ABOUT THE PRODUCTION

When Tzi Ma, the Chinese American actor who starred opposite Michael Caine in The Quiet American and Tom Hanks in The Ladykillers, was first sent the Dragon Boys script, the title page was missing. He read Part One, marvelling at the Asian Canadian writer who must have created it. When he found out the writer was in fact non-Asian Canadian Ian Weir, he was very surprised. The actor and writer had a lengthy telephone discussion, during which the actor offered his insights into the character, even though he had not yet been offered the part.

“I wanted the project to work, whether I was involved or not,” says Ma. The story in Dragon Boys reminded him of his experiences in New York City in the 1970’s, even though it was set in present-day Vancouver. “It rang very true for me,” he says. He’d been a social worker in Chinatown and understood how kids became involved in gangs. “I felt it was the only script that had ever talked about how this affects the victims and families. Normally, in such stories, they only talk about the gangs themselves. There is seldom an opportunity to look into the minds and hearts of the people who are affected. This was telling the other side.”

The only non-Canadian member of the cast, Ma is incredibly passionate about the project. He has strong opinions on how Western media portrays Asian North Americans. “We’re perpetual foreigners, always seen as that, no matter how many generations we’ve been here. We always have the opportunity to play Asians, but very seldom do we get a chance to play Asian Americans – or Canadians.”

Ma feels that Dragon Boys is a seminal project because “it represents us well, giving us three dimensionality and it examines the depth of complexity of who we are as human beings.”

With scads of research, a small army of cultural advisors and an amazing cast of Asian Canadian movie stars, writer Ian Weir and his fellow executive producer Michael Chechik set out to make the most ambitious television project ever about Asian North Americans.

Several years ago, Weir’s fascination with organized crime on the West Coast led him to research Asian organized crime. He read everything he could by Chinese Canadians and Americans. “Very quickly, it became a story about the culture, about human beings rather than crime per se,” he says. “Crime was a way in. Once immersed in that, questions of culture took over.” Weir read many novels by Chinese Canadian writers and thus began the lengthy, two-year process of immersing himself in another culture.

As the story of Dragon Boys came together, Weir worked intensively with two cultural consultants, historian and writer Jim Wong-Chu and journalist/filmmaker Colleen Leung. Also crucial to the development of the miniseries was Corporal David Au, an actual member of the Richmond RCMP Anti-Gang Squad. Au’s work with the production began early on and he worked closely with Byron Mann and the actors playing his fellow officers. “David ensured that the gang/crime and police elements were timely and realistic, and he also provided very valuable cultural feedback,” says Weir.
The production also worked with an array of Cantonese and Cambodian translators. The work of Cantonese translator and co-producer Hoi Bing Mo was key in pre-production as well as during principal photography. She assisted with Cantonese dialogue on set and her presence was required by the producers for many of their overseas calls to Hong Kong. “She was instrumental in some of those negotiations,” Chechik recalls.

The key characters were also developed in close consultation with the actors portraying them, bringing their reality and perspective to the story. Weir spent many hours with Ma and Byron Mann, discussing their characters, backgrounds, opinions and experiences.

“Crime drama works well on television,” says Weir. “It’s simply friendly to the medium. It gives you high stakes and characters in a crucible, having to make decisions, which is when character is revealed. So it’s a fertile backdrop against which to set a human story.”

Weir says Dragon Boys is an intensely personal story for him. “I’ve always been fascinated by questions of self definition. I think we all are. The themes are universal. And as I went along and the characters began emerging, I simply fell in love with them. And once you’ve fallen in love with the characters, you need to tell their story.”

Ian Weir was thrilled with Jerry Ciccoritti’s response to Dragon Boys. “I think he’s the best director in Canada and he was first on our wish list. He responded the same way I did,” Weir says. “He talked very eloquently about how he himself was the child of immigrants. He saw the themes of generational conflict within families, and the defining issues of the child being different from the parents. He was responding to all those things, exactly what I saw as the heart and soul of the script.

