In April 2024, I had the privilege of sitting down with Nicholas Tse during the Far East Film Festival in Udine, where he had travelled to present the festival’s closing film, Customs Frontline.
And when I say he had just arrived in Udine, I mean it quite literally.
After a very long journey from Hong Kong involving flights and connections, Nicholas Tse arrived at the festival and generously agreed to sit down with me for an interview before presenting Customs Frontline alongside director Herman Yau and screenwriter Erica Li.
Considering the circumstances, I was particularly grateful for his time. He could not have been more gracious, professional and generous during our conversation.
Twenty-five years in Hong Kong cinema
The timing was also particularly appropriate.
By 2024, Nicholas Tse had already accumulated approximately twenty-five years of experience in the film industry, appearing in dozens of productions and developing one of the most interesting careers among his generation of Hong Kong stars.
For this conversation, I particularly wanted to concentrate on something that has accompanied him throughout much of that journey: action cinema.
His career has allowed him to experience several generations of Hong Kong action filmmaking, working with some of its most important directors, actors and action choreographers.
From Time and Tide to Raging Fire
Naturally, one of the films we discussed was Tsui Hark’s Time and Tide, an extraordinary piece of Hong Kong action cinema and one of the films that helped establish Nicholas Tse as a serious screen presence at the beginning of his career.
More than two decades later, his remarkable performance opposite Donnie Yen in Benny Chan’s Raging Fire demonstrated just how far he had travelled as an actor.
Tse’s villain in Raging Fire is charismatic, physical and genuinely threatening — and, for me, remains one of his strongest performances.
Our conversation therefore became an opportunity to look back at some of these milestones and discuss his relationship with action filmmaking, his evolution as a performer and the physical commitment that has characterised many of his roles.
From a short interview to a 20-minute video
The conversation itself lasted around fifteen minutes, but I wanted the finished piece to be more than simply an unedited interview.
For the version published on CineFlamme, I incorporated film extracts and additional visual material illustrating the different stages of his career that we discussed.
The resulting video runs approximately twenty minutes, turning the original conversation into a small retrospective of Nicholas Tse’s journey through Hong Kong action cinema.
The interview was conducted in English, making it accessible to international viewers, while the CineFlamme edition also includes French subtitles.
It is exactly the kind of material I want CineFlamme — and its future English-language counterpart, CineMagma — to develop further.
CineFlamme, CineMagma and more interviews to come
At the time I am writing these lines, the full CineFlamme and CineMagma websites are still being prepared, but their social media and video channels are already beginning to host material from my archives as well as more recent interviews.
The Nicholas Tse conversation is one example.
Other interviews and videos are gradually joining it, including my conversation with Soi Cheang around Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, alongside material drawn from many years of encounters with filmmakers, actors and other figures from Asian cinema.
There is considerably more waiting in the archives.
Some interviews will become videos. Others will be revisited as written pieces on CineFlamme, CineMagma or this website. And some of the longer material will eventually feed into the documentary projects I am currently developing.
For now, however, I hope you enjoy this conversation with Nicholas Tse — recorded in Udine in 2024, almost immediately after his arrival, and looking back at roughly a quarter-century of Hong Kong action cinema.