Johnnie To Kei-fung was born in Hong Kong on 22 April 1955, in Sham Shui Po, with family roots in Puning, Guangdong. He joined Television Broadcasts' fourth artist training class in 1974 and was mentored by the veteran director Wong Tin-lam, working as an assistant director and becoming a director at the station at twenty-two. He made his film debut in 1980 with The Enigmatic Case, and in 1983 served as executive director on the television adaptation of The Legend of the Condor Heroes. Returning to film in 1986, he directed the comedy Happy Ghost III and went on to make popular hits such as Eighth Happiness (1988) and All About Ah Long (1989), starring Chow Yun-fat, before turning to a wide range of subjects in the 1990s, including the courtroom comedy Justice, My Foot! (1992) and the superheroine films The Heroic Trio and Executioners (1993). In 1996 he co-founded Milkyway Image with Wai Ka-fai, going on to make a series of distinctive crime films such as Too Many Ways to Be No. 1 (1997), The Longest Nite (1998) and Expect the Unexpected (1998). He won the Hong Kong Film Award for Best Director for The Mission (1999), PTU (2003) and Election (2005), and the Golden Horse Award for Best Director for The Mission, Breaking News (2004) and Life Without Principle (2011). His other notable works include Running Out of Time (1999), Throw Down (2004), Exiled (2006), Mad Detective (2007) and Drug War (2012). He has also made romantic comedies such as the Don't Go Breaking My Heart series with Wai Ka-fai and dramas such as Blind Detective (2013) and Office (2015), showing unusual range. Drug War (2012) broke box-office records for a crime film on the mainland, and films such as Election and Exiled were selected for Cannes and Venice. In 2020 he initiated and produced Septet: The Story of Hong Kong, an omnibus by seven Hong Kong directors that was selected for the 73rd Cannes Film Festival, and in 2023 he served on the main competition jury of the Berlin Film Festival, becoming one of the few Chinese filmmakers to have judged at all three major European festivals. A former chairman of the Hong Kong Film Directors' Guild, he has long nurtured new directing and technical talent. His Milkyway team gathered writers and directors such as Yau Nai-hoi, Law Wing-cheong and Soi Cheang, and he also made commercial hits such as Needing You (2000), the year's top-grossing Chinese-language film in Hong Kong, and Love on a Diet (2001).
Johnnie To co-founded Milkyway Image in 1996 and built an austere triad aesthetic through films such as The Mission, PTU and Election, repeatedly winning Best Director at both the Hong Kong Film Awards and the Golden Horse Awards. His work brought Hong Kong crime cinema back into the spotlight of international festivals and is seen as a meeting point of Hong Kong auteur film and commercial genre. Milkyway Image also trained a generation of writers, directors and technicians, sustaining the local film industry. He later served on international festival juries and initiated Septet: The Story of Hong Kong, bringing the collective work of Hong Kong directors to the world stage.
Achievements
- 1996 · He co-founded Milkyway Image with Wai Ka-fai and went on to make a series of distinctive crime films.
- 2000 · He won Best Director at the 19th Hong Kong Film Awards for The Mission.
- 2004 · He won Best Director at the 23rd Hong Kong Film Awards for PTU.