How To Beat A Bully

Derek Tsang’s controversial thriller Better Days made it all the way to the Oscars, but what the Hong Kong director really won was the respect of his critics

- Eric Wilson

Derek Tsang was lying on his sofa at home after a long day on March 15 when his phone started lighting up with messages from friends who were congratulating him, just at the moment it was announced he had become the first native Hong Kong director to be nominated for best international feature at the Academy Awards.

“I knew it was going to be that day, but I didn’t know there was a live broadcast,” Tsang says, and although he was hopeful for a nod for his teenage film noir Better Days, which handily swept the Hong Kong Film Awards and received multiple international prizes, he was not watching the news very closely. “That’s when it hit me that we were in the final five, and I just became elated, hugging my wife and jumping around and screaming.”

In the highly competitive, overly scrutinised world of the Oscars, they say it is an honour just to be nominated, and in this case, they would be correct. As anyone following that horse race would know, from the moment the awards were announced, it was the Danish drama Another Round, starring Mads Mikkelsen, that would be “hard to beat”, as The New York Times columnist Kyle Buchanan politely assessed, and which would ultimately win the award. Still, Tsang saw the nomination as an opportunity to expand his already considerable mark in cinema well beyond Chinese-speaking audiences. Better Days was a phenomenon in China, grossing US$230 million, and was the highest-grossing film in the world upon its release, driven partly by its mystery thriller plot centred around a bullied high school student, and partly by the popularity of its leads, Zhou Dongyu and the TFBoys superstar Jackson Yee.