Films of Fury: The Kung Fu Movie Book

by Meyers, Ric

  To find his inspiration, Jet looked back on his career. There he recognized a character who had been there all along. Not Wong Fei-hung or even Chen Zhen. It was the man Chen Zhen had been fighting for. In Asia, the resulting film was named for that poisoned sifu: Huo Yuan-jia. In the English-speaking world, it was called Fearless (2006).

  “This character,” said Li. “He fights a lot of people, and never loses. But he loses against himself. He figures out that he needs to fight and win against himself to understand life. That’s basically what I believe. You can use violence to control other people, but you will not change their minds. The most powerful thing is that, by caring about them, you can turn your enemy into a friend. That’s why I made Hero and Danny the Dog. Sure, if you’re powerful, you can knock down twenty people in three minutes, but if you don’t care about others and can’t control yourself, you’re no better than a mad dog. Physically you’re very strong, but mentally you’re very weak. So in my past three movies I tried to show a different angle, to show the audience a different view of martial art violence.”

  To supplement his vision, he called upon the choreographer who had opened his eyes to the self-improvement powers of kung fu. “I think Yuen Wo-ping is one of the greatest martial art directors in the world. He has a unique style by himself. He’s a real martial artist. He just loves making traditional Chinese martial art movies. Like Fearless. We had ninety working days, and out of that, he and I had sixty days working together. He loves it! We’re very close friends. For each movie we do together, we try to create something new. In the ‘90s, we tried to do it very fast for the camera. But now, for this film, we wanted to show the powerful physical side, but also we wanted to show what each character believed through how he fights. Wo-ping loves using martial arts to tell the story. Through the fighting, you can see the fighter’s spirit without talking. That’s his specialty.

  “Huo tells his students, I don’t want to see revenge any more. Martial arts is not just about training your body, it’s about training your mind. That’s the goal. To show that kind of choreography is very challenging for Wo-ping and I. We used a lot of energy to let the audience see the action, keep it interesting, and show the power, but also, at the same time, show the motivation and character behind the action. To show the inner peace. That was the difficult part.”

  Difficult, but not impossible. To find their way, Li, who also served as the film’s producer, signed Ronny Yu to direct. Yu was best known in Asia for his lush romantic melodramas like The Bride With White Hair and The Phantom Lover (1995), while he’s best known in America for his horror films. Li wanted a bit of both styles for his masterwork.

  “The whole intention of making this movie is that it could touch everyone, even if you don’t practice, study, or even understand martial arts,” Yu told me. “Before this, I was crazy about kung fu films. But they were all about revenge and winning at any cost. I don’t know if I should blame Bruce Lee or the Shaw Brothers who introduced us to the vengeance-filled martial art world. When I was growing up, I was a fanatic, but the only message I got was: somebody punch you? You learn martial arts and get even.

  “So this is the one movie I threw in everything I learned, liked, and disliked from all the kung fu movies I’ve ever seen — from the old black and white Huang Fei-hong movies with Kwan Tak-hing to all the bloody Chang Cheh films … everything! When I was starting to prepare this movie, I had long talks with Jet and Wo-ping and said, ‘Why don’t we go back to the basics? Because we have an actor who’s actually a master in Chinese wushu, why don’t we forget about the wire-fu, the quick cuts, and all that? Why don’t we go back to long takes?’ That meant we only used wires when we absolutely had to, for safety’s sake.”

  With Fearless, Jet, Yuen, and Ronny set the stage for the next generation of kung fu films. They also set the stage for both Li’s and Yu’s exit from that very stage. “After making this movie I realized that the better at wushu you are, the better peacekeeper you are,” Yu concluded. “The higher your level and ability, the more enlightened you are, the more you understand, and the more peaceful you become. So I don’t think I’ll ever do another wushu movie. What I wanted to say and convey to people on the subject is all in this movie. With Fearless, it’s all been said.”

  Jet apparently felt the same way. During the American marketing campaign for the film, advertising announced that this would be Jet Li’s final kung fu film. When I asked him about this, Jet smiled, and shrugged. “If that’s what it says, that’s what it says.”

