“I have a deep love of Hong Kong. And I made this movie for Hong Kong,” says its screenwriter-star. “I was born and lived there until I was 18. Then I would go back every year for months on end, just because I liked living there.
Mann also brushes off his martial arts skills as “just basic stuff”, saying he practises his wushu when he must.
But it is a whole other type of fall Mann takes in The Modelizer.
As heir to a property development fortune, he is feckless, hedonistic charmer Shawn Koo, whose job, apparently, is to wear the latest foreign model on his arm. That is, until he meets one who commandeers his frivolous heart and threatens to change his egocentric ways.
Byron Mann, then, is avowedly not Shawn Koo. So where did the idea for the film come from?
“The director of photography went to Hong Kong – Christmas 2018 – came back to LA and said, ‘Hey, I love Hong Kong, I want to shoot a movie there with you.’ I said, ‘Great! Why don’t you send me a script?’
“‘I don’t have a script, I don’t even have a story,’ he said. ‘I just want to shoot there.’
“Then he asked me if I had a story. I said I would think about it, but that I didn’t want to do the usual kung fu, martial arts, cops and robbers.
“I said, ‘I do know one guy who told me he dates a different foreign model every week. Let me talk to him.’
“It’s an outrageous world unto itself. And I found it so interesting that this was happening on Chinese soil.”
“Most of the film is loosely based on things that have happened,” he adds. “The guy is one of several characters I came across who make up Shawn Koo. So when I got around to playing Shawn, I knew exactly who he was.”
Ironically, thanks to distributors’ continuing logistical headaches after the coronavirus pandemic, The Modelizer, shot entirely on location, is still awaiting a general release in Hong Kong, although it can be watched via Apple TV and Google Play Movies.
Nevertheless, Mann is happy he has managed “to present [another] side of Hong Kong to the world”, meaning its cosmopolitanism.
“Hong Kong movies, you think of kung fu films, and that’s great – I’ve acted in them,” he says. “But as we were making it, I realised that one of the messages of this film is that Hong Kong is not just Chinese people: it’s English, Serbians, Americans, Russians, some living there for 30 years.
“What about their stories?”
