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.”
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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.”
