Genesis of 'Green Dragons'

Making the jump to the American film market from abroad is a difficult feat accomplished by only a few great directors, notably Alfred Hitchcock and Guillermo del Toro. In “Revenge of the Green Dragons,” Andrew Lau and fellow director Andrew Loo are trying to replicate the feat. Known best in this country for crime thriller “Infernal Affairs,” basis for the Oscar-winning Scorsese film “The Departed,” Lau’s new enterprise seeks to strike a balance between the fast-paced Hong Kong crime films that are his trademark and the American tradition of the gangster film.

Based on Fredric Dannen’s 1992 New Yorker article of the same name, “Revenge of the Green Dragons” follows the involvement of two immigrant brothers, Sonny (Justin Chon) and Steven (Kevin Wu, better known as YouTube personality KevJumba), in the rise of a crime empire in New York’s Flushing Chinatown. Paul Wong (Harry Shum, Jr.), head of the Green Dragons gang, is falsifying immigration papers for Chinese aliens to grow his influence in Flushing, but his increasingly aggressive and ruthless maneuvering within his organization makes Sonny begin to question his loyalties.

“Revenge” is the most high-profile product of a collaboration between Lau and Loo that goes back more than 15 years. “We met socially back in the late nineties—’96, ’97. I was producing a film in Hong Kong, and my wife was producing his film ‘Storm Riders,’ so we sort of met then and continued to work together on smaller things,” Loo said. “In 2005, we did a film called ‘The Flock’ [Lau’s first English-language film]…. When we were finished, then we said, ‘Hey, this is a fun thing—we have compatible thing going here,’ so we decided to start our own company and focus on English-language co-production type of projects.” “Revenge” is the first movie to come out of this arrangement. The directors’ skills were very complementary. “His background is in producing and writing, but me, I don’t like meetings!” Lau said. “I’m on the set. I handle the technical side of things.”

The subject of “Revenge” was especially appealing to the directors. “Andrew’s done his share of gangster films…. Just doing a gangster film isn’t enough to get the juices flowing,” Loo said. “When we read the original article it was based on, back in ’92, it was just a fascinating investigative report on a real gang. It’s all real events, real characters, all true. For us, we were immediately struck not only by the crime aspect of it, but it also happened at a very significant time in the history of [immigrants’] integration in the United States…. For us, it was really an interesting story, not just about crime, which has its appeal but was really for us a story, an American story, about a part of Asians’ history here, who really haven’t had their story told.”

Faithfulness to the news story was one of the directors’ primary goals. “We made a commitment to the original writer, as well as to ourselves, to be as truthful to what actually happened and to the environment in which the Green Dragons existed [as possible],” said Loo. This faithfulness is what motivated them to shoot in New York in spite of the relatively large expense, rather than seeking a cheaper filming locale like Toronto or Chicago. “For us, this wasn’t just an American story or an Asian story—this was a New York story,” Loo said. In spite of the specificity of the plot, the directors still feel that it is a story with broad appeal. “This was a much more universal story,” Loo said. “Finding a better path to walk—it’s something that’s not specific to race or gender or nationality.”

This layering of significance—and the ambivalence that arises from it—is at the heart of “Revenge,” Lau said. “The American dream—everyone comes here from everywhere, and maybe, at the end, it’s a bad dream.” Hopefully, Lau’s American dream will end well. “Revenge of the Green Dragons” is seeing limited release throughout the United States on Oct. 24.

— Crimson staff writer Jude D. Russo can be reached at russo@college.harvard.edu.