From a kung fu dream

In those days it was forbidden fruit, and oh how sweet it was. Hidden away, heart thumping, he read the contraband novel at night, by flashlight.

“I was 16,” recalls Chinese director Zhang Yimou, best known for tragic dramas that serve as parables of China’s modern history (“Raise the Red Lantern,” “Shanghai Triad”). “It was the Cultural Revolution -- the Eight Model Revolutionary Works, tearing down the Four Olds, all that. Some neighborhood kid got a copy of this martial arts novel, ‘The Eagle-claw King.’

“It was a time when you could be locked up if caught with the wrong literature, and anything not officially approved was strictly forbidden. So the boys took the book apart into sections, they designated hiding places among piles of outdoor rubble -- their own clandestine lending library.

“We didn’t dare take it home,” Zhang recalls. “I never did read that book from beginning to end, I just read sections of it, completely out of order.” He laughs in his deep rumble, his gaunt face easing into a smile. “You know boys and this stuff. We just ate it up,” he says. “There were no flying daggers, but two old guys with very high kung fu skills. I was hooked.”

Today, on a visit to Los Angeles, the award-winning director has two martial arts films behind him -- “Hero,” which had a record-breaking opening weekend for a foreign film at the end of August, and now “House of Flying Daggers” (opening Dec. 3). He didn’t make them as a result of seeing other martial arts films but was inspired by that first jumbled epic and others he picked up when censorship relaxed.

During the shooting of his own, serious films, he would unwind by escaping into the latest martial arts, or wuxia, novel, and he dreamed of making one into film. Indeed, re-creating a dream was his method. He’s the first to admit he didn’t observe all the conventions of the wuxia film, perfected in Hong Kong. He’s seen only a handful.

As a student at the Beijing Film Academy, in the first class to be accepted since the end of the Cultural Revolution (and often called the Fifth Generation), he saw two Bruce Lee films. “They were more action films than wuxia films,” he says. Since then he’s seen only a few Hong Kong wuxia pictures and, of course, Ang Lee’s landmark “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.”

Despite accusations that he’s an Ang Lee copycat, his own projects were underway when “Crouching Tiger” came out. Zhang is deeply grateful to Lee, however. “The success of his film made my films possible,” he says. “Producers were willing to invest in this genre again.” In fact, Bill Kong, producer of “Crouching Tiger,” bankrolled his last two pictures.

In his search for a story line, Zhang found that the classic wuxia literature had already been cinematically mined. So he and scriptwriters Li Feng and Wang Bin came up with half a dozen ideas, finally choosing two. He liked both so much, he made “Hero” and “Dagger” back to back. He sees them as a pair, both dealing with the very Chinese theme of self-sacrifice.

“ ‘Hero’ is about the sacrifice of oneself for a larger purpose, for one’s country,” he says. “ ‘Daggers’ is really a love story, and how for love you might sacrifice all else.”

While he recognizes that his early films were weighted by the responsibility of being a Fifth Generation filmmaker, trying, despite draconian government censorship, to tell the truth of what the Chinese had suffered under feudalism and then communism, he has made the new ones with entertainment in his sight lines. The payoff has been in both national and international distribution for these films -- in China, many of his previous films have been banned for touching on politically sensitive subject matter -- and at the box office. Two years ago, “Hero” netted the highest box office take ever in China, $30.2 million. This year, “Daggers” did a robust $18.1 million business there.

Kong, speaking by telephone from Hong Kong, says he had complete faith Zhang would do well in this genre, despite his lack of experience. “A good director is a good director, someone who can work in any genre,” he says.

OF STRENGTH AND SKILL

Of course, Zhang did observe the fundamental prerequisites for wuxia pictures: They have to be set in a dynastic period and feature heroes with superhuman powers, presumably acquired through training with a master.

