his is something that might sound quite politically incorrect, but I'm going to say it anyway,' says Peter Chan Ho-sun, as he leans forward in his chair in the small meeting room at his company, Applause Films. He's visibly unwell after all the travelling he's been doing to promote his latest project, the US$40 million blockbuster The Warlords.
'You can talk about universal brotherly love in the world all you want, but the truth is that educated people and the uneducated can never be friends. The sheer difference in how they view morality would make it difficult to become so.'
The 45-year-old filmmaker - a Bangkok-born, trilingual film school graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles - is summing up an idea he's been developing for the past few minutes. Human goodness, he says, is simply not an issue for the masses, those with no proper schooling and who have to worry about where their next meal is coming from.
The tabloid press would have squealed with delight at this proclamation, as over the past few weeks, there's been a feeding frenzy in local gossip columns about a falling out between Chan and Jet Li Lianjie, the star of his film.
The 44-year-old actor - who spent his teenage years as a trainee and was then a coach at wushu academies - has never received conventional education and is known for not being particularly strong when it comes to reading screenplays. It's not difficult to interpret Chan's remark as a comment on his relationship with Li.
Yet rather than being a reflection of Chan's real-life interaction with his less erudite peers, his comment on sophistication and savagery encapsulates the antagonism in The Warlords, the tale of three blood brothers (played by Li, Andy Lau Tak-wah and Takeshi Kaneshiro) whose bond gradually unravels as they fall victim to jealousy, lust for power and politics.
