One Thing After Another: Johnnie To, Ringo Lam and Tsui Hark's Unusual New Movie

Johnnie To has explained how his upcoming collaboration with Ringo Lam and Tsui Hark is going to work.

The film will be police thriller, around 90 minutes long, with each director handling a discrete section then passing it on in a kind of cinematic relay.

Tsui Hark is expected to make his third first of all, without revealing any details to his collaborators, then pass it on to Ringo Lam. After he is done, the two-thirds complete film will be passed to Johnnie To for the final section to be put in place.

Reports have claimed that there will be no script for the project - though I expect this only means there will be no over-arching script, with the directors keeping the pages for their own segments secret.

It's an ambitious project, with the onus really falling on Johnnie To to make it all work. He's the one charged with making sense of everything that has come before, building on the work of his colleagues and wrapping up the entire project satisfactorily. I wish him luck, but I think it's going to be very, very hard for him to do the job brilliantly.

Billy Wilder once said "If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act" and he was absolutely right. Narrative structure really does bear comparison with a house of cards and refusing to be careful and delicate with your plotting can get you into a lot of trouble.

I'm confident Tsui Hark will throw Ringo a line or two, and I'm hopeful he'll at least try to keep the flame alight for Johnnie. Worst case scenario, I guess, we'll have an episodic, lurching story that works in part. My main fear is that the directors try to make it hard for one another. One upmanship would not be good for the overall shape of the story. To said "Ringo might decide everyone dies in his part and I will have to finish it off". That kind of thinking could lead to some silly stunts that really run the piece up a dead-end alley or two.

But having said that, nothing aids invention like a tight set of restrictions. Good luck to them all.

Tsui Hark starts filming in May, the film should be completed sometime early next year.