“Jerry said, ‘The issue isn’t about being able to deliver a good thriller, it’s what’s the human truth that makes the human story compelling.’ Once I heard him say that, I knew he was perfect. Not merely the best, he also saw the project from the best possible angle.”

For his part, Ciccoritti admits he jumped at the chance to get involved. The child of Italian immigrants, he knew the immigrant experience in Canada. “It’s a fundamental part of my makeup. Almost everything I do, deals with these issues to a greater or lesser degree: the question of identity. There’s a split between here and there, and because of the split, there’s a lack of healing. And until they’re healed, they belong to neither place.”

Ciccoritti says it’s not a Chinese story, it’s a Canadian story. “And there are three cultures in every immigrant situation: the foreign, the landed and the in-between. Dragon Boys is the in-between culture.”

When executive producers Ian Weir and Michael Chechik set out to cast Dragon Boys, they never dreamed they’d end up with a slate of international stars. “The cast is well beyond anything we dared to hope for when we started this process,” says Chechik.

Having cast several projects in Vancouver, they knew of a number of great actors, but wondered how deep the Asian Canadian talent pool was in Vancouver and Toronto. “Our first few casting sessions were punctuated by the sounds of jaws bouncing off tables,” enthuses Weir. “The Asian Canadian acting pool has grown incredibly rich and deep in Vancouver. We could have easily cast the show four times over with tremendous people.”

Television productions don’t usually have access to many people on the level of feature stars. So when Byron Mann’s name came across their desk the executive producers were elated. “He’s a movie star,” says Weir. “It had never occurred to me that someone like him would want to do this.”

Mann loved the script. “It had a lot of heart and a heartbeat, and it didn’t shy away from being realistic,” he says. Mann stars as Tommy Jiang, a detective on the Richmond RCMP Anti-Gang Squad. While Mann feels that many Asians in North American stories are portrayed simplistically or one-dimensionally, he found the characters in Dragon Boys were “portrayed more realistically and sophisticatedly.”

And then Mann’s agent, Andrew Ooi, asked the producers if they would consider Tzi Ma for the role of Henry, the entrepreneur and family man. Weir laughed, sure the star would not accept a role that wasn’t the lead. But the writer and the actor connected via a three-hour telephone conversation, during which Ma offered his perspective on the script and character.

During that fateful phone call, the character and storyline of Henry Wah was reshaped. Weir had not yet written Part Two and with Ma’s input, a major story line for the second half began to emerge.

Needless to say, Ma got the role, and he was delighted to get the part. “I know where the script is coming from: a place that is a lot deeper than someone writing a script per se. There’s a connection, love and compassion about what he’s written.”

Talent agent and co-producer Andrew Ooi was instrumental in helping cast the mini-series. Chechik recalls searching for the actor to play the role of gangster kingpin Willie the Duck. “I told Andrew, ‘What we need is an Asian “Joe Pesci.”’ Andrew said, ‘You want Eric Tsang. Give me half an hour.’” One of the most celebrated stars in Asia, Tsang has appeared in 150 movies, including the Hong Kong box-office sensation Infernal Affairs. Chechik says, “Andrew called back promptly with fantastic news. He said Eric was available and added, ‘Guess what? He’s Canadian!’”

From there, the casting process snowballed. Tsang’s son, hot newcomer Derek Tsang, was also interested, and he was cast as gang member Fox Boy. And his best friend, film star and pop music sensation Lawrence Chou, came on board to star as the ambitious Movie Star. While the Tsangs and Chou all live in Hong Kong, they are Canadian citizens. Both Chou and Derek Tsang attended high school in Vancouver. In fact, with the exception of American Tzi Ma, the entire, star-studded cast of Dragon Boys is Canadian.

“The whole casting process was a wonderful revelation,” says Weir. “The sheer number of wonderful actors we have in Vancouver in the Asian Canadian community. And we have a cast full of international movie stars, which doesn’t happen in Canadian projects.”

