Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Interviews

A CONVERSATION WITH ANG LEE AND JAMES SCHAMUS:

How does this film fit in with the other movies you have done?
James Schamus: We have always seen it as "Sense and Sensibility" with martial arts.
Ang Lee: I think at the core they're a lot alike. It just cinematically looks very different. There's "sensibility," a passionate, romantic force; if you go overboard it can be destructive. On the other hand there is "sense,"- restraint, social code, obedience, repression. My films always seem to be about how these conflicts resolve themselves.

One thing that's different is I've never gone as far with the romanticism as I did with this film.
James Schamus: It also takes a decisively feminine turn. The film pays really careful attention to the female characters.
Ang Lee: Well, that fits with my other movies. Women do a lot of the things men do in this genre. They embrace the Tao, they take the duels. The women are gutsy and they make decisions, one way or another.

Why did you want to make a martial arts film?
Ang Lee: Martial arts has always been one of the main kinds of entertainment in Chinese society, both in the pulp fiction and the movies, it's always a main genre.

I grew up with it. I had fantasies about the things I wanted to try to do. It's a fictional world. It has a law of its own and a very interesting cinematic language as well. It's a fascinating world, where people can fly, anything can happen. There's a part of me that feels, unless you make a martial arts film, you are not a real filmmaker. It's pure cinema energy-it's raw, it's cool, it's fun. It's why you want to be a filmmaker.

But people tend to look down on the genre. Some may have thought it strange that I could just drop what I normally do and make something like a B-movie. And as I was doing it, there was no escape, I had to bring in drama, I had to bring in women, I had to bring beauty and whatever I feel added quality to it. It became an Ang Lee movie.

How did you come upon the original story?
Ang Lee: It's an adaptation of the fourth part of a five-part novel, by Wang Du Lu. The fourth part is also called "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and was written before the Second World War. I got to read it in Taiwan only about five years ago, when we were finally allowed to publish books that are published in mainland China.

I like the writer and the old-fashioned, nostalgic way he approaches classic Chinese culture. 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. Anyway, this project was in my heart for a long time. I made three other movies before I got to do it.

Is it common within this kind of story to have such strong female roles?
Ang Lee: No. What I'm doing is very different from what's normally done with the genre. It deals with female characters, and it deals with real feelings, which is rare in this genre.

Did you have to bring in a lot of new elements to the story?
Ang Lee: Jen's character was already pretty much there in the novel. Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh) was not. And Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun Fat) was not so much in this episode, he was the leading character in the second episode. I borrowed a little bit from that, but I recreated Li and Shu Lien.

Tell me about the Wuxia...
Ang Lee: The Wuxia is a particularly Chinese type of hero (or heroine). Wu means martial, and a rough equivalent for xia in Western culture would be knight-errant. Unlike the knight-errant, however, the Wuxia is a free spirit, not belonging to any class. In the world of the Wuxia, the most important values are honor, loyalty and individual justice.

These qualities became ideals, and the Wuxia became a mythical, larger than life hero in the Chinese imagination. By the Ching Dynasty, in the 18th and the 19th centuries. Wuxia fiction was very popular. The story of the Wuxia became a fantasy of power, romance and moral duty - embodied by Li Mu Bai and Shu Lien in "Crouching Tiger."

As the genre developed, the Wuxia character became a more independent figure, often serving the basic principles of honor and justice themselves, rather than a particular master. In this respect, the Wuxia is not unlike the familiar Western hero - the lone cowboy riding into town to exact justice and right wrongs. The world of the Wuxia is different from that of society. The Wuxia operates in a realm under the surface of society and the rule of law, called Giang Hu. A world made up of individuals and their relationships, rather than the collective and the government. These relationships can exist entirely outside of the law. For example, the Wuxia can be a member of an underground, Mafia-type organization, but loyalty and honor are still the main values. In serving a master, the Wuxia keeps his or her word, even to the point of death. (Today, the term Giang Hu has a broader meaning, referring to the entanglements of life and relationships in a society).
James Schamus: There are Wuxia novels, a genre based on these kinds of heroes. These heroes inhabit what's called the Giang Hu world.
Ang Lee: The fictional Giang Hu world is very popular in Chinese culture. Li Mu Bai's character - righting wrongs, staying true to his word - is wishful thinking come true. A constant theme of the Wuxia novels is that of surpassing your abilities through practicing your martial art. You keep doing this, and fulfill the final achievement, which is transcendence.
James Schamus: And in this particular case, the Taoist influence...
Ang Lee: Internal strength is, in essence a search for nothingness, in the void, to find your strength. Because you are pulled apart by tension, which comes from external emotions, complex relationships-all your strength goes in different directions. If you can lose this tension and direct all your energy to one channel, find transcendence, then you can create tremendous power and wisdom.

