Stephen Chow and Wu Mengda's fate began in Hong Kong Wireless, when Wu Mengda graduated from the third training class of Wireless, and Stephen Chow graduated from the eleventh training class of Wireless, but the experience of the two in Wireless was full of twists and turns.
Soon after Wu Mengda graduated, he starred in the 1979 wireless highlight "Chu Liuxiang" as the second male Hu Tiehua, and became famous with this role. But later, Wu Mengda was self-aggrandized, contaminated with the vice of wine-colored wealth, and was hidden by wireless, and he was on the verge of bankruptcy.
After graduating from the training class, Stephen Chow shuttled through various crews, whether it was villager A in the 82 version of "Su Qier", or Song Bing B in the 83 version of "The Legend of the Condor Heroes", he has been doing "curry coffee" (carefree, that is, running tricks), or being the host of the children's program "403 Shuttle". It wasn't until 1987 that the wireless major drama "The Journey of Life" had a relatively large number of roles.
The real collaboration between Stephen Chow and Wu Mengda is the 1989 martial arts drama "Heroes of the World", which is Stephen Chow's first attempt at his "nonsensical" style. Through this play, the two have built trust and gradually become a group of best partners.
At that time, many actors who filmed dramas in Hong Kong TVB aimed to enter the big screen from TV stations. Stephen Chow and Wu Mengda are no exception.
When they were filming wireless dramas, they actually got the opportunity to shoot movies separately. Stephen Chow was appreciated by Li Xiuxian, playing a prodigal little brother in the movie "Thunderbolt Pioneer", and won the Best Supporting Actor Award at the 25th Taiwan Film Golden Horse Awards for his outstanding performance, and was also nominated for Best Supporting Actor and Best Newcomer at the Hong Kong Film Awards. Wu Mengda has played supporting roles in many movies, such as "The Working Emperor", "The Sequel to the True Colors of Heroes", "God of Gamblers" and so on. The two of them are fighting on their own, and it is not enough for them to occupy a place in the film industry. And the success of "Heroes of the World" and "He Comes from Jianghu" has created a glimmer of opportunity for them to merge in movies.
In 1990, "The Saint of Gambling" appeared.
Just the year before, the movie "God of Gamblers" directed by Wang Jing and starring Chow Yun-fat, Andy Lau, Wang Zuxian and others became an instant hit, refreshing the box office record of Hong Kong's Christmas stalls that year, and opening the era of "gambling films" in Hong Kong films. Only 8 months later, directors Yuan Kui and Liu Zhenwei followed the trend of playing the edge ball of the previous work, and put the concept of "God of Gamblers" on the screen again. They played a serious gambling movie with a variety of tricks, broke the seriousness with a nonsensical structure, and showed off their personality with an uninhibited attitude, which was eye-catching.
It is said that the original inspiration for "The Saint of Gambling" was ** Hong Kong veteran filmmaker Wu Siyuan, who in a chat with Yuan Kui, one of the directors of the film, said the idea of a person with special functions from the mainland to Hong Kong to find relatives, and the other director of the film, Liu Zhenwei, only spent five hours to write the script outline and the scene.
Now that the script is available, it has become a difficult problem to find who will play the leading role.
The film's distributor, Golden Harvest, wanted to find Tony Leung to play the protagonist Zuo Songxing, because Tony Leung was red and purple at that time, and had starred in many TV series such as "The Story of Deer and Ding", "Heaven and Dragon Slayer", and Andy Lau, Huang Rihua and others were known as the Wireless Five Tigers, which was guaranteed at the box office.
But director Liu Zhenwei insisted on using Stephen Chow, who was not as famous as Tony Leung at the time, and the latter's nonsensical performance was deeply favored by Liu Zhenwei. In addition, this film is a comedy movie, so it is natural to think of his best partner Wu Mengda in the series, so the two got together again in the movie, from father and son on the TV screen to uncle and nephew on the movie screen.
From the wonderful combination of one singing and one harmony on the TV station, to the successful double reed cooperation on the big screen, Stephen Chow and Wu Mengda are definitely mutually successful. They are not only simple performance partners, but also partners who learn from and inspire each other creatively.
According to Wu Siyuan, the producer of "The Saint of Gambling", almost all the funny scenes in the movie were designed and conceived by Zhou and Wu together. For example, in the play, Wu Mengda would go crazy inexplicably when he heard Stephen Chow call him "Third Uncle", which Wu Mengda came up with, and he also gave him a made-up scientific name for this: "congenital disorder of control".
Director Lau Chun-wai completed the filming in just 37 days, and soon the fast-paced, low-budget film landed in Hong Kong theaters.
After the release, Stephen Chow and Wu Mengda were nervous, not knowing if their nonsensical performance style could impress the audience, so they went to the theater together to peek at the audience reaction at the midnight show.
"The Saint of Gambling" is the first film in the history of Hong Kong cinema to break through the box office of 40 million, reaching 41.32 million Hong Kong dollars, which established the status of Stephen Chow and Wu Mengda in the Hong Kong film industry in one fell swoop. Stephen Chow and Ng Mengda were nominated for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor at the 10th Hong Kong Film Awards, respectively. Since then, Stephen Chow has also changed from a "star boy" to a "star master" in the mouth of everyone, and he and Wu Mengda have also started a ten-year cooperation.
Another interesting thing is that Wang Jing's "God of Gamblers" just became the box office champion the year before, and I don't want to be defeated by Liu Zhenwei's follow-up work after only a few months. The red-eyed Wang Jing spared no expense to poach Stephen Chow and Wu Mengda, and at the end of the same year, launched the sequel "Gambler" to "The Saint of Gambling" with Andy Lau, and once again received 40.32 million Hong Kong dollars, making Wang Jing earn a lot of money; And the protagonist he discovered was poached by his peers, which also made Liu Zhenwei suffer a dumb loss.