CrouchingTalent,
December 22, 2000
Director Ang Lee brings a new sense and sensibility to martial arts moviemaking
By Kimberly Chun
Director Ang Lee spent five months preparing to shoot the romantic martial arts epic film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. He spent another five months shooting the film in Beijing, on the dramatic, sandy expanses of the Gobi Desert and amid the bamboo forests and villages southwest of Shanghai — with about 100 days devoted solely to martial arts scenes. Then he spent another five months embroiled in post-production.
But for the 46-year-old Taiwan native, the most grueling aspect of the filmmaking process has come in the last seven months — the period in which he’s had to hit the road promoting the picture. “It’s not ending yet,” he says with a small, weary chuckle on the phone from Los Angeles, in the latest in a long line of interviews he has gotten roped into since the film started taking off.
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| Ang Lee |
At this spring’s Cannes Film Festival, even cynical critics and jaded movie industry honchos wildly applauded Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s screening after each fight sequence. The film is a sweet, startling revelation, a hybrid of martial arts and swashbuckling romance, which mates an airborne pre-World War II wuxia pian chivalric tale with amore-earthbound contemporary humanism.
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| Chow Yun Fat as master swordsman Li Mu Bai. |
Based on the fourth part of the five-part novel by Wang Du Lu, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon revolves around Green Destiny, a sword owned by warrior Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun Fat). After a meditative retreat, Li decides to take the path of reduced violence, giving up the sword and entrusting it to his father’s friend in Beijing.
His own longtime fighting companion and unrequited, unconsummated love, Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh), promises to safely deliver it to the capital. There, she meets Jen (Zhang Ziyi), the beautiful, bejeweled daughter of the governor. Soon to be married, Jen seethes with rebellion beneath her formal headdress and ornate costume; she immediately blurts out that she admires the nomadic, independent fighting life of Yu Shu Lien, who disabuses of the romanticized notion just as swiftly: “Without rules, we wouldn’t survive for long.”
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| Zhang Ziyi as Jen has a feisty love affair with desert bandit Lo, played by Chang Chen. |
After Green Destiny is stolen that night by a masked thief, in spite of Yu Shu Lien’s finest fighting and flying skills, evidence seems to lead to Jade Fox (Cheng Pei Pei), a female bandit who long ago poisoned Li Mu Bai’s mentor. All is not as it seems, however, and Jen turns out to be not quite as innocent as she appears — in more ways than one. In flashbacks, it’s revealed that she once had a wild affair with a desert bandit, Lo (Chang Chen).
If the sheer romance of Crouching Tiger’s various love stories doesn’t leave you breathless, the in-flight fight scenes, choreographed by Yuen Wo-Ping of The Matrix, should — in particular Jen and Yu Shu Lien’s panting, wild-eyed combat with swords, machetes, spears and everything else in the room, and an ethereal, symbolic battle between Chow Yun Fat and Zhang Ziyi, flailing at each other from the tops of bending, swaying green-leafed bamboo.
“It was a good excuse to do abstract art, though still in the realism realm,” Lee says of the action scenes. “Emotionally it worked on a very realistic level but the performing and shooting was abstract art. To me, I like to see action as an extension of characterization, plot and relationship development rather have you just sit back for four minutes and enjoy the fight. These are repressed characters and only in the fight can they assert their personalities.”
To put his own twist on the genre, Lee permeates Crouching Tiger with “real emotion, real, genuine performance, complexity in a semi-fairy tale kind of environment.” Through his lens, the cheesy and cringe-worthy comic book aspects of the martial arts genre are filtered out. Instead, the film is couched not only in sumptuous Hollywood production values but also philosophical depth, spiritual gravity, psychological complexity and an emotional realism. With woman warriors dominating the action, Crouching Tiger is martial arts, all grown-up, ready to be taken seriously in the 21st century.
The idea for Crouching Tiger sprang from Lee’s boyhood fantasy. Growing up in Taiwan, he would often watch martial arts movies and pore over novels of romance and myth. “I know somewhere along the line I wanted to do a martial arts film,” he recalls. “Not to begin with, because I wasn’t right for that; it’s a highly skilled kind of filmmaking.”
During the production, the actors — as untried as Zhang (a 19-year-old dance and drama student who was new to martial arts) and as experienced as Cheng (the renowned 1960s kung fu actress of Golden Swallow) — surrendered themselves to Lee, with particularly striking results from Yeoh and Zhang. “They were kind of new to it all. Michelle, I suspect, is a good-quality actress, but she never gets a chance to do it,” he says with a chuckle. “She’s been action-heroing. All she’s been doing is ‘bing-bong-bing’ and act tough and action shots, but she has such a screen presence and an aura. I think she’s a serious actress who was never really observed by a camera in a dramatic way.
“It’s strange, usually a movie star knows better than the director how a camera works,” he continues with another quiet laugh. “But she was quite innocent of that. Her charisma in fighting scenes or in action scenes is incredible, but when it comes to dialog scenes, she’s rather innocent; she’s like a newcomer, which makes it a very unique, interesting and refreshing … a very special case.”
In films such as The Ice Storm and Sense and Sensibility, Lee has coaxed Oscar-caliber performances from actors such as Joan Allen, Kate Winslet, Kevin Kline, Sigourney Weaver and breakthrough work from younger stars like Tobey Maguire, Christina Ricci and Katie Holmes. To do that, he tries to look at each actor’s individual approach and talents.
“Everybody’s a different case. Usually I spend at least two weeks rehearsing time with them, just to get to know their nature and try to find the essence of the character their portraying, both for them and for me … I don’t over-rehearse them. They’re real control and creativity is on the set during the shooting. It’s really an organic approach,” he says. “Half of the time, of course, I was telling them to act less. Less, less, less. [Most actors] think they have to carry the movie, instead of the movie carrying them.”
Apparently, his advice was well taken. And just as the movie seems to have carried the actors to a new level of acting, audiences have been carried away by Crouching Tiger. The way viewers applaud its action scenes reminds one of the early days of Star Wars and the cheers that would accompany, say, the attack on the Death Star. Considering that comparison, Lee can’t help but gently laugh and agree, “I feel like that’s the best comparison. Star Wars — a real movie-movie.”
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon will open in San Francisco on Dec. 22 and nationwide in January.
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