How British-Chinese filmmaker Chee Keong Cheung aims to build the Blumhouse of action

For Chee Keong Cheung, a cinematic education came not from the local cinemas of his native Lancaster in England’s northwest, but from the neon-lit streets of Hong Kong. “I was probably a bit young to be watching them, but the John Woo films were a big inspiration. The Killer, A Better Tomorrow … had a real effect on me,” he tells the South China Morning Post over a video call. Films from the so-called “Heroic Bloodshed” era of Hong Kong action cinema, of which Woo was a key figure, lit a fire in Cheung. The filmmaker often dresses in a black suit, white shirt and tie, just like one of Woo’s assassins. He remains a fan of the director and film star Chow Yun-fat. “What I was really drawn to was just the style and how cool these films were, but also … this level of nobility. There’s this code that these characters live by … and they are also characters at a crossroads. It wasn’t just action, action, action. With my background, being British-Chinese and growing up in the UK, seeing the two perspectives … that shaped my thought process.” In his youth, Cheung roped in his friends to make short films – thrillers, heist films – often using his parents’ restaurant as a location. “As a child, I tried but I didn’t necessarily get the best grades,” he says. “I was not top [of] my class. With film, it was a creative outlet.” Of course, he had no idea that he would one day be making films in Hong Kong, collaborating with the likes of Idris Elba, or heading up the UK’s first action-oriented studio. The Blumhouse of action? Cheung’s new feature, Bad Day at the Office – which has its world premiere this week at the Edinburgh International Film Festival – is the third feature produced under the banner Action Xtreme. The company’s mission is to originate, develop and own “action IP across film, TV and online content” – the action film equivalent of Blumhouse, the American powerhouse led by Jason Blum behind horror franchises such as The Purge. “It’s about creating a home, a place for action talent and action audiences,” Cheung says. Launched in the wake of Redcon-1, Cheung’s 2018 zombie-action film, the company already co-runs the world’s first master of arts degree in feature filmmaking with Falmouth University, and recently signed a deal with 22Summers, the production outfit co-founded by Luther star Idris Elba, to forge action film productions in West Africa. That move followed Cheung’s 2025 film Son of the Soil, a Netflix-released story of a Nigerian soldier returning to his native village to find it overrun with drug lords. “With each action project I ended up doing, it’s always been [about] how you push the envelope. How can you build?” Cheung asks. “I’ve never been, as a filmmaker, one to make a one-location, two-actor kind of film. How can we expand and be more ambitious? You only have one shot when you’re making a film, so you’re trying to be as ambitious as possible, and trying to create a stamp.” A dizzying first-person perspective Cheung has gone out on a limb with Bad Day at the Office, creating a madcap tale told entirely through a first-person perspective. It stars John Hannah (1999’s The Mummy) as Karl, who wakes up in a hotel with amnesia, unable to remember his name, his occupation or why there is a dead guy in the bath. With the help of Molly (Radha Mitchell), a hotel maid, he goes on a chaotic rampage to unearth the truth. Cheung was inspired by the 2015 film Hardcore Henry, a parkour-influenced action film shot from one character’s perspective. “I was really, really curious that there hadn’t been more point-of-view films made,” he says. Using GoPro rigs attached to Hannah and his co-stars to capture the action, Cheung ups the ante, unfolding the story via four different characters’ perspectives. He even tracked down Fedor Lyass, one of the cinematographers of Hardcore Henry, who came on board as a consultant. “We spent probably over a year R&D-ing [researching and developing] the film, running camera tests, to understand how to make the point-of-view interesting, so that it doesn’t actually just become like a YouTube vlog,” Cheung says. He needed to consider issues like motion sickness when building the woozy visuals. “How can you keep audiences engaged without them being too disoriented? That was a big thing,” he says. Violent, nihilistic and darkly comic, the film is as dizzying as Hannah’s lurid trawl through the London underworld. Paced at breakneck speed, it sees Cheung notably borrow from the style of first-person shooter video games like Call of Duty; at one point, Hannah and a rival gangster, Solomon (Tamer Hassan), are careering through a space, notching up kills, which are recorded on the screen in text. It is an ambitious action-oriented work that even Hong Kong auteurs such as Woo and Tsui Hark would appreciate – and that is perhaps no surprise. While Cheung was born in London in 1980 and raised in Lancaster – his father was originally from Shenzhen, his mother from Guangdong – his family ensured he remained linked to his Chinese roots. “Every few years we’d go back, just [for me to] get a grounding … to reconnect with the culture,” he says. A gateway to storytelling Cheung is a rarity in terms of being a British-Chinese director of action films, a result of persistence against adversity. “[At the outset] I was developing a lot more drama films, and what I was finding with the industry was that there was a real challenge with getting those films made without necessarily having star power or talent. And so action … became a gateway for me to be able to tell stories.” After studying film at the Surrey Institute of Art & Design, he made his 2007 debut with Underground, a story about tournament fighting that allowed him to collaborate with Chinese stuntman-turned-coordinator Liang Yang, who later went on to famously fight Tom Cruise and Henry Cavill in Mission: Impossible – Fallout. “He’d come over from China, he was working in the circus in the UK,” says Cheung, who realised his films were a chance to help others who weren’t “necessarily getting opportunities”. A year later, Cheung was in Hong Kong making his second feature, Bodyguard: A New Beginning. The martial arts spectacular features such revered actors as Richard Ng Yiu-hon, his son Carl Ng Ka-lung, Vincent Sze and Shing Fui-on, who previously played the villain in Woo’s 1989 classic The Killer. “It’s a different kind of rhythm, different kind of pace,” Cheung says, admitting it was an adjustment adapting to the Hong Kong way of working, with Jackie Chan’s stunt team leading the film’s action co-ordination. While he recently wrapped The Experiment with X-Men star Famke Janssen – a film inspired by Resident Evil, Saw and Squid Game, he says – Cheung would be intrigued to shoot another film in China, if the story was right. “It certainly would really be fascinating. Stories which can also transcend as well – that’s something which I’m on the lookout for,” he says. Bad Day at the Office premieres at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in the UK on August 13. Want more articles like this? Follow SCMP Film on Facebook

How British-Chinese filmmaker Chee Keong Cheung aims to build the Blumhouse of action

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Inspired by John Woo and Chow Yun-fat, Chee Keong Cheung talks about his Action Xtreme studio and upcoming film Bad Day at the Office

Inspired by John Woo and Chow Yun-fat, Chee Keong Cheung talks about his Action Xtreme studio and upcoming film Bad Day at the Office