Who is Ng See-yuen, the visionary super-producer who launched many Hong Kong film careers?

Ng launched Jackie Chan’s career with kung fu comedies, helped break the grip of film studios, and championed young directors like Tsui Hark

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Ng See-yuen, then-chairman of the Hong Kong Film Awards Association, pictured in 1995. From launching Jackie Chan’s career with kung fu comedies to helping end big studios’ stranglehold on filmmaking, Ng has had a huge influence on Hong Kong cinema. Photo: SCMP

Richard James Havis

Published: 11:15am, 28 Jul 2024

Since he began his career in the 1960s, Ng See-yuen has contributed so much to the Hong Kong film industry.

Although not well known outside Hong Kong today, Ng has long been revered at home. “Ng is a daring genius of Hong Kong cinema,” the Hong Kong Film Archive noted in 2017.

As a director, Ng, now 80, made important films such as Anti-Corruption (1975), which, along with Leong Po-chih’s 1976 classic Jumping Ash, popularised a new style of more realistic crime film.

As a producer, a role to which Ng mainly devoted himself in the 1980s, he launched the kung fu comedy wave with Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow and Drunken Master (both 1978), both box office smash hits.

Jackie Chan in a still from Drunken Master (1978), a kung fu comedy that helped launch the actor’s career. Photo: Golden Harvest

The two films turned Jackie Chan (who was then languishing as a Bruce Lee clone in veteran director Lo Wei’s company) into a major star, and put Yuen Woo-ping – whose martial arts choreography on The Bloody Fists (1972), Ng’s first hit as a director, he had championed – in the spotlight as a martial arts film director.

Ng is a cosmopolitan filmmaker who keeps up to date with foreign releases, and he got the idea for Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow at a film festival.