Spoiler alert! The following contains details about the major plot twist(s) in Project Gutenberg … and a 24-year-old Hollywood movie. Stop reading now if you do not want to know.

Ever since Felix Chong Man-keung’s crime thriller Project Gutenberg opened in Hong Kong cinemas in October, it has been followed by accusations from professional critics and general cinema-goers alike on how the film’s central plot twist feels uncomfortably like a rip-off of The Usual Suspects (1995).

The mockery turned into indignation in some quarters on social media last night when Chong’s film won seven prizes at the 38th Hong Kong Film Awards, including best picture, best director and, ironically for some, best screenplay.

For the uninitiated, The Usual Suspects has been one of the most cited noir classics in the way its story builds up to a mind-blowing final twist that negates everything that came before.

Project Gutenberg the big winner at the Hong Kong Film Awards

In the Oscar-winning screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie, whose career has skyrocketed further since he took up the Mission: Impossible series in 2015’s Rogue Nation , Kevin Spacey plays the timid Verbal Kint, the sole surviving member of a five-strong criminal gang supposedly working for a mythical mastermind, Keyser Söze.

Much of the story is related through Verbal’s recollections under police questioning, shown through flashbacks. Then came the final reversal that – as the detective belatedly realises – Verbal is Keyser Söze and he has just walked away with a confession improvised with information he spots in the room.

In Project Gutenberg, Aaron Kwok Fu-shing plays the timid Lee Man, the sole surviving member of a criminal syndicate – apart from its mythical mastermind, Painter (Chow Yun-fat). Much of the story is related through Lee Man’s recollections under police questioning, shown through flashbacks.

Then came the reversal that – once an innocuous police officer played by Chow walks into the building – Lee Man is Painter and he has just walked away with an improvised confession, and Chow’s character is a random officer Lee Man spotted on the way to the police station.

The similarity of the two films was put to Project Gutenberg writer-director Felix Chong when he sat down with the Post for an interview back in September. The quotes were excluded from our published interview to avoid spoiling the film’s key plot points.

But since five-and-a-half months have passed – and actor Louis Koo Tin-lok gave away the entire twist when he presented the best actor prize at last night’s awards (He said: “Kwok plays a good guy who reveals himself as the bad guy at the last minute; Chow plays a character that doesn’t exist in the story”) – the time has come for a re-evaluation.

When he was asked at our interview about the resemblance between Project Gutenberg and The Usual Suspects, which essentially had Kevin Spacey in a similar role to Kwok’s in the new film, Chong was dismissive towards any direct comparison.

“First of all, people who watch a lot of movies will know that this kind of story has existed since the days of black-and-white films,” he said.

“Look at Orson Welles’ F for Fake (1973). Not to mention Billy Wilder’s films too. And you can say the same about Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder (1954). But [Project Gutenberg] is not only about this treatment.”

Chong then emphasised that the starting point of his story actually stemmed from an old Hong Kong film, director Chor Yuen’s 1963 Tear-Laden Rose.

“When I took up the subject matter of counterfeit money at the very beginning, I didn’t know how to start telling the story,” said Chong, who revealed that he was inspired by Tear-Laden Rose to write the storyline involving Aaron Kwok and Zhang Jingchu’s characters.

“That film was about a painter who is unrecognised for his talent. In that story he’s helped by his good friend, a successful painter, behind the scenes. It was a beautiful love story. That story influenced me a lot.”

Another major inspiration for Chong was William Wyler’s How to Steal a Million (1966), starring Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole.

“From my memory, that is the first film that I could comprehend watching. I grew up in cinemas; I was four [when I watched this film] and I could understand it.

“How to Steal a Million starts with [a] fake painting,” he went on. “Alan [Mak Siu-fai, Chong’s regular collaborator] said: ‘If you want to tell a story about a painter making counterfeit money, why not start with a scene showing him draw a stamp?’

“Why draw something as cheap as a stamp? It must be desperate times. [So] I pictured a prison. To let the character escape, I set the action in northern Thailand.”

That would become the opening scene of Project Gutenberg, the biggest winner at the 2019 Hong Kong Film Awards. Meanwhile, we can go on debating till the end of time if the rest of his film is a rip-off of The Usual Suspects.

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This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Stop me if you’ve seen this one before

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