Believe it or not, it’s been 20 years since “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” arrived in theaters. The film would go on to be nominated for 10 Oscars in 2001 (a record for a non-English-language film at the time), and it would end up taking home trophies for won Best Foreign Language Film, Best Art Direction, Best Original Score, and Best Cinematography. And now, two decades after its premiere, director Ang Lee reminisces about his iconic martial arts drama.
Speaking to EW about the 20-year anniversary of the film (which was released in late-2000, so more like 20+ years, but oh well), Lee talked about the difficulties in taking a martial arts film, which before then was largely seen as a B-movie genre, and turning it into something more.
“I bent [the genre],” the filmmaker said. “I think that’s the real difficulty. Like, ‘You want to fight… or you want to do drama?’ I wanted it all. Because of that, I didn’t realize I was upgrading a B-movie to A. You’re supposed to go crazy, go wild. I was honing something really restricted and refined.”
And one of the ways he “bent” the Chinese martial arts film genre is by making the fighting something more.
“Chinese martial arts are not just martial arts,” Lee explained. “It’s a way of life, it’s philosophy, it’s how humans relate to nature. I really wanted to project that into the drama and everything in the movie.”
But even though he wanted to treat the fighting as more than just exciting set-pieces, there were some difficulties. Primarily, the tension was between Lee and his fight choreographer, Yuen Woo-ping, who was just done working on “The Matrix.” The difficulty came from Ang Lee wanting to rehearse the fights and add some more drama to them, while Yuen was used to doing things a bit differently.
“When people fight, I treat it like a conversation, like a verbal drama,” Lee said. “There’s a relationship, a development going on, there’s conflict. So [Yuen] could not just design the most fascinating fights, which is what he does. We all had to sacrifice a lot. I had to sacrifice drama sometimes, and he had to sacrifice beautiful action for the dramatic effect.”
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He added, “I didn’t get to do what I wanted to do. It turns out, I get to do a little bit of what I want to do, but mostly [Yuen] does the design, and I choose whatever fits the movie…. I would say, ‘I like this, I don’t like that, this doesn’t fit the character.’ Usually, they don’t care. What looks good, they do it. So his hands were kind of tied too.”
Of course, the end result is a classic film, especially 20 years later. “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” opened up a time-honored international film genre to a whole new audience and gave the martial arts film, perhaps, it’s most auteur-esque installment ever.
