All About Women


All About Women, originally titled She Ain't Mean and Not All Women Are Bad, is a 2008 Chinese romantic comedy-drama film directed by Tsui Hark. Starring Zhou Xun, Kitty Zhang and Gwei Lun-mei, the film tells a series of interwoven stories as it focuses on the lives of three women and their romantic relationships. Zhou plays a clumsy woman who secretly develops a pheromone drug patch, which serves as a plot device for the film; Kwai plays a punk rock band singer, who is also a boxer and novelist; and Zhang plays a wealthy attractive woman.
Originally set to be an updated version of Tsui's Peking Opera Blues, All About Women was shot in Beijing, China, and was released in China and Hong Kong on 11 December 2008. The film was later released in Singapore on 8 January 2009.

Cast

The film features cameos from four filmmakers: the film's director, Tsui Hark, in a deleted scene, cameos as a taxi driver; co-screenwriter Kwak Jae-yong appears as a noodle restaurant patron; Hong Kong film director Jacob Cheung appears as himself, playing an unlucky patient; and actor–film producer Henry Fong appears as Ou Fanfan's boss.

Production

Development

To commemorate on the 25th anniversary of his production company Film Workshop, director Tsui Hark wanted the film to be one of several remakes of films produced by the company. Tsui expressed his inspiration for All About Women being a calligraphy with the words She Ain't Mean written in Chinese. He said that after seeing the drawing, he awoke one day, and images of countless women flashed across his mind. While promoting his 1991 film Once Upon a Time in China in Seoul, Korea, Tsui attended a seminar, where met Korean filmmaker Kwak Jae-yong. Tsui began working on a script titled She's a Hooligan, developing various characters, who began to gradually form into something more concrete after several days. When Tsui discovered that Kwak was working on a script similar to his, he abandoned his own script, and collaborated with Kwak. Kwak wrote the script in Korean before it was translated into Chinese. Tsui then commented on and amended the Chinese version before it was translated back into Korean. The script was later re-edited by Kwak and retranslated into Chinese.

Filming

All About Women was shot in Beijing, China from 1 January to April 2008, and was hailed as updated version of Tsui's 1986 film Peking Opera Blues. In March, Tsui, for the first time as a filmmaker, invited the Chinese press visit to the set of All About Women in Changping, Beijing. Kitty Zhang commented on Tsui's style of filmmaking as the director would frequently make changes to the screenplay: "Often, when I arrived on the set in the morning, he'd hand me three pages of the script, saying that it's what we'd be filming today. I was taken aback. What he gave me earlier only had two paragraphs. Why such a big change?"
Upon being questioned, Tsui admitted there would be changes to the screenplay, since he did not have everything he wanted in the film on the shooting script.

Accolades

28th Hong Kong Film Awards