Teddy Chan Tak-sum was born on 26 April 1958 to a Ningbo family in Hong Kong and studied at St. Teresa's English School in Kowloon, St. Francis Xavier's College and a secondary school in Taiwan. He entered the film industry in 1978, working as a continuity clerk, assistant director and producer and serving as Jackie Chan's personal assistant before producing at Golden Harvest. He made his directorial debut with a 1991 comedy and directed youth and action pictures through the mid-1990s, including the 1997 thriller Downtown Torpedoes, which won Best Action Choreography at the 17th Hong Kong Film Awards. His big-budget Purple Storm (1999) earned a Golden Horse nomination for Best Feature Film, and in 2001 he tailored The Accidental Spy for Jackie Chan, shooting in Turkey and South Korea. Bodyguards and Assassins (2009) marked his peak: an all-star epic re-enacting revolutionaries' protection of Sun Yat-sen before the 1911 revolution, it built elaborate period streetscapes on a huge scale, swept Best Film, Best Director and other prizes at the 29th Hong Kong Film Awards in 2010, and grossed close to 300 million yuan on the mainland; he also took a Hong Kong Film Directors' Guild outstanding-director award. He received an outstanding overseas Chinese director award at the 14th Huabiao Awards in 2011, then directed Kung Fu Jungle (2014) and the psychological thriller Insanity (2015). He published a memoir in 2022 and has run TVB's acting classes, remaining a veteran of Hong Kong action and genre cinema after more than four decades in production.
With Bodyguards and Assassins, Chan showed that Hong Kong could mount an all-star historical epic, tying action set-pieces to a sense of nation; the film swept Best Film and Best Director at the 29th Hong Kong Film Awards and became a model for mainland-Hong Kong co-productions.
Achievements
- 1997 · Directed Downtown Torpedoes, which won Best Action Choreography at the 17th Hong Kong Film Awards
- 2010 · Won Best Director and Best Film at the 29th Hong Kong Film Awards for Bodyguards and Assassins
- 2011 · Received an outstanding overseas Chinese director award at the 14th Huabiao Awards