Canadian actress and Asian star, Steph Song was recently voted the "#1 Sexiest in the World" by readers of FHM Singapore magazine. In Dragon Boys, Song stars as Chavy Pan, a beautiful young woman who buys her way, illegally, to Canada only to have her dreams of becoming a model shattered by having to work as a prostitute to pay off her debt. While Song was already fluent in English, Hokkien and Spanish, she added a fourth language to her repertoire, learning Cambodian to play the part of Chavy.

“I love my cast,” says director Jerry Ciccoritti. “There’s a lot of kismet. Individually, they’re all great, but when an entire cast coalesces they all vibrate on the same tone, they all fit, and that’s what makes a great movie.”

Ian Weir equates being a dramatist with digging a mine shaft. “You create the shaft for the actor to go into, but it’s the actor who, working with the director, finds the gold.”

Ian Weir discusses the phenomenon of Vancouver’s recent emergence as a world-class Pacific Rim city “as opposed to the essentially small town it was 25 years ago. It was a small, Anglo post-colonial outpost. And more than any other, it’s the Chinese culture which has reshaped that in extraordinarily positive ways. And if you’re looking to tell a story about the West Coast today, you need to look at Chinese culture as an absolutely dominant part of that story because it’s had such a big impact on shaping the community we live in.”

While 10 per cent of the population of British Columbia is Chinese Canadian, Chinese is the mother tongue of 15 per cent of the people living in the Lower Mainland, the area in and around Vancouver. And 60 per cent of the population of Richmond, the large suburb south of Vancouver where Dragon Boys is set, is Chinese Canadian.
Nonetheless, “It’s very rare for Asian Canadian actors to play roles in which we see our private lives,” says Jean Yoon, who plays massage parlour doyenne Belinda Lok. She says that in TV and films, she usually plays “normal, assimilated Asian Canadians: reporters, doctors, nurses, there to advance the plot. It’s unusual to actually be part of the plot, with a beginning, middle and end to my story. It’s very satisfying.”

Weir says he was very heartened to hear from his cast of Chinese Canadian actors that they were thrilled by the project. “For once, it was a project in which all the leads are Asian Canadian, with three dimensional characters with full and compelling lives. As artists, they were being given a chance to do what they as artists do best, which is create vibrant, powerful, strong characters, as opposed to being trapped into the stereotypical secondary and tertiary roles traditionally offered.”

Byron Mann enjoyed his collaboration with Weir. “Ian was open to ideas and suggestions. And he wasn’t afraid to go dark and tell the truth.”

Mann also enjoyed working with Ciccoritti. “Jerry’s very intense and adheres to a high level of creativity and he encourages you to be on that level, too. It’s a very high level of performance and you feel kind of safe. He understands the immigrant experience and family. He understands what these people are going through and what their story’s about.”

Jean Yoon agrees, and was especially impressed by Ciccoritti’s wanting to get together during pre-production. “I had never had a director want to meet before hand to discuss the role and that makes a huge difference. We’re all doing better work than we’re used to doing,” she laughs.


For 40 days, from October through December 2005, Dragon Boys filmed on location in the City of Langley, 40 minutes southeast of Vancouver.

“Dragon Boys is about family and community, but mostly, it’s about love,” says Tzi Ma. “It’s a dangerous script. It has so many characters that are so good and so rewarding to play. I don’t know when the actors will get another chance to play such interesting characters again.”

Dragon Boys is produced by Anchor Point Pictures Inc. with the participation of the Canadian Television Fund, created by the Government of Canada and the Canadian cable industry; Telefilm Canada: Equity Investment Program; and CTF: License Fee Program; in association with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation; with the participation of the Province of British Columbia Film Incentive BC; Canadian Film or Video Production Tax Credit; the CanWest Western Independent Producers Fund; and the COGECO Program Development Fund. Dragon Boys is produced in association with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.