Monday 29 December 2014

The yin and yang of box office

Ang Lee's new film, a mystical, martial-arts Chinese epic, opens this week. It's one of the year's big hits, says Anne Billson

PRODUCER James Schamus sounds chuffed, and no wonder. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, his seventh collaboration with Taiwan-born director Ang Lee, has just scooped four Los Angeles Film Critics Association awards, including the one for Best Picture. Schamus is the film's co-writer and executive producer, but it's the three craft awards - for Tan Dun's music, Pater Pau's cinematography and Tim Yip's production design - he's particularly thrilled about. "Hollywood thinks of itself as the ultimate in movie craftsmanship," he