  Since then, however, Li deservedly won his first Asian acting award for The Warlords (a 2007 remake of Chang Cheh’s milestone Blood Brothers which featured some sweet “battlefield-fu”), reunited with Jason Statham for the shredder-edited potboiler War (2007), was yanked around on balance-robbing wires in both the misconceived Forbidden Kingdom (2008) and overblown Mummy 3: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008), then got bounced around with Jason Statham and Dolph Lundgren in Sylvester Stallone’s 1980s-style machismo mash-up The Expendables (2010).

  Also in 2010, Jet starred in his first straight drama, Ocean Heaven, without a scrap of action. And, as of this writing, he’s signed on for two new Tsui Hark wuxia films, one in 3D. But he spends a lot more time working with the charitable organization he created after he and his family survived the devastating “Great Southern Asian Tsunami” in 2004. Now, his “One Foundation” raises money for a multitude of worthy causes. In fact, he spent an entire year developing the charity rather than making films.

  So is Jet Li truly done with kung fu movies? Happily, you’ll get to decide for yourself. But for him, doing kung fu is now more than just a way to defeat villains.

  “I saw a lot of movies, and I made a lot of movies,” Jet told me, “and usually we only talked about violence against violence. A lot of old Hong Kong action films, they only talk about revenge. Whenever the good guy and bad guy use their physical strength to hurt the other, it’s to show, to prove, that they are right. I think that’s not good enough anymore. So, now I talk a lot about martial arts in the heart. What is martial arts and what learning martial arts is really about. Not just the physical but also the philosophy. What martial arts can do to help you understand life. Who’s the enemy? The biggest enemy is yourself. So your biggest enemy is not from outside. It’s from deep inside your own heart. You need to fight that. That’s the highest meaning of martial art.”

  Picture identifications (clockwise from upper left):

  Tony Leung vs. Philip Kwok Choy (Kuo Chui) in Hard Boiled; Chow Yun-fat in Hard Boiled; Chow Yun-fat in Full Contact; John Woo; Tony Leung, Jacky Cheung, and Waise Lee in Bullet in the Head; Chow Yun-fat in God of Gamblers.

  At the end of The Warlords, director Peter Chan’s award-winning, 2007 remake of Chang Cheh’s classic Blood Brothers, something very telling happens. After betraying his friends and spending his life acquiring power, Jet Li’s character, General Pang, gets shot in the back by government assassins. Not confronted by a small army of blade-wielding soldiers, like Chow Yun-fat in Curse of the Golden Flower, nor by eighteen armaments and three styles of pugalism, like Liu Chia-liang in Legendary Weapons of China. Not even by a mob of shadow warriors brandishing nearly a half-dozen kinds of trickery, like Cheng Tien-chi in Five Element Ninja.

  No, they just get a sniper’s rifle and shoot him in the back from a great distance away. Where’s your kung fu now, mister-wushu-champion-at-the-age-of-eleven? Of course this, again, brings into the focus the nature of kung fu (and people’s reaction to it). Although designed as a system of self-improvement, its self-defense side effect became the main attraction to millions who sought a short cut to gaining some control over their mortality and/or power over others. But once the gun was invented and introduced throughout the world, all that training seemingly became moot.

  No, now all you had to do was point and contract your index finger. As Shoji Kurata said in Fist of Legend; “if you want to win, bring a gun.” Why seek self-improvement when you cou
ld just point and shoot? Turns out that not only worked on the streets, but inside studio walls as well. Why search for someone who could actually do kung fu beautifully when you could just overwhelm scripts, cameras, actors, and audiences with firepower?

  After all, the Shaw Brothers kung fu training course was no more. The Peking Opera schools were mostly closed. Fewer and fewer students filled the mainland wushu academies every year. The rise of “Gun Fu” was inevitable once Hong Kong films became internationally famous. The main reason it hadn’t happened before was that the Chinese were proud of their kung fu and sword-slingers. It was part of their culture. Although gunpowder had been invented in China, guns were seen as a foreign encroachment. Both China and Japan did what they could to ban them. In fact, Japanese law forced home-grown filmmakers to build prop guns for their movies — leading to many an action film where it looked as if criminals were pointing smoke-blowing toys at their enemies.

