Stephen Tung Wai

He began as a stuntman at sixteen, which in 1970s Hong Kong meant being thrown off things for a living. Stephen Tung Wai has been inside the industry ever since, and his credits read like a core sample of the whole business: bit parts as a teenager, choreography through the boom years, then directing, then the elder statesman explaining how any of it was survivable.

The early rows are the apprenticeship. He is an uncredited fighter in Executioners from Shaolin, a captured pirate archer in The Valiant Ones, nameless in Freedom Strikes a Blow, and he is somewhere in Enter the Dragon, the film through which most careers of his generation touched the outside world exactly once.

What he became is one of the defining action choreographers of Hong Kong cinema, a repeat winner of the Hong Kong Film Award in that category, and a collaborator of John Woo, Tsui Hark and Wong Kar-wai across films as unlike each other as Hard Boiled, The Blade and 2046. In Hard Boiled he is also on screen, as Little Ko. Choreography of that era was authorship: the fight is where the story happens, and the man designing it is doing more than the director's stunts.

He directed too, mostly action pictures where the choreography is the argument: Magic Cop, Contract Killer, Fox Hunter. Lately he has become a witness, appearing in the documentary Kung Fu Stuntmen and in the 2024 film Stuntman as Lee Sam, records of a profession that broke a great many bodies and has largely gone.