Steve Cheng Wai-Man
BIOGRAPHY
Steve Cheng Wai-Man (Chinese: 鄭偉文, simplified 郑伟文; born 1963 in Hong Kong) is a veteran Hong Kong director with a career spanning more than four decades. He is the co-director of The Untamed (陈情令, 2019), credited on all fifty episodes and on the twenty-episode Special Edition alongside Chan Ka-Lam.
Four decades, three broadcasters
He joined TVB in 1983 as an assistant director, working on series including Police Cadet ’85 (新紮師兄續集), The Feud of Two Brothers (流氓大亨) and Wong Tai Sin (黃大仙) through the mid-1980s. He later moved to Asia Television as a director and was promoted to producer there.
In 1995 the director Benny Chan invited him to co-direct 《旺角的天空》. His breakthrough came in 1997 with the 《抄墓碑》 segment of the horror anthology 《陰陽路》, known in English as Troublesome Night. He went on to direct more than a dozen films, most of them horror and thrillers, alongside crime pictures. That period includes Bio-Cops (2000), Sleeping with the Dead (2002, which he also wrote), Killer 2 (2003), City of SARS (2003) and Lethal Angels (2007).
He left ATV in 2001 to concentrate on film, returned in 2004 as a production manager, was promoted to assistant production director in 2005, and left again in 2007, after which he has worked across mainland China, Taiwan and Singapore.
Mainland costume drama
From 2005 his work is dominated by long-form Chinese television: The Dragon Heroes (2005, 44 episodes, which he also created), Scarlet Heart (2011, 80 episodes), The Imperial Doctress (2016, 50 episodes), Legend of Heavenly Tear: Phoenix Warriors (2017, 56 episodes), Secret of the Three Kingdoms (2018, 54 episodes), The Legends (2019, 56 episodes), No Boundary (2021), Thousand Years For You (2022, 36 episodes), Wonderland of Love (2023, 40 episodes) and Divine Destiny (2023, 36 episodes). 2019 alone carried 126 episodes across three productions.
The Untamed in closer view
The series is adapted from the novel The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu, and Tencent Video began streaming it on 27 June 2019. Wei Wuxian, a cultivator who used forbidden demonic arts, is brought back sixteen years after his death, and he and Lan Wangji, the reserved second young master of the Lan sect, look into the secrets of his past and the reasons he died. Xiao Zhan plays Wei Wuxian and Wang Yibo plays Lan Wangji. Liu Haikuan, Yu Bin, Wang Zhuocheng and Zhu Zanjin play Lan Xichen, Wen Ning, Jiang Cheng and Jin Guangyao in the supporting cast.
The Untamed was co-directed by two Hong Kong television veterans, Steve Cheng Wai-Man and Chan Ka-Lam.
Cheng was an assistant director at TVB in 1983, thirty-six years before The Untamed, and directed horror films from the late 1990s into the 2000s. His television work since 2005 has run to forty episodes or more on most of its series.
In my view the thing to notice in his career is range. He started as an assistant director at TVB, made horror and thriller films in the late 1990s and 2000s, and then spent years on long costume series with episode counts most directors never reach. The Untamed is the easiest way in, and Scarlet Heart at eighty episodes shows how much story he can carry across a long run.
PROFILE DETAILS
- Native Name
- 鄭偉文
- Real Name
- Cheng Wai-Man
- Nickname
- Steve Cheng (English professional name)
- Born
- (Age 63)
- Birthplace
- Hong Kong
- Western Zodiac
- Gemini ♊
- Chinese Zodiac
- Rabbit 🐇
- Profession
- Debut
- 1983 · Joined TVB in 1983 as assistant director; breakthrough as director with the 《抄墓碑》 segment of 《陰陽路》 (Troublesome Night, 1997)
- Years Active
- 1983-present
- Skills
- Series directing, film directing, producing, screenwriting, long-form costume drama
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