Fortunate Cookie: 'Fulltime Killer'

How often does a Texan who used to review Hong Kong movies actually get to come back to Texas and watch a Hong Kong movie he helped make? Joey O'Bryan, a film reviewer for The Austin Chronicle in the early to mid-Nineties who specialized in the Hong Kong film industry, returns to SXSW this year with Fulltime Killer, a Johnnie To and Wai Ka-Fai movie that O'Bryan co-wrote with Wai. The movie is a wild and stylish ride through the nether world of two dueling assassins who toy with each other for occupational supremacy. One is a reclusive legend, the other a rising hotshot -- and of course there's a girl who's involved with them both.

O'Bryan left Austin for Los Angeles in 1996, but first detoured through Bracketville, Texas, to beg for a job on the sixth installment of Once Upon a Time in China, which was shooting there. It was directed by Sammo Hung. O'Bryan spent the next four months "fetching coffee, pumping smoke, and doing whatever else for some of the most distinguished filmmakers in Hong Kong. Seventeen hour days were the norm."

Cut to the future. "One day I'm walking out of a Sammo Hung movie," says O'Bryan, "and who should be walking in but Sammo Hung. He actually remembered me, so we exchanged numbers, and I wound up spending the next two years as his personal assistant on Martial Law."

When Hung's TV show was canceled two years later, O'Bryan took the time to finally sit down and write some of the scripts that had been his intention to do when he first left Austin. He found representation, took a lot of meetings, and basically found out that everyone at the studios is essentially looking for the next Lethal Weapon script.

Chance came his way again when "a friend called from one of those industry parties I can never work up the energy to go to and said, 'Johnnie fuckin' To is here!' I'd been a fan for many years so I was pretty stoked. I got over there and found a chance to talk to the man. Turns out we liked a lot of the same movies. I sent a script his way, and he thought enough of it to put me to work. I couldn't believe it, the proverbial dream come true.

"We had just over a month to turn in a shootable draft," O'Bryan explains. "We worked separately then met to discuss likes and dislikes. Ka-Fai is the man, a mad genius. He doesn't speak much English, and I can do little more than curse in Cantonese. We communicated through a translator, with a lot of arm waving thrown in for punctuation. I'd gotten used to that working for Sammo."

Fulltime Killer became the fifth highest-grossing film in Hong Kong in 2001, as well as Hong Kong's official nomination for Academy Awards consideration last year and No. 4 on the Hong Kong Film Critics Association list of the Top 10 Chinese films of 2001. O'Bryan is sufficiently jazzed by the kudos the film has received, but it's this screening back home, where he hopes to return one day, that has him most excited.

Fulltime Killer screens Saturday, March 8, 12:15am, at the Alamo; Monday, March 10, 2pm, at Westgate; and Saturday, March 15, midnight, at the Alamo.