More from Hero screenwriter Li Feng.
Li talks about a short poem in which a man sees the moon and falls in love with a woman living in the moon.
“The moon changes everything,” he says.
“Without the moon the man would be a hooligan.”
So, the production team went to extraordinary efforts to ensure that each phase of the film had its own beauty. They thought of a scene in a sea of flowers and the assistant director was told to go look for the backdrop. He couldn’t find it.
“He was told to go to Ukraine. He comes back and says the problem is solved. He spent US$8000 buying flower seeds and planting them in Ukraine,” Li says.
“Unfortunately Sars happened and a lot of countries didn’t want to (admit Chinese). The US$8000 of flowers grew well in Ukraine but we couldn’t use them.”
Then there was the golden forest scene where Flying Snow and Moon get swept up in a fight in autumnal leaves.
“We made a lot of leaves of paper and plastic. But we didn’t think they looked realistic,” he says.
“We paid farmers to collect leaves for us. We categorised the leaves into different types. The first grade leaves went in the front of the camera, the second grade leaves in the background.
“The pursuit of beauty in making kung fu films is difficult.”
__________________________________________________
Outtakes:
“To Hollywood, kung fu is an element; to Chinese kung fu is a genre which you can put anything into.”
“Zhang Yimou can work for a long time while Ang Lee can observe for a long time… They are like two sides of one hand.”
“There are vast differences between western and Chinese cultures and it first struck me when working on Hero. We had a Hollywood screenplay writer telling us how things would work for a western audience. The story was about an assassin trying to kill the Qin emperor. He said why does he want to assassinate the king? I said the Chinese audience would not ask that question because they would take it for granted that he would be assassinated… He kept asking why. We called him “1,000 Whys”. We later realised those whys were legitimate.”
“Bruce Lee was aggressive – [he was] not the Chinese favourite star. Bruce Lee’s classic look is serious and enraged. That is also the style of his martial arts.
“Chinese favour Jacky Chan. This is because Jacky Chan is funny. He is capable of turning serious martial arts into funny stuff… His style of martial arts is opposite to Bruce Lee. He drinks and loses his combat abilities. He embarrasses himself trying to combat the attacks.”
A drop of water can be the difference between the ridiculous and the sublime in a kung fu movie, especially if the film’s backers are counting on overseas interest.
Li Feng, screenwriter of the blockbuster, Hero, says this prospect weighed on the mind of director Zhang Yimou as he tried to piece together an elaborate duel on a lake between Nameless and Broken Sword. In the scene, the two adversaries volley a drop of water between them before the droplet falls on the face of an inert Flying Snow, Broken Sword’s lover. Broken Sword stops to wipe away the drop and Nameless is so moved by the gesture, he calls off his attack. It’s the kind of moment that can provoke sentiment or sentimentality, or worse still, ambivalence.
“[So] a lot of effort went into filming that drop of water,” Li says.
“The object of the scene is not to show who wins but to portray the beauty in the fight. Chinese artists try to find beauty in an apparently fierce fight.
“The water scene (ended up) short. Zhang Yimou said westerners might find water travelling between two swords ridiculous. He wanted to convey the correct sense of the drop of water so he made the scene shorter. A westerner might feel that moves against physical laws but I didn’t think that mattered. You can see it as a Chinese Star Wars. A lot of Chinese were moved by this scene and forgot it was a kung fu film.
Li Feng interview continued at http://diggingtochina.wordpress.com/2008/03/06/field-of-dreams/
