Leon Ko Sai Tseung’s lineage seemed to predestine him to writing music for stage and film: the son of legendary Hong Kong actress Lucilla You Min – who won ‘Best Leading Actress’ at the first ever Golden Horse Awards – and the grandson of Cantonese Opera artist (and occasional silent film actor) Bak Yuk Tong, his career as a composer of Cantonese musicals has been rich in awards and popular acclaim, with all of his four creations, The Good Person of Szechwan, The Legend of the White Snake, Field of Dreams and The Passage Beyond, having won best score at the Hong Kong Drama Awards. This, in addition to being a driving force in the recent revival of Cantonese Opera and an occasional musical director for Jacky Cheung’s  world tours. Ko’s works have travelled as far out of Hong Kong as London’s London’s Stratford East Theatre and New York’s Carnegie Hall.

That’s not even mentioning his career in film scoring, which is the topic of the following interview, and equally successful as his other musical ventures. After only eight film scores – for major directors like Peter Chan, Derek Yee or Dante Lam – Leon Ko is already a Golden Horse Award winner and a two-time Hong Kong Film Award winner, with four additional nominations. You can sample his work for film and stage at his website. You might be struck by Leon Ko’s versatility: there’s a world of difference between the atonal thrills of That Demon Within and the epic whimsy of Monster Hunt, or between the lyrical anguish of Dearest and the old-school playfulness of The Great Magician. Now as busy and in-demand as ever, he nevertheless graciously agreed to answer my questions.

  Can you tell us about your academic background and how you came to be a film composer?

I grew up in Hong Kong and later got my Bachelor’s degree in Music Composition at Northwestern University in Illinois, USA. I discovered musicals there and upon graduation I went to New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts to get my master in musical theatre writing. I was a classically trained musician before wandering into pop music in Hong Kong, then venturing into musical theatre which brought me to film music. My first feature film score came about after Mr. Peter Chan Ho Sun saw a stage musical of mine in Hong Kong – an adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan – and asked me to work on his film Perhaps Love, which was a movie musical. That in turn called for my pop music and classical music skills, so I guess it came around full circle.

  Did you find scoring a movie musical different from scoring a stage musical? What are your memories of this first foray into film scoring?

I think I had a relatively easy transition from stage musical to film musical because of Perhaps Love. The fact that the movie relied heavily on musical numbers was a huge shock-absorbent for me. The obvious difference between scoring a movie and a stage musical is that for movies I usually belong to post-production whereas I always take the driver’s seat in a stage musical. There will be no show without the score and hence I have a lot of control over the storytelling and artistic direction of the piece from the get go. Perhaps Love was a rarity in that the creative process was much like that of a stage musical, with the exception that the director was already at the helm and there was a musical director on board and the story was pretty much written. It was a long process for a Hong Kong movie – we had creative meetings for close to a year before shooting began. Every other week I would bring in songs or different versions of it to see how Peter felt about them. He was trying to find a different convention from what I regarded as a natural concept in a musical, namely the way characters go from speech to song. We were all pushing the envelope, and thank goodness most of us were musical lovers!

  Peter Kam is also credited for the music of Perhaps Love: did you work together or split the work? How was the collaboration?

We split the work so I wrote half of the numbers and he wrote the other half. In our creative meetings, we would look at the script and say “I will do this one” or “Why don’t you take a stab at this” and sometimes we would inadvertently work on the same spot and the director would decide which one he felt was more in the right direction. The one thing we never did was to co-write anything, even with the rest of the music score we split up the work accordingly.

  You reunited with Peter Chan two years later on the epic The Warlords, which you co-scored with no less than three other composers: Peter Kam, Chan Kwong Wing and Chatchai Pongprapaphan. How was that process?

I remember time was extremely tight and a group effort was obviously the only way to go to get the score done. I was in New York at the time and Peter Kam and Chan Kwong Wing were in Hong Kong and I believe Chatchai was in Thailand. We never had a composers’ meeting and we all worked separately. There was a cue checklist though so we scurried to pick and choose whatever was left to be done. It was a miracle that the score actually came together like one piece while in fact we had very little idea what the other composers were doing, and in what style. I think there must have been some telepathy going on amongst us. I finally met Chatchai for the first time a year later!

  In 2011 you worked with another great Hong Kong director, Derek Yee, on The Great Magician. How different is it to work with Peter Chan and Derek Yee?