Alan Chui Chung-San 徐忠信
Alan Chui Chung-San trained in Peking opera, appeared as a boy in a King Hu film, and worked for many years in Hong Kong cinema as a stuntman and action choreographer. For Nepal Affair he shared a Hong Kong Film Award with his colleagues. After a serious knee injury, Chui performed fewer stunts himself but continued to appear on screen as martial arts masters and criminals.
Around the age of eight, Alan Chui began studying Peking opera and martial arts. He trained at the Eastern Drama School of Tang Ti. Chui later said he belonged to the northern school, which placed great emphasis on acrobatics. Among the students of that same school, he named action choreographer Tony Ching and stuntman Mars. Chui began appearing in films as a child. He recalled that in King Hu's film Come Drink with Me (1966), he played a beggar boy.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Chui worked at Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest. He performed stunts, took small roles and eventually began choreographing fights himself. In the 1980s, he said, there was so much work that he sometimes had to turn jobs down. Different films could be shooting at the same time. In 1984 he signed a contract with TVB. After getting married, he needed a steadier income. He had met his wife, a Taiwanese student, on a shoot on a university campus. After the wedding she moved to Hong Kong. They had a son and a daughter.
Many years later, Chui recounted in an interview an incident on the set of Night Orchid (1982), where he was choreographing the fights. Some dry ice accidentally landed on Brigitte Lin, and she sharply scolded an elderly crew member. Chui stood up for him and, by his own account, behaved rudely, then deliberately demanded another take. In the interview he admitted he had been wrong and apologized to Lin. Soon afterward, two of his works were recognized at the Hong Kong Film Awards. In 1987, Chui, together with Tony Ching, Phillip Kwok and Lau Chi-Ho, received an award for action choreography on Nepal Affair (1986). A year later he and his colleagues were again nominated in that category for A Chinese Ghost Story (1987).
In 1989, Chui doubled for Adam Cheng. He jumped from the height of a second floor and seriously injured his knee. Recovery took many months, but the familiar movements no longer came easily to him. Chui said that after that he focused on action choreography. He could now do more behind the camera than by performing stunts himself. In the mid-1990s he also took up directing. He worked on Tough Beauty and the Sloppy Slop (1995), and in 2000 he directed Bloody Secret.
He never stopped acting, though. In the 1990s Chui appeared in Last Hero in China (1993), and later worked with Johnnie To on Breaking News (2004) and Election 2 (2006). On television he was sometimes given brief bit parts, and he was surprised that viewers managed to remember him. Colleagues also knew him as an action choreographer. Gordon Lam recalled how one of the series they worked on grew from fifteen episodes to thirty-five. Chui had to come up with far more fights than he had initially expected.
In a 2020 interview, Chui said he already had a grandson and a granddaughter. He had no intention of teaching them kung fu. Let them go to school first, said the man who himself had been preparing to take the stage since the age of eight. Chui died on November 2, 2022. At the funeral, his coffin was carried by colleagues, including Tony Ching and Gordon Lam. Three years later, Chui's daughter publicly disputed Tenky Tin's account of the circumstances of her father's death. According to her, he spoke of what happened as an eyewitness, though he had not known her father closely. Tin responded that he respected the family and would not comment on her words.
