The Oscar-winning director spoke to EW about pulling off his blockbuster wuxia epic to mark its 20th anniversary.
“Actors got hurt, tired, exhausted.
“I had my fantasies since childhood,” the Oscar-winning director says.
Credit: Everett Collection
“There are things I like about that genre, there are things I don’t like.
I think, ‘Oh, it should be like this.
It would look better this way, that way.’
Everett Collection
So I have a lot of things in my head.”
“I bent [the genre].
I think that’s the real difficulty,” Lee explains.
“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.”
“Chinese martial arts are not just martial arts,” notes Lee.
“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 that’s not to say the movie skimps on the fight scenes.
“The hardest thing to do is the lightness,” Lee recalls.
“People don’t fly.
You want them to be weightless.
To mimic that lightness, it takes a lot of strength.
When things look easy and light, that’s the toughest.”
Chow and Zhang spent those two weeks actually dangling among the treetops, on wires hanging from cranes.
“It’s very dangerous,” Lee says.
“You hang Chow Yun-fat up in the air over a valley of bamboo that’s pretty scary.
After we let him down, after his shot was done, the crane just slides a little bit.
I was like, ‘Holy s—.
God bless us,'” he adds with a laugh.
It was not a smooth process, to say the least.
“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.”
“I didn’t get to do what I wanted to do,” he adds, laughing.
Usually, they don’t care.
What looks good, they do it.
So his hands were kind of tied too.”
“I learned from those guys not only choreography, but pure cinema,” he says.
“What works for movies, cinematic sense, camera movement, editing, a lot.
MakingCrouching Tigeralso transformed Lee’s conception of martial arts as a genre and an art form.
“The fight is equivalent to singing and dancing numbers.
There’s a certain innocence to it.
You put logic aside for a while and go to that childhood fantasy land.”
It’s that sense of wonder and innocence that Lee believes drove the movie’s success.
“I think it hit the West in this sweet spot because of the unfamiliarity of the genre.
It hit our innocence, so to speak, because it was fresh….
In the year 2000, the world wasn’t quite like today.
It was ready to jump out.
I think I just hit the right time, the right place.”
“But I think it’s not something I can take credit for, because everybody helps.
We’re a big family.
We’re a film community.”
“There’s imagination beyond and below real life that may be more truthful.
[Crouching Tiger] really unites people, not in a rational way, but on a gut level.
It’s fantasy but it’s meaningful.
It’s just a beautiful thing.”
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