  No one really took guns seriously in kung fu films for more than a half-century ... until a soft-spoken, innocuous Hong Kong immigrant named John Woo arrived. Born in Canton in 1946 to a tubercular ex-teacher father and doting, itinerant worker mother, Wu Yu-sen grew up in abject poverty — his only sanctuary being the Church … and movie theaters. Back then, not only were movies considered fit only for women, but those women could bring their children along for free, and the Wu Yu family took copious advantage of that.

  “I loved the musicals,” the man who became John Woo told me. “I was fascinated by them.”

  By then his family had fled religious persecution and settled in Hong Kong, but problems still plagued them. Even though they survived in a slum, even that was destroyed by an infamous 1953 fire. Hope came in the form of a Christian education at a charitable Lutheran school, but a wise old priest saw more than religious fervor in the boy. He knew he was destined for an artistic life. Sure enough, by the time he was a teenager, Woo was making personal films with borrowed equipment. In his late teens, he was trying his hand at acting while learning film technique from books he stole from the library. Finally he secured a job at the Cathay Studios as a script supervisor.

  “I was inspired by the French New Wave,” he said. “The concept of the director as auteur was revolutionary and really intrigued me. Small budgets, small crews, a single camera … I became determined to be a film director.”

  He got his chance in 1971, when Chang Cheh took Woo under his wing at the Shaw Brothers Studio. He became first assistant director on such classics as The Water Margin (1971), Boxer from Shantung (1972), and even the milestone Blood Brothers.

  “I learned many things from Chang Cheh,” he recalled. “The importance of brotherhood, filmmaking technique, editing … it was a very important time for me.”

  Important, yes, but just like Liu Chia-liang before him, Cheh knew a good thing when he hired it, and was seemingly reluctant for Woo to move forward in his own career. So when Woo got his first directing assignment, it wasn’t at Shaw Brothers. It was at Golden Harvest, on a little kung fu film called The Young Dragons (1973).

  It was not an auspicious start. Young Dragons, like Yes Madam, was deemed unreleaseable, but Young Dragons, unlike Yes Madam, didn’t set box office records when it was finally shown years later. Woo would retreat to serving as production manager for comedy king Michael Hui on several of the landmark Hui Brothers’ comedies: Games Gamblers Play (1974), The Private Eyes (1977) and The Contract (1978). In between, he kept honing his craft by directing cheap martial art potboilers, including The Hand of Death (1976, aka Countdown in Kung Fu), co-starring and reportedly choreographed by the then “Jacky” Chan.

  Apparently that was not a happy set. Chan supposedly suffered his first notable injury on that production; knocked unconscious for a full half-hour by a mistimed kick. The finished product was nothing to write home about either. Woo was more successful, critically, at least, with Last Hurrah for Chivalry (1978), a Chang Cheh-flavored swordplay epic featuring such stunting stalwarts as Li Hai-sheng and Mars. After that didn’t find much in the way of financial favor either, Woo tried his hands at several genres, under several names.

  He was most sought after for his kooky comedies, including Money Crazy (1977, where he was first listed as John Y.C. Woo), From Riches to Rags (1979, his name finally shortened to John Woo), and Laughing Times (1981, as Wu Shang-fei). Finally, he teamed with Ricky Hui, the “Shemp” of the Hui Brothers, to make To Hell with the Devil (1982), a truly loony “religious horror comedy” that played like a demented “Exorcist meets Airplane.” He gained further traction with 1982’s Plain Jane to the Rescue, but betrayed his growing audience’s trust with Heroes Shed No Tears (1983), a nasty tale of a mercenary tracking Vietnam drug lords. This was truly an unremitting, mean piece of work that seemed completely out of character (until years later).

  In any case, by the time the middle 1980s rolled around, Woo was in personal, financial, and creative trouble. He had a vision for what he wanted, but no one else seemed inclined to let him do it. Except Tsui Hark. Hark had left the Golden Harvest confines to find his own artistic Shangri-la and invited Woo to join him at Cinema City. There they teamed the supposedly washed up director with a pair of supposedly washed up stars to create a film supposedly no one wanted: A Better Tomorrow (1986).

