Patrick Yau Tat-chi was born in Malaysia in 1964 to a family from Nanhai, Guangdong, and is a Hong Kong film and television director and screenwriter. He joined Television Broadcasts' news division in 1985, moved to its drama unit as an assistant director in 1987 and became a director there in 1990. Between 1991 and 1996 he made dramas and television films for Malaysia's state broadcaster RTM while also producing television films and series for Hong Kong Cable Television. He entered cinema in 1996 as executive director on Johnnie To's Lifeline and directed his first feature, The Odd One Dies, in 1997 — a film starring Takeshi Kaneshiro and Carman Lee about two strangers who agree to die together. In 1998 his Milkyway Image film Expect the Unexpected won the Hong Kong Film Critics Society's best screenplay award and The Longest Nite brought him a best-director nomination at the 18th Hong Kong Film Awards; both were named recommended films by the society, and he was for a time spoken of alongside producers Johnnie To and Wai Ka-fai as a 'To-Wai-Yau' trio. Expect the Unexpected stars Lau Ching-wan, Simon Yam and Jessica Hsuan as a serious-crimes squad hunting armed robbers, and earned nominations for best screenplay and best new performer, while The Longest Nite, set during a single night of gangland pursuit in Macau and starring Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Lau Ching-wan, contains the orange ball his character holds as a symbol of a fate beyond his control — a detail Yau added on set. Those three noir films, cool in surface and startling in their endings, became a marker of late-1990s Hong Kong cinema. After directing The Losers' Club in 2001 he returned to television, working in Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and mainland China on series such as Twin of Brothers, The Tai Chi Master and Che Shen, and since 2014 has concentrated on mainland television dramas including Mekong River Case, Wuxin: The Monster Killer II, The Secret of the Three Kingdoms and Yun Xiang Zhuan.
Directing three noir films for Milkyway Image at the end of the 1990s — The Odd One Dies, Expect the Unexpected and The Longest Nite — Yau earned a Hong Kong Film Critics Society best-screenplay award and a Hong Kong Film Award best-director nomination, and stands as one of the key authors of the company's early style before moving into television across the region.
Achievements
- 1997 · Directed his first feature film, The Odd One Dies, starring Takeshi Kaneshiro and Carman Lee.
- 1998 · Expect the Unexpected won the Hong Kong Film Critics Society's best screenplay award, and The Longest Nite earned a best-director nomination at the 18th Hong Kong Film Awards.
- 2001 · After directing The Losers' Club in 2001 he returned to television work.