Keep on rollin'

Singapore's film industry has its fair share of colourful characters, and none more so than Tony Yeow. A producer, writer, director, occasional actor and veteran of television and commercials, Yeow was born in 1938, around the same time as the Shaw Brothers set up their film studio in Jalan Ampas – thus his career spans the history of filmmaking in Singapore, from its beginnings post independence up to the present day. 'I'm a has-been that never was,' he's fond of saying, and it's true that Yeow has been an outsider, hustling to get projects off the ground, facing indifference, censorship and critical hostility along the way.

He's also a survivor, and recalls several close brushes with death during his WWII-era childhood in Chinatown – one bad fall left him with two broken arms – which he credits to 'somebody upstairs taking a liking to me.'As a boy, Yeow often slipped off alone to the cinema, soaking up martial arts and horror flicks. 'I enjoyed it,' he says now, 'but I never thought I'd end up as a film producer.' Instead he prematurely became the breadwinner for his family, first as a teacher. He then stumbled into radio broadcasting, largely on the strength of his still-resonant, crystal-clear voice, a tool he'd deliberately cultivated to imitate colonial-era English news announcers. He sidestepped into television, where he was promoted to producer and presenter, and was in the studio in 1965 when Lee Kuan Yew tearfully told the nation of Singapore's secession from Malaysia.

Peter Chong in Ring of Fury

His first film, Ring of Fury (read the review by A Nutshell Review) came in the aftermath of a year working in TV in Hong Kong. 'They had colour, Singapore was still in black and white,' he recalls. Yeow had met Bruce Lee, who was heavily into disco. 'He was always dancing. He broached the idea of doing a musical with me. Unfortunately a year later he died.' Inspired by Lee, Yeow created Singapore's first (and so far only) martial arts action film, producing, storylining and co-directing a low-budget but very stylish tale of a humble noodle-seller – played by Peter Chong, a real-life karate master – who battles against gangsters led by a man in a metal mask. Aside from showing many parts of Singapore in 1973 that no longer exist, the film has some memorably hard-hitting combat scenes. 'We didn't choreograph those,' Yeow explains. 'I told them where to run, and we just turned on the camera and they fought.'

The film was banned for its portrayal of crime at a time when social policies were being implemented to aggressively 'clean up' the city-state. After a disaster like that, most people would bow out, but Yeow found himself 'bitten by the passion'. His second film, a comedy about fishermen-out-of-water called Two Nuts, did little to reverse the decline of Singapore's film industry in the late '70s, and his production company Impact, turned to commercials, documentaries and Government campaign films (such as Stop at Two, intended to curb overpopulation). During this period, Yeow joined the crew of Peter Bogdanovich's infamous Saint Jack, the Hollywood film secretly shot in Singapore, and also took acting roles, including a part in the Australian mini-series Tanamera: Lion of Singapore (1989). But the 'impossible dream' hadn't disappeared.

Tony Yeow talks to Ben Slater

'Once you start on one film, it somehow leads to another,' Yeow says, and he kept toying with various ideas, inadvertently kickstarting the 'revival' of Singapore's film industry with Medium Rare in 1991. Envisioned as a documentary-style account of the Toa Payoh murderer Adrian Lim, it drifted radically from this concept and is now largely seen as a terrible, albeit historically significant, flop. Yeow walked off the set on the first day of shooting and never returned. 'Medium Rare could never be well done,' laughs the director (he has a pun like this for all his films). Ironically its failure did pave the way for more successful local films by directors like Eric Khoo and Jack Neo, and that in turn gave Yeow the chance to produce Tiger's Whip (1998) (read the review by A Nutshell Review) , a comedy about an American looking for the titular Viagra substitute. It was intended as a 'spiritual film', but ended up being 'whipped pillar to post'. Yeow remembers the lead actor, an American, was 'a zombie, but very good-looking.'

'I had one more joust at the windmill,' says the director of his virtually forgotten Malaysian action-comedy The Deadly Disciple (2001), but he's still going strong. After our interview he's driving to town to 'meet a friend who has an idea for a film,' and he has drawers full of screenplays: everything from knockabout comedies to horror flicks and his period epic Little Red Star, about The Long March in China. If you meet Yeow for even a short while, he's likely to suggest you read one of them.

'I never made any good films,' Yeow muses. For a moment he seems to regret his lifelong involvement in an industry that hasn't always been kind to him, but has certainly made for an interesting career. 'What else can I do? There's no place to go.' Then he's off again, enthusiastically discussing other new projects. As he says of his much-cherished Little Red Star: 'It's just a dream.'