‘Maybe they’ll say I’m hao lian’: Mark Lee on challenging himself after winning first international award for Wonderland

Mark Lee has been playing the funnyman on our screens for decades, but he’s always wanted to expand his scope.

In the drama film Wonderland (formerly known as The Last Letters), the 55-year-old plays single dad Loke who sells his kampung house and moves to a one-room flat in the 1980s so his daughter Eileen (played by Xenia Tan) can study in the United States.

As he is illiterate, his neighbour Ah Tan (Peter Yu) helps him read letters from Eileen and pen his replies. When bad news arrives, Ah Tan decides to keep it a secret from Loke for fear of it affecting his poor health.

It’s Mark’s second collaboration with director Chai Yee Wei, with their first movie together being 2011’s horror-comedy Twisted.

“All along, I’ve wanted to try a different character in a movie,” Mark told AsiaOne in a recent interview. “Of course I did a lot of roles as an ah beng, comedian, even the horror movie we did was not horror, it was comedy.”

For their roles in Wonderland, Mark won Best Actor and Peter, 56, won Best Supporting Actor at the Ho Chi Minh City International Film Festival earlier this month.

Mark admitted that he felt a little stressed about it, because it meant that he’d have to put in “another 100 per cent effort” in his next role “to give the audience a different Mark Lee again and try to make the movie a success”.

“In Singapore, it’s not easy to make a movie, but I always believed that the script is so important,” he added. “You can’t use money to pay the scriptwriter to write a good script.”

He said that, in the future, he’ll be selective when it comes to roles, particularly scripts that can help him “bring the audience a fresh storyline”.

“Maybe some people will say I’m hao lian (a show-off), I’m proud already, get award already,” he added. “Even last time, when I saw actors get international awards and choose their scripts, I would feel like they’re hao lian.”

But now he realises that being discerning about scripts will help him challenge himself and is about giving himself higher expectations.

‘Local talents are able to stand head-to-head with the best in the region’

Wonderland will be released in Singapore on Aug 8 but premiered at the San Diego Asian Film Festival in November last year.

It has also been screened at the Singapore International Film Festival in December and won the Local Jury Award at the Palm Springs International Film Festival this January.

In the same interview, Yee Wei told AsiaOne that going the film festival and international awards route with the film was a matter of timing.

“Typically speaking, I don’t really make films for festivals. If you look at my previous four films, it was only the last one (That Girl in Pinafore) that I had a chance to submit to a festival,” the 47-year-old said.

“And it was because of timing as well, I just submitted whatever was ready and suitable.”

With Wonderland, Yee Wei admitted that he “didn’t really have a strategy” but the film was “organically accepted by American festivals first”.

He said it gives the film a “nice take-off point” for its upcoming release over the National Day long weekend.

“Festivals have given us the opportunity to see how the film would translate to audiences outside Singapore, because we tend to have a fear that Singapore is too small, we need to sell our things internationally,” Yee Wei said.

Though he made the film with local audiences in mind, he said the festival circuit allowed him to see which themes could translate beyond our country.

“It has universal themes that actually can touch people regardless of where they come from, so this has been used as fuel to get international distribution,” he said, adding that people in Vietnam were interested in screening it.

The film’s success at the Ho Chi Minh City International Film Festival has also shown Yee Wei that our local actors can be on par with actors overseas.

“People tend to demarcate local actors versus international actors,” he said. “I have also had a chance to work on films outside of Singapore, but working with actors of the best calibre in Singapore, I can say that they’re definitely able to match them.”

That two Singaporean actors managed to “beat out 11 other films from the region on an international level” came as a shock to Yee Wei, but not because he didn’t think highly of local actors.

“I think suddenly you realise, ‘Hey our local talents are able to stand head-to-head with the best in the region’,” Yee Wei said. “We should really be proud of our local talents that we sometimes fail to give credit to.”