Art and Action Kick It Up

We are in the bowels of a fantastical cavern, an abandoned pottery factory crammed with beehive-shaped kilns and littered with cracked pots and broken shards. Water drips, a fire burns.

In this heart of darkness, the final scenes of director Ang Lee’s eagerly awaited “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” unfold. Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh) and Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun-Fat), the shining heroes of this magical martial arts epic, will confront Jade Fox (Cheng Pei Pei), a woman who has mastered the mystic arts for her own sinister designs.

Today, a key action scene has been scheduled for Chow, a man known for his derring-do in such Hong Kong police/gangster flicks as “A Better Tomorrow” and “Hard-Boiled” who must now distinguish himself in a more classic form. Long before he arrives, a team led by Hong Kong action choreographer Yuen Wo-Ping (“The Matrix”) has been busily setting up and testing the necessary steel wire rigging and supplemental effects. To test things out, the team has a stunt double “fly” through the air a dozen times, lifting him with wire supports attached to a body harness, and makes adjustments until the desired trajectory is achieved.

“For me, this is a dream come true,” says Lee, who fell under the spell of early martial arts flicks seen in his native Taiwan--low-tech as they were at the time. Plodding around the set, the director pauses now and then to watch the preparations, but since stunt work is not his expertise, he spends most of the time behind the set--literally, behind a 30-foot-high wall of scenery, in a makeshift area set up with chair, video monitor and electric heaters.

This is a film with a lot of heat on it. An award-winner and crowd-pleaser at festivals around the world--including Cannes, Toronto and New York--it could be the first Chinese-language film to become a mainstream hit, with its unique mix of martial arts choreography, romance and even feminism--the central characters are highly independent women.

Still, a film shoot consists mostly of long stretches of tedium interspersed with brief ignitions of movie magic, and this one, on a wintry day last year at the Beijing Film Studio, is no exception--even for a film whose pedigree is as distinguished as “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” Lee has won international acclaim (“The Wedding Banquet,” “Sense and Sensibility,” “The Ice Storm”), while Hong Kong veterans Yeoh (“Police Story III: Supercop,” “Tomorrow Never Dies”) and Chow (“The Corruptors,” “Anna and the King”) have burgeoning careers in the West.

Throw in two promising young Chinese stars--Zhang Ziyi, Zhang Yimou’s new discovery, from China, and Chang Chen (“Happy Together”) from Taiwan--and a swashbuckling script based on a martial arts classic by the celebrated storyteller Wang Du Lu--and it’s still a bit of a grind. Especially in China, where the studios are decidedly unglamorous--big hangars with peeling paint and cement floors, and toilets that constantly overflow. Today the temperatures inside are as freezing as the ones outside because, by government dictate, heating should not be turned on until Nov. 15.

So everyone is huddled in parkas, and the lucky few sit near portable heaters. Zhang Ziyi, bundled up in an oversized green People’s Liberation Army coat, seems to have cornered the market and has got half a dozen units surrounding her as she sits in one corner. The actors wait in a shared dressing room or on the sidelines until called, while stars Chow and Yeoh enjoy the Hollywood-esque luxury of their own trailers.

Then the moment finally comes, the crew has finished its preparations. Suddenly, all that is magic about movie-making starts to ignite. The energy level shoots up as Chow, a tall, charismatic man even in a Qing Dynasty robe, arrives on set. In this climactic scene, he has to fly about 15 feet through the air and thrust his blade into the enemy. Crew members are bustling about, shouting louder.

Despite being pressed for time, they must first observe an industry ritual before the camera rolls. The technical staffers are mostly from Hong Kong, meaning they are highly superstitious about anything that involves risk, and light sticks of incense as prayer to the powers that be. Three sticks are given to Chow, who takes them and obligingly holds them up to his forehead and gives a short bow in four directions.

They rig him up: two wires on either side of his back, two leading from the front, with the attachments hidden under the folds of his robe. Because wires can now be wiped out by computer in post-production, they are able to use thicker wires than before, which permits broader and more controlled movements.

Even with computer technology available, however, stunt master Yuen believes that actual moving bodies are far superior to digital effects. “It never looks quite right,” he says about people seen “flying” completely through computer-generated means. “It still requires people doing it.”