“Hero” was set in the Qin Dynasty, as the infamous Qin emperor ruthlessly unites the country by force. “Daggers” is set at the end of the Tang Dynasty. Zhang’s protagonists possess fantastic strength and skill. They can wield lightning-fast blades and shoot arrows with unerring accuracy -- sometimes hitting more than one target at a time. They can leap walls, fly from tree to tree, even stave off armies.

To guarantee some genre authenticity, both films hired one of Hong Kong’s top action directors, Tony Ching. “Hong Kong action directors are the best,” Kong says, “so we got the best.”

“During the action scenes, Ching was in charge and I was assistant director,” Zhang says. Two spectacular action sequences in “Daggers” have moviegoers abuzz. In one, Zhang Ziyi, as a courtesan dancer, has to fling her long sleeves into surrounding drums to replicate a sequence of sounds. Zhang Yimou made this all the more difficult by having the actress play a blind person.

“Zhang Yimou thinks of things no one else would ever think of,” says the actress from the Los Angeles set of “Memoirs of a Geisha,” in which she is starring. “For this role, I spent two months studying with a blind woman,” she says. “Watching how she moved, watching how she might dance.”

She acknowledges that the director, who cast her in her film debut, “The Road Home” (1999), is highly demanding and gives few compliments during shooting. “But when he does say you’ve done something well, you know you’ve done it very, very well.”

“Daggers’ ” other memorable scene takes place in a bamboo forest. Zhang nearly abandoned this idea, realizing that both King Hu (“A Touch of Zen”) and Ang Lee had mounted celebrated fights in bamboo forests. “Then I was thinking about modern chase scenes and how you often have helicopters chasing people below,” he recalls. “So I asked, why not have the imperial soldiers above chasing our heroes running below?”

Ching was left to figure out how the scene could be done. Because real bamboo bends readily, he devised poles that were painted to look like bamboo and stuck them among real trees. Hooked to wires, acrobats jumped on cue from pole to pole. One leap might take a whole morning to rig -- and there were many leaps. The sequence, eight minutes of the film, took three weeks to shoot.

HUMAN STORIES

Zhang’s heroes, unlike their classic wuxia counterparts, can be plagued by human doubt and done in by human frailty. In “Hero,” the protagonist (Jet Li) begins to doubt the wisdom of his mission to assassinate the king. In “Daggers,” an imperial officer (Takeshi Kaneshiro) falls in love with a rebel spy (Zhang Ziyi), and vice versa.

“From the beginning, my films were more people-oriented,” he points out. “Look at Chen Kaige’s first film, ‘Yellow Earth’ [1984]. It was a very cerebral film, almost abstract.” The two were classmates at the Beijing Film Academy, and Zhang served as cinematographer on “Yellow Earth,” the first of the Fifth Generation films to win international attention. “Look at me -- my first film was ‘Red Sorghum’ [1987]. It was a very simple story about the human spirit, about love.”

Chinese critics have pounced on “Daggers” for being simple, even superficial. “They say it’s just a love story, and I say, yes, it’s a love story,” says Zhang. “I think young people today want to be entertained, so to attract them, you first have to entertain them. After you draw them in, you can put in ideas, although not too many. If you put in too many, only critics will like it, it will only be shown in film festivals. If it fails in the market, then your industry will die, and the market will be dominated by Hollywood.”

He sees himself as a filmmaker who will always be based in China.

The final confrontation in wuxia literature usually takes place in a breathtaking location, often the top of a famous mountain, Zhang says. Likewise, he decided to set the ending of “Daggers” in a lush autumnal landscape, replete with fire-colored leaves. “I’ve always emphasized the visuals in my film,” he says. “Film is a visual medium.”

Ever the perfectionist, he took this part of the production to Ukraine, because of its spectacular fall foliage and relatively low costs. But then it started snowing.

Zhang rewrote some of the scenes and kept shooting. Although it wasn’t what he had planned, he says, “It was fate.” He feels he has achieved his purpose -- to capture a sense of beauty and poetry in the final battle between two worthy opponents, an idea borrowed from his favorite boyhood reading.