Tony Leung names his favourite Tony Leung movies
If you don’t know Tony Leung Chiu-wai by name, you would probably recognise his face. The Hong Kong actor is one of the most prominent international stars from East Asia, and he has appeared in more than 100 movies and television series. He is most known globally for the films he has made with director Wong Kar-wai. Of these, the bewitching masterpiece Chungking Express, the sumptuous romance In the Mood for Love, and the surprisingly soulful martial arts movie The Grandmaster are the most well-known.
Leung is the perfect leading man for Wong. He exudes the integrity and weariness of an old-fashioned hero, while his eyes have gained him a fandom all their own. Somehow, he is able to convey the most minute emotions simply through his gaze. In In the Mood Love, he gives one of the great romantic performances of the past few decades, and the film is practically constructed around his eyes. Playing a husband who falls in love with the wife of another man, he spends most of the movie gazing through windows, across restaurant tables, and into space, his eyes conveying longing and pain with a poignancy that no words could match.
In addition to his films with Wong, Leung has reached global audiences with the crime drama Infernal Affairs, which Martin Scorsese remade as The Departed, and Ang Lee’s controversial 2007 drama Lust, Caution, which features such explicit sex scenes that Leung and his co-star, Tang Wei, were repeatedly asked if they were unsimulated.
Through his collaborations with Wong and other towering figures in East Asian cinema, Leung has risen to international prominence, but it wasn’t until 2021’s Marvel smash Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings that he made a movie in Hollywood. This has allowed him to explore a wide range of roles and genres in contrast with many other international action stars who were given thankless, two-dimensional, racially stereotyped bit roles when they transitioned to Hollywood.
Given his vast and varied filmography, Leung’s fans would be hard-pressed to pick five or even ten favourites, but Leung has been able to do so himself. For the 2022 Busan International Film Festival, the actor was asked to select six of his own movies to be screened in a special showcase entitled ‘In the Mood for Tony Leung’. He spoke to Screen Daily about his choices and explained why one of his favourites could make the list.
“Many films are memorable and important to me,” he said. Three of the films he chose were directed by Wong – In the Mood for Love, 2046, which acted as a quasi-sequel, and Happy Together, a 1997 romance centred on a gay couple visiting Argentina.
“I was looking for a comedy to create a more diverse selection,” he says as an explanation for including the 1993 martial arts film The Eagle Shooting Heroes, saying that he admired its director, Jeffrey Lau, for his comedic chops. Completing the list were two cop thrillers, Infernal Affairs and 1998’s The Longest Nite.
The film that couldn’t make a list due to availability was 1989’s A City Of Sadness, a historical drama directed by Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-Hsien. Leung also said that, for the sake of balancing commercial and arthouse films, he did not include the abstract 1995 film Cyclo but singled it out as another of his personal favourites.
Tony Leung’s favourite films of his career
- A City of Sadness (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 1989)
- The Eagle Shooting Heroes (Jeffrey Lau, 1993)
- Cyclo (Trần Anh Hùng, 1995)
- Happy Together (Wong Kar-wai, 1997)
- The Longest Nite (Tat-Chi Yau and Johnnie To, 1998)
- In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000)
- Infernal Affairs (Wai Keung Lau and Alan Mak, 2002)
- 2046 (Wong Kar-wai, 2004)
