afraid. They didn’t want to talk. They were either afraid of the cops or they were afraid of the yellow side. And some people on the yellow side were afraid of other people on the yellow side who were more radical and violent than they were. So there was a lot of. There was a lot of fear. There was a lot of paranoia. So we did a lot of interviews. We couldn’t put the people on camera because they wouldn’t go on camera. So we decided to take this fantastic interview stuff that we’d got and write it into a screenplay, write a drama which had no fiction in it at all. It was all true. Every character, everything that came out of their mouth, everything that people observed, it was all reported to us by people who had experienced the turmoil in Hong Kong. We made this film. We gave equal time to everyone. So there was no agenda to kind of favor the yellow side or favor the blue side, which is the government side.
Pearl Lam: The yellow audience or the yellow side is the student and the.
Malcom Clarke: Well, the pro-democracy protesters. And the blue side is the government and the police. But we, the police are Hong Kongers, too. So we tried to be really balanced. I’m quite proud of the film. Did a good job.
Pearl Lam: I think it’s fantastic. It’s very honest.
Malcom Clarke: It’s also very difficult to make because it was very violent. And I don’t think people realize quite how violent it was. We were on the streets every day for months and we were pepper sprayed. We were beaten. I mean, it was. It was a. And when I say beaten, I don’t mean by the cops. I mean actually by.
Pearl Lam: I know, the yellow side.
Malcom Clarke: So. But anyway, I thought, well, this is an interesting film. It’s an interesting thesis, and it’s based. And the thesis is based on a classic film made in 1951, which is still revered and taught in film schools today. It’s an amazing movie. And we got turned down in three countries. The San Sebastian Festival in Spain, the Venice Festival in Italy and the Berlin Festival in Germany. These are festivals get into. You know, I’m a. I’m a. I’m a. Yeah, you know, I get into these festivals. I have all my career. They know me. They know who I am. They know the kind of movies I made. They all turn them down. Why pro China? I said, this is. This is just. It’s asinine.
Pearl Lam: It’s true. Because if you’re not anti China, you’re pro China.
Malcom Clarke: But the point. But the point about that turmoil is that China actually did something very, in my opinion, admirable. They stayed out of it. I don’t want to get into too much political detail here, but, I mean, we.
Pearl Lam: They have a lot of resources.
Malcom Clarke: We knew a lot of what was going on. And it was very mischievous and it was all run out of, let’s just say, you know, places in America. And it was not a leaderless movement. That was nonsense. We kept hearing about this. It was utter. It was ridiculous. So I was very disappointed by the Western press because I’m a kind of cockeyed optimist. And I do think that Western journalistic values are things that I live by and make my films by still, even though I am an old fart. That’s the way I was taught. But there was one day when I was actually on a bridge in a huge demo and there was a. There was a BBC guy standing next to me, literally, like he was doing a report to camera wearing his camouflage, you know, his kind of desert camouflage thing with all the pop pockets and his press bulletproof vest and his. I mean, he was idiotic. I mean, there was nothing happening. It was just, like, self dramatizing. And I was listening to what he was saying and, you know, and what was coming out of his mouth was entirely antithetical of what was happening on the streets. But he didn’t matter because clearly, either he had an agenda or his. His bosses had an agenda, but it was bullshit and it was very, very offensive. And I don’t think with great respect to China, because they have way more important things to deal with than the way people think about them. They’ve got a country to run. But I do feel, and I say this with great respect for what they have achieved, that if they were a little less propagandistic in reporting what they have achieved and they just told the truth about the society, because it is an amazing place with amazing people who have achieved extraordinary advances in the last 30 years. You don’t need. There’s enough to be proud of. You don’t need to propagandize your message. You don’t need to boost it and kind of pump it up. Doesn’t need pumping up objectively, they have achieved something unimaginable and historic by any kind of social, political metric. There’s never been a place like that.
Pearl Lam: But China doesn’t have that confidence.
Malcom Clarke: Well, I think that’s the point. They are, we think, because they’re this colossal country with, you know, and with all kinds super smart people, but it’s not the chinese way to kind of advertise themselves, and it’s not the chinese way to. They understand propaganda. Propaganda. But propaganda is a perversion of the truth. And people in the west are too smart and too sophisticated. The moment they smell that the message has been propagated, they reject it. You know what? Here’s one way to put it. Do what South Korea is doing. South Korea is punching way above its weight in terms of soft power. What we should never forget is that soft power is power, of course. And people all over the world now know South Korea. Why? Because of boy bands? Because of Gangam Style? Because of. Because of feature films. Exactly.
Pearl Lam: And K pop.
Malcom Clarke: Yeah, but that’s. That’s all you need. China could do that. They. I mean, they have some incredibly talented people. Of course they could do it. They just need to have the self confidence to do it without propaganda and to liberate their artists, which is very important.
Pearl Lam: I always felt that the West cannot appreciate China in many ways, because China up to now, is behaving in a reaction of the 150 years of the humiliation by the western aggression and western domination since 19th century. I mean, the middle of the 18th century, middle of the. But. But really, it come to heightens after the opium war. So. So I think they still is. The reaction I know, is a long time ago. But it’s still that reaction of that suppression because China has always felt that they were the center of the world. China, for thousands of years of culture, they were. So is that arrogance also being slapped down, pushed down?
