The big difference was that the Hollywood filmmakers used special effects to create the blaze, whereas To and his team used real fire.

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“It was a very difficult film to make, and we were very lucky that we did not have a major accident,” To told the Post’s Winnie Chung in 1999.

“Hollywood has a lot of special effects that they can use to key in the fire and the explosions, but we had to do it for real,” he added, noting that there were no advanced special-effects houses available in Hong Kong at that time.

“We actually had to learn how to set fires and put them out. It was very difficult as the camera crew and the actors were very close to the fires.”

The story focuses on a firefighting team at the Tsz Wan Shan station who are thought to be jinxed as their rescues keep going awry. To flesh out the characters and increase the viewers’ emotional engagement with them in the action scenes, To employs his oft-used tactic of delving into the personal lives of the firefighters.

When a fire breaks out in a factory containing flammable chemicals, the Tsz Wan Shan team muster up all their courage to prove their worth.

Lau and the actors did all the stunts themselves, wearing fireproof clothing as protection. Lau escaped without injury, but some of the cast and crew sustained minor burns.

“We didn’t leave anything to luck,” Lau told the Post. “We had to make sure that all of our firefighting gear, which was the real thing, was in order. Even a tiny gap in the mask could lead to serious injury. Although the clothes were all fireproof, it was really, really hot.”

Lifeline was made on a budget of HK$10 million, which was a small sum for an action-based Hong Kong film in 1997. To felt that Hong Kong viewers wanted to see heroes on the big screen, but he wanted to give them something different to cops and robbers and martial artists.

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Once he had settled on a firefighting story, To realised that he had to create the fire.

“Fire is unbearable, but smoke is more dangerous and even after two months our spit was still black when we coughed,” he told film historian Miles Wood.

“We wanted it to be realistic, and whenever we shot a scene, we went into the fire station and asked the opinion of the firemen. We did this for six months. We even stayed at a fire station for two weeks.”

According to Lau, only To would be crazy enough to attempt making a film with such a big fire.

“To pushes everything to the limit. Not many people would have had such a big blaze,” he told the Post.

The Mission (1999)

The Mission acts as a coda to To’s idiosyncratic genre games of the 1990s. Set in the familiar triad milieu, the low-budget film – it only cost HK$2.5 million to make – is elegant and meticulous, and features some beautifully choreographed action sequences that are cool-headed and unflustered.

To said he didn’t want much dialogue in the film, and that is the key to its success.

“The Mission shows off To’s high-handed mastery of film language … it re-posits the storytelling power of cinematic images,” critic Thomas Shin wrote in 2000.

Although the film was critically acclaimed at home and abroad, To said that The Mission would be the last of his personal works for a while; he wanted to make films that had a wide audience appeal to help revive the fortunes of Hong Kong films at the home box office.

The film has a neat structure worthy of a French policier. Five top gangsters are brought together to protect a triad boss from assassination. Their mission is a success, but one of the bodyguards has an affair with the boss’s wife. Will the team follow their orders to kill him – or will they stand by their brother?

The audience was kept guessing right until the last frame, and even the actors didn’t know how it would turn out.

“The basic concept was that everything is predetermined – your fate, whether you die or not, and so on,” To told movie critic Derek Elley in 2000. “You have to dance to a prepared tune.”

“It’s a film that is only possible because of Kurosawa. The main influence is the Seven Samurai, which contains a kind of stillness that no other director has been able to capture,” To told the Hong Kong International Film Festival.

“I was particularly influenced by the way Kurosawa implies movement within stillness. He gives the impression of things happening even when his protagonists stand still throughout a scene. He could get such a lot of energy from stillness.”

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All the actors play brilliantly off of each other, although To said that he had envisaged an even more stellar cast when he was planning the film.

In this regular feature series on the best of Hong Kong cinema, we examine the legacy of classic films, re-evaluate the careers of its greatest stars, and revisit some of the lesser-known aspects of the beloved industry.