Li Mu Bai practices the Wudan style of martial arts. In the popular imagination of Wuxia stories, a distinction is made between this and the Shaolin style of martial arts. The more violent Shaolin stands for outer strength, while Wudan - the style of Li Mu Bai - signifies inner strength. In fact, the two styles have a common origin in the efforts of ordinary Chinese to defend themselves from danger. Fighting eventually became the province of the military, and was further refined and codified into the Chinese martial arts. The disciplines of Wudan and Shaolin are not separate or opposite. In Chinese philosophy as a whole - and not just martial arts - inner and outer strength are both integral parts of every living being. Just as everyone has the Buddha within themselves, they also have a tremendous power - the crouching tiger, ready to leap out. The key is to achieve a balance, to seek harmony and reduce conflicts. Therefore to focus on real strength.

Coming from this kind of culture, stories like "Crouching Tiger" have been generally filmed in a particularly Eastern cinematic style. I have also worked in the very different Western cinematic tradition. Rather than choose between these two, I let the creative tension between these two styles became an important part of the making of "Crouching Tiger."

Tell me more about working with your fight choreographer Yuen Wo Ping ("The Matrix")
Ang Lee: Yuen Wo Ping is one of my heroes. Working with him was a great inspiration for me - not only for film action, but for my filmmaking as a whole. When it comes to fight sequences and choreography, Yuen is, in my opinion, without equal. He knows everything about Chinese Kung Fu action sequences. But he also has a respect for the classical martial arts style and the tradition of Chinese opera with its stylized movements and acrobatics.
James Schamus: And "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" is not a Kung Fu movie, that we associate with street fighting. This movie is more about inner strength and centeredness. That's where the floating comes in, more romantic choreography and dance.
Ang Lee: I wanted to try something different. Even the movie stars, like Michelle Yeoh, are trained dancers first. And Chow Yun Fat never touched a sword in his life. First and foremost, they are wonderful actors.

I did a lot of vaulting wire work-more than Yuen Wo Ping ever did before. Two of the climactic fights involve two women. He is famous for real macho combat. And the more elaborate camera movement, lighting, beauty, aesthetics. That's not usually what most martial arts films are after.
James Schamus: In this film, the acting, the drama has a kind of martial arts choreography to it. It has that kind of grandness and scale. And the martial arts themselves are a kind of dance and very abstract art: motion, editing, movement, image.
Ang Lee: Through the martial arts you express how you feel instead of just beating someone up. There is a dramatic quality to it.
James Schamus: The people are expressing where they are, their ambiguities and ambivalences, the conflicts they feel. In most of the fights in this movie, the people can't fully fight, because emotionally they are torn. So, the fighting is a way of thinking and feeling and relating.

This must have been one of the most technically difficult films you have ever made.
Ang Lee: Yes, it was very time consuming, and at times it was dangerous. You had to watch out for people's safety. The actors will do anything to please you and they can get tired and lose concentration. Especially when they are required to put acting on top of the action sequences. It takes a lot of energy, lots of takes.

Where was the film shot?
James Schamus: This film was shot in almost every corner of China, including the Gobi Desert and the Taklamakan Plateau, north of Tibet, near the Kurdistan border. We were based for a time in Urumchi where all the street signs are in Chinese and Arabic, all way down south to the Bamboo Forest at Anji. North to Cheng De where the famous summer palace is. It is beautiful, so a lot of the scenes are shot there. The studio work was done in Beijing, we recorded the music in Shanghai, and we did post-production looping in Hong Kong. So it is really bringing together almost every conceivable image you could have of China.