  The posters for the film were up all over Hong Kong — plastered on construction site walls and movie theater hallways. They were stylish images, but looked to all the world like a drama about schoolteachers. Top-billed actor Ti Lung had floundered since the Shaw Brothers Studio film units had been shuttered. Co-star Leslie Cheung was best known for his singing career and lightweight romantic musical comedies. Third-billed supporting actor Chow Yun-fat was slowly being declared box office poison after a promising start as a nighttime TV soap star. Woo himself was hoping for the best, but planning for the worst.

  Coincidentally, I met the director for the first time the night before the film premiered, and even after a long talk, I was not prepared for what I saw the following night. But the people of Hong Kong certainly seemed to be. Every showing of the film was sold out that day and that evening, causing us to drive to a remote cinema on the outskirts of town to find seats. And the reaction to the film was unlike any our group had experienced in the British colony. Hong Kong audiences were polite and undemonstrative for the many kung fu and wuxia films I viewed with them. Only occasionally had the older women in the audience repeatedly “tsked” when a hero was ignobly killed by a heinous villain … a habit evidently left over from Peking Opera performances.

  But it was as if the entire city had shared the same propulsive, convulsive response to A Better Tomorrow. This stylish, inventive, exhilaratingly violent tale of a nobly-suffering, honorable triad (mafia) gangster (Lung), his angry, resentful cop brother (Cheung), and the clever, cool underling (Chow) who tries to bridge them while an odious betraying gangster targets them all, elicited cheers, stomps, and fist-pumping. Hong Kong film fans maintain that they had not seen a reaction like this since Bruce Lee kicked the “No Dogs or Chinese” sign in Fist of Fury.

  There had hardly been a hint of this consummately assured visual storytelling in any of Woo’s previous work. His command of the action and emotion was unprecedented. He had clearly perfected Chang Cheh’s themes of yang gang, taken to heart his mentor’s love of Bonnie and Clyde as well as Rebel Without a Cause, eliminated all Cheh’s affectation and stolid camerawork, then transferred the martial arts seamlessly into the gun age.

  Woo’s love of French gangster films was obvious here — especially in the character of Chow Yun-fat, who instantly joined Alain Delon (star of such classics as 1967’s Le Samourai) as the world’s greatest screen gunman. Both understood what Bruce Willis would borrow only temporarily in Die Hard (1988) and Die Hard II (1990) — that pulling the trigger of a gun was not easy. It requires effort along with the communication of both power and fear. It also calls for strength (of muscles, will, and mind), open eyes, and straight arms.

 
John Woo and Chow Yun-fat were superstars, literally overnight. Everybody wanted a sequel as soon as possible. Only one problem. John Woo didn’t want to give it to them. While Chow reveled in his new-found fame, making twenty other movies in the next two years, Woo took a “been there, done that” attitude against ever-increasing pressure. Finally, taking a reverse psychology tact, he decided that if gun fu was what they wanted, he would give it to them in abundance. He would shove gun fu right in their faces. He would overwhelm them with gun fu. He would drown them in gun fu. He would make them sick with gun fu.

  He should have known better. A Better Tomorrow II (1987) was full of outrageous moments — Chow Yun-fat sliding backwards down a stairway with his guns blazing, reams of white-suited gunsels falling out a doorway like slaughtered clowns at a circus, and Chow being engulfed, then knocked off-camera, by an on-screen explosion — but its very outrageousness worked in its favor because Woo had become too good a screen stylist. Even the plot was ridiculous — with Chow’s character killed at the end of the previous film, they fall back on the hoariest of gambits: a twin brother.

  Woo amped up everything: the emotional angst, the bloody slaughter, the sheer physical and mental bedlam … but the power of the film cannot be denied. By trying to overdose his audience, Woo had not only effectively satirized himself, but painted himself into a blood-red corner. Now he would have to top himself with each subsequent production. But Woo was up to the challenge. It would take him two years, but he was up to it.

  The Killer appeared in 1989, and Woo cemented his reputation with it. Chow Yun-fat stars as an expert assassin, whose conscience is resurrected by his accidentally blinding a beautiful bystander (Sally Yeh). To finance an operation to restore her sight, he takes the infamous “one last job” from exactly the wrong client … the kind who likes to leave no witnesses to his misdeeds.