Malcom Clarke: And now they were, they were humiliated and they, and it was a national tragedy and it was a national humiliation. They’re not going to forget it. They’re not, nor should they.
Pearl Lam: And then I think now, now is, they are just coming out because it’s like a continuation. It’s not changing even. Okay, we have a communist country, but it doesn’t forget what has gone through the 100, 200 years
Malcom Clarke: But I think in terms, it is a communist country, I guess it’s a socialist country.
Pearl Lam: It is a social, it’s more than a communist country.
Malcom Clarke: And the moment you, in a sense, they’re never going, going to not call it a communist country because that’s a.
Pearl Lam: Foundational article in the name of communist.
Malcom Clarke: But in the west, the moment you say something is communist, people think of gulags, they think of the Soviet Union in 1937. They think of Stalinism, they think of all that unpleasant stuff that happened for decades in the Soviet Union. And that’s a kind of idea fix for people in the west. They cannot get over it. And in fact, this, I mean, people were oppressed and they were unhappy and they were thwarted in their ambitions. They had no dreams. China’s different. People now have dreams, of course, because.
Pearl Lam: All the students who study abroad, they all go back China to find opportunities because.
Malcom Clarke: That’s kind of the top tier. That’s the super smart kids who get an opportunity to go abroad. You don’t have to go abroad in China anymore.
Pearl Lam: They have fantastic, yes, they have a lot of opportunities.
Malcom Clarke: One of the films that I made.
Pearl Lam: Oh, I love the film about the truck driver. That was a fantastic film, I think. I mean, the audience, what is the name of that film?
Malcom Clarke: That film is called Drive Like a Girl.
Pearl Lam: Drive Like a Girl. A tiny, tiny, tiny girl, girl, girl who was an abusive marriage and then start making her independent life by being a lorry driver.
Malcom Clarke: You know, if you remember great, great movie, Mao Tse Tung, who is still revered in China, he was the one who said women hold up half of the sky. Half the sky. And I think what is starting to happen is not at the top tier of chinese society, but at the bottom tier. I think one of the things that Xi Jinping got absolutely right was there were 150, maybe 200 million critically impoverished people in China. If you could liberate that energy, if you could empower them by giving them an education, getting them out of those horrible surf, land based kind of. I mean, kind of agricultural based economies. If you could just use what’s between their heads, you can turbocharge the Chinese economy, and they can live a much better life.
Pearl Lam: Malcolm, last time when I talked to you, you have this plan by having a fund, and this fund will be. Will be for you to make movies about China and about the human level about China, about people, like, drive, like. And then how does human level about the real people in China?
Malcom Clarke: Well, I think. I mean, there’s a. You have to look at China developmentally. It is still because of the Cultural Revolution and the revolution before the Cultural Revolution upon which China was built, the political revolution, movies were very much secondary. They were not important. People had to eat. They had to work. They had to put food on the table. Movies are very much a product of a higher economic standing. Again, it’s like poodles. You only go to the movies if you have the money to go to a movie. And the Chinese didn’t, but slowly, slowly have developed a film industry, because like everyone anywhere in the world, the Chinese like to laugh, they like to cry, they like to be entertained. And a movie is still the cheapest, you know, 2 hours. Exactly. Everyone can afford it. It’s not expensive compared to going out to a restaurant and feeding, you know, your girlfriend. It’s a cheap date. And it’s very. It gives you. It gives you a moment of kind of respite in your life, a safe place to sit and just relax and be entertained. So China has done that. And there are some very talented filmmakers in China, but at the same time, they’re not at the same level as western filmmakers yet. The stories that they tell are to some extent derivative of western, western films made in western styles. And there’s a lot of genre films being made, which is fine because people will watch them, but they never really explore what that society is about, and that society is extraordinary. So what we want to try and do is to put a little bit of money together to make films that will explain. Not apologize, but explain what China is, who the chinese people are. Literally, I’m talking about love stories, thrillers. I’m not talking about fancy, Highfalutin documentary films. All I want to do is I want to be able to put a human face on China and the Chinese so that people overseas, they can see that the chinese people are not any different. I mean, and that, you know, and I don’t want to sound Pollyanna ish about this. We were all the same. Sounds like Kumbaya, you know, but it’s not. It’s actually, people demonize the Chinese. They think they are dishonest. They are intellectual property thieves. They are all manner of kind of sins that are put at the China’s door. And actually, when you’re there and you meet them and you see them and you see what they have achieved, how hard they’ve worked, how much they’ve sacrificed to get where they are, really, all I’m saying is I am probably more sensitive to the issue of propaganda and being, I mean, just because I’ve been accused of this so often, because I do live in China, but I think the Chinese are not doing a good job of telling their own story. And it shouldn’t fall to an aging british filmmaker to be doing this. China can do a lot better job. So if I have a criticism, it’s like I’d like to see them liberating their storytellers, their filmmakers. They’re novelists. Anyone who can tell the world a better and more nuanced view of their country and their society, I think would be doing the entire country a huge favor.
Pearl Lam: On this note, thank you.
Malcom Clarke: My pleasure.
Pearl Lam: Thank you, Malcolm. And, Malcolm, I’m waiting for to watch your film and your new film, never seen. I can’t imagine you not doing documentary, but thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for having me and goodbye.
