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...film Zhang is extending this ability to create a new form of action scene: rhythmic, poignant and majestic. Yen, whose working relationship with Li goes back a decade, sees that. He's fresh off success in the U.S. where Yuen Wo-ping's 1993 classic Iron Monkey, in which Yen plays a lead, was rereleased by Miramax and made $10 million at the box office. He applauds Zhang's command of a new style: "For a guy who has never directed action, he's got a nuance for certain pauses, certain breaks. He never stops looking at the bigger picture...
With good or bad luck, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon would have provided a stern challenge. Consider these factors: a $15 million action movie that was also to be a poignant, tragic romance; a fight choreographer, Yuen Wo-ping, who had won international acclaim for his work on The Matrix and was bound to tangle with the soft-spoken, hard-to-budge Lee; a top-flight all-Asian cast featuring Chow Yun Fat (Hong Kong), Michelle Yeoh (Malaysia), Zhang Ziyi (Beijing) and Chang Chen (Taiwan). Only one of the stars--Zhang, then a 19-year-old ingenue--spoke anything like...
Audiences watching the aerial ballets, lightning swordplay and Astaire-worthy foot fights in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon may gasp with childlike wonder and delight. Who is brilliant and daft enough to choreograph these nonstop battles? The answer is Yuen Wo-ping, stunt master supreme and, not incidentally, the director of a couple of dozen films--among them some of the most exciting in Hong Kong movie history. "He's directed more movies than I have," says Ang Lee. "And better ones...
Yuen comes from an illustrious family of martial artisans. His father Yuen Siu-tin (Simon Yuen) was a martial-arts teacher in films as far back as the 1920s and earned late stardom in the title role of 1978's Drunken Master. Wo-ping's four brothers have carved notable, knockabout careers in movie action; one of them, Cheung-yan, supervised fight scenes for the new Charlie's Angels. The brothers often work together, billed as the Yuen Clan...
...though, Yuen had a collaborator as stubborn as he is gentle--determined to put on film the beautiful, impossible stunts he had dreamed of since childhood. Yuen had to play the stern adult. "Ang would say he didn't want to shoot things Wo-ping's way because it was an Ang Lee movie," Chow Yun Fat recalls. "But his ideas couldn't be worked out. Finally, he'd go to Wo-ping and say, 'Master, I'm wrong. Let's do it your way now.'" But Lee did persuade Yuen of the need for the film's bamboo scene...