With its faded walls, peeling paint and broken glass windows, the derelict mansion on Po Shan Road stands out from nearby luxury flats in the western Mid-Levels. Yet the forlorn building takes on a different guise in Ang Lee's espionage thriller Lust, Caution, where an undercover agent played by Tang Wei rents the house to pose as a wealthy tai-tai to seduce and assassinate a collaborator played by Tony Leung Chiu-wai in Japanese-occupied Shanghai.
'It is where they meet for the first time and their sexual tension is palpable in that scene,' says financial writer Keith Ng.
A self-professed film buff, he has documented more than 300 locations featured in local movies over the past 30 years in a guide, Hong Kong Island: An Odyssey of Film Locations, released by Joint Publishing in September.
The work is informed by the contrast between reality and fantasy that Ng finds when visiting film locations.
'I often use my imagination because it brings my film appreciation to a new level,' he says, pointing to a cluster of luxury flats on Conduit Road, which once served as the premises of the Foreign Correspondents' Club and stood in as a hospital building in the 1955 classic Love is a Many-Splendored Thing.
'The two leads [William Holden and Jennifer Jones] take a walk together to the hilltop from the hospital. Although the film didn't show the route, I found clues from the dialogue and recreated the walk here,' Ng says. 'It's fun and rewarding to share that romantic moment in the film this way.'