On cue, Chow strikes a valiant pose as workers on the periphery of the sound stage pull on thick ropes to lift him into the air and fly forward into the action. To add to the effect, two assistants toss pails of water in the air--yes, by hand--to express the great kung fu power emanating from the master. It may be tricky to coordinate all of that low-tech labor, but it is certainly cost-effective; the epic-scaled film cost only $15 million, a fraction of the budget for big Hollywood action epics.

Chow, who has never before done a martial arts film but has seen plenty of them growing up in Hong Kong, manages to maintain his balance, stare fixedly ahead, and look like the great hero he is meant to be. Four, five tries and it’s a take! Everyone bursts into applause. The actor is quickly detached from wires. Chow, a big ham, nods left and right with his brilliant smile as he exits the set, back to the warmth of his trailer.

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“It’s been my longtime dream to make a martial arts film,” says Lee, who grew up seeing wuxia (martial arts) films and reading wuxia pulp fiction. “It’s part of my cultural roots and the fulfillment of my childhood fantasies.”

Arguably the most versatile of Chinese directors, Lee started his career with two Chinese American comedies, “Pushing Hands” (1992) and “The Wedding Banquet” (1993), then made a surprising leap to Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility” (1995), scripted by and starring Emma Thompson. Since then, he has made a complex drama about American families in flux in “The Ice Storm” (1997) and a searing Civil War-era drama in “Ride With the Devil” (1999). “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” brings him back, not only to a Chinese-language film, but to China, the homeland of his parents.

Indeed, the film is another first for him: He has never shot in China before. At a time when other directors often complain of troublesome government censorship and regulations, he quickly dismisses such problems. He is duly thankful for permission to shoot here, which is granted by the Chinese government only after a close scrutiny of the shooting script. In his mind, he had always needed the Chinese landscape as a backdrop for his film.

Wearing a blue-and-orange New York Mets cap, Lee moves unobtrusively around the set. During scene changes, and there are a lot of them, he stays out of the way and sits in his folding chair, cushioned with a large pillow and flanked by two portable heaters that Zhang hasn’t somehow absconded with. A small stream of people come by to consult him. Is this jade pendant all right? Shall we stick these acupuncture needles into Chow’s neck? Lee asks them to feign the latter effect first--having the needles stick via a small piece of wax--as he would like to avoid puncturing the star. Later he concedes that puncturing looks more realistic.

In between, he studies the script, munches on a snack or stares blankly at the video monitor. Actress Cheng, a veteran of an earlier wave of wuxia films who is playing villainess Jade Fox, observes with a twinkle in her eye, “We often find him staring into space, but we know he’s thinking, planning.”

Lee smiles, “Oh, I’m just spacing out!”

“We know you’re not,” Cheng says.

She’s right. Every few minutes, Lee jumps up and goes onto the set, sharing his thoughts with an actor or stuntman or director of photography Peter Pao. He is firm without being dictatorial, and everyone listens to him as they would to a shi-fu, a teacher, a master.

Five years ago, Lee read a five-part novel by Wang Du Lu, a mainland writer active in the early 1900s. Lee quickly saw that it could be turned into the wuxia film he had always wanted to make.

“I like the writer and the old-fashioned, nostalgic way he approaches classic Chinese culture,” says Lee, who wrote the original scenario later crafted into a shooting script by his longtime partner, James Schamus, along with Wang Hui Ling and Tsai Kuo Jung. “There is a degree of realism to it; it doesn’t go too crazy, too out of bounds. It has outstanding female characters and it has a tragic ending, both of which are unusual for a martial arts film.”

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The story’s title is from a popular Chinese saying used to refer to a place where mysterious or unsuspected powers lurk. It also refers to the nicknames of the two younger heroes, Lo (Chang), a reckless Xinjiang bandit, and Jen (Zhang), the fiery daughter of a high government official. Taking place during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), the action is set in motion when a famous sword is stolen from a court official’s household. Swordswoman Yu Shu Lien (Yeoh), who had delivered the sword to its new home, feels responsible for its safety, so takes it upon herself to root out the culprit. From the beginning she suspects the willowy Jen.