Any stories you want to tell about working with Chow Yun Fat, who is the world's most popular actor, and of course, enormously famous in China?
James Schamus: When he flew into Beijing, they literally shut down customs at the airport for forty-five minutes.
Ang Lee: While all the customs officers lined up for an autograph.
James Schamus: That's the level of stardom that he has.
Ang Lee: On set he is like Mr. Perfect. He is very noble. He knows the crew members' names.
James Schamus: His wife would leave the set for a moment, and two minutes later he would be suspended, suspended 70 feet on a wire. "Where is my husband? Oh, my God, what are you doing up there?"
Ang Lee: Upside down.
James Schamus: He would do anything for the film.

How long did the actors train?
Ang Lee: Chow Yun-Fat prepared for about two months. Michelle Yeoh trained for five months. And the first week she broke her knee.
James Schamus: She flew to Baltimore where her fianc� is a cardiologist at John Hopkins, and got the knee thing taken care of and went right back to Beijing. She was right back to work within two weeks. Michelle is just unbelievable.

Zhang Ziyi, who plays Jen, was a dancer before this...
Ang Lee: At high school level, and then she went to drama school in college, and was in her third year in college. We had to get special approval from the school to let her out of school. She was 19. She is 21 now.

Did you discover her in Zhang Yimou's film "The Road Home"?
Ang Lee: No, Zhang gave me a call, saying "do you want to see this actress? She's good in our movie." And a few weeks later, I did a couple of screen tests.

Did she also have to train?
Ang Lee: Oh, rigorously. Not only martial arts, but disposition, classic movement, calligraphy, etiquette, voice. Diving-she never dived before.

How long did she train?
Ang Lee: Less than two months. But she had on-the-job training too, as we were shooting. The music is very special in this film...
James Schamus: It takes from grand Chinese traditions and draws also from Western orchestral music, and ethnic and pop music and really pulls all of them together. It was written by Tan Dun, who composed the most recent Peter Sellers opera, "Peony Pavilion," and was the musical director last year at Tanglewood. He works in both China and the U.S. And the great Yo-Yo Ma plays the cello solos.

James, tell about the process of co-writing the screenplay...
James Schamus: We came to the script originally with a very strong narrative focus-breathless storytelling of a really fun kind. But when the script was translated from English to Chinese, it was clear that there was a lot of the culture that was missing in the original English script-because we weren't focused on how the texture, both verbally in the language as well as physically in the way the people related to each other, was going to make its way into the movie.

So there was a very, very big rewrite done on the picture, by Wang Hui Ling, a writer based in Taiwan. And when we translated that back, I was able to ingest an enormous amount of information in detail and feelings, which I never had before. And then we backed into the script to restructure it narratively, to bring it back into a more western narrative form.

The back-and-forth of these two approaches really accelerated as we got into production. It was literally commuting back and forth to China writing scenes.
Ang Lee: Between all of the different writers, I was the guy who was in the middle, who was in between the two worlds.
James Schamus: English is only a few hundred years old. I am reading Beowulf right now, which is about 1200 years old, and even it has to be translated into contemporary English to be understood. When somebody says something in this film, the character that is written down, that attaches to that, has roots that are 5,000 years old, if not older. The Chinese embedded in every word of this movie has layers and layers of culture and meanings. They simply don't exist to a Western ear. It is one of the truly delicious ironies of this movie, that although I co-wrote it, I'll never fully understand all of its meanings.

What does the title mean?
Ang Lee: "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon": for those familiar with the Chinese characters, the link between the film's title and the storyline is graphically clear: Jen has the word for "dragon" embedded in her name, while Lo, her lover, is the tiger. Jen and Lo are headstrong, self-centered and wild - and young. In contrast, Li Mu Bai and Shu Lien respect the ideals of honor and selfless duty - acting as role models within the story, and to the larger audience.

Today, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" is a common expression which refers to the mysteries that lie below the surface of society and our everyday lives. The expression is a reminder never to underestimate our own dragons and tigers - they can spring out at any time.

The title "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" describes the structure of the film. The first part of the story is about society - it takes place in the world of law, duty and ceremony. The second part takes us beneath the surface, into the world of individuals and their relationships. The story becomes a psychological one.

As Li Mu Bai and Shu Lien pursue Jen, they are chasing their own dragons. Jen's youth and energy reminds them of the romance and freedom that neither of them have experienced. Having chosen a life of duty, Li Mu Bai and Shu Lien had to suppress their passions and desires, and most of all, their love for each other. It is always close to the surface, but if they gave into their true feelings, they would be abandoning the code of honor that shaped their lives.