As part of Lee’s deliberate new twist on an old genre, the film starts slowly, to establish the drama and the characters. When the first action scene comes, it is breathtaking: Shu Lien pursues the thief through the courtyard and across the rooftops of the Forbidden City. They dance blithely up the sides of walls and over the curled tiles, sometimes clashing, sometimes falling, but always managing to find their balance again.

Lee discussed each action scene with Yuen, not in terms of specific movements, but in terms of the dramatic themes he wanted to convey. In the first one, “‘I wanted to further stress the relationship between these two women, two different styles, fighting principles,” Lee says. “One is gravity-defying, slow tempo but flying, the other fast-paced, agile. The theme is about the rules of the game; it’s about how to bring this young girl down to earth.”

Spectacular duels are interspersed throughout the movie, each unexpected in its own way. One, for example, shows Chow and Zhang breezily battling it out atop a bamboo forest, as the stalks sway and bend to their weight. “You always see people fighting in the bamboo forest,” Lee points out, “so I thought, Why not on top of the forest? This was one of the most difficult scenes to shoot, involving dangling the actors from cranes.”

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All this takes place against the backdrop of a double love story. There is an older, repressed romance between Shu Lien and Mu Bai, who knew each other when she was married to his best friend. Unfortunately, the husband perished while saving Mu Bai from danger--and now both feel obligated to honor his memory and remain . . . just friends.

There is the younger, wilder romance between Jen and Lo. They meet when Lo and his bandits attack her family’s official caravan traveling through China’s northern territories--and he decides to make off with her jade comb. Furious, she jumps on a horse and pursues him across the desert. After what seems like days of pursuit and fighting, they fall in love. But being the good Qing girl that she is, she eventually returns to her family, and, when we meet her at the start of the film, she is prepared to be married off to someone chosen by her parents and no doubt stodgy and traditional.

“For me, he’s very, very eloquent,” Yeoh says of how Lee helped her prepare for her role. “He knows his subtext. He takes the time to go over with you all the background and to explain why he’s doing what he’s doing. He also watches his actors very closely.”

All three of her co-stars were eager to work with Lee, and not only because of his international reputation. They also saw they would be making a different kind of wuxia movie--one that has heart as well as adrenaline.

“To me, there’s another level of meaning,” says Lee. “There’s an internal, psychological aspect--the unsettling personal desires, the forces of destruction that’s obvious in the younger couple but hidden in the older couple.” Then he quips, “Some people have called it ‘Sense and Sensibility’ with martial arts!”

With all the complex action sequences, as well as Lee’s exacting demands, the shoot took five months. The production traveled up and down China, from the green mountains of Huang Shang to the desert plains of Xinjiang, and Beijing in between. “It’s the longest shoot I’ve ever undertaken,” Lee said in May, when the film was part of the official selection at the Cannes Film Festival. “Yet I had the shortest post-production period--four months!” Fortunately, post-production could be done in his part of the world; he lives with his wife and two sons just outside New York City.

Marketing for the genre-bending “Crouching Tiger” has proved a unique challenge for its American distributor, Sony Pictures Classics. In two previews now running in movie theaters, no Chinese language is used, because, says Michael Barker, the company’s co-president, “We find that subtitles don’t work in previews.”

However, the Chinese-language dialogue--with English subtitles--is being retained in screen prints. “The film is so entertaining,” he says, “subtitles won’t be an issue for the public. There are so many different audiences for it. It’s a very soulful martial arts film.”

“In test screenings,” adds Tom Bernard, Sony Pictures Classics’ co-president, “about 40% of people said afterwards they didn’t remember that the film had been in another language.”

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Still, they are releasing the film carefully--New York and Los Angeles by mid-December, then 35 more cities on Dec. 22. Twenty days after that, it will be on 300 screens, “which is considered huge for a foreign-language film,” says Barker.

“Our thinking was that we wouldn’t go wide at Christmas, when there’s too much competition. The worse thing is to go too wide too early. But by Jan. 12, it will be everywhere.”

Especially encouraging is the fact that “Crouching Tiger” has been a critical hit at film festivals and a commercial hit in Asia, where it has already been released. And for Lee, bringing the dreams of his youth to the screen underscores the cinema’s enduring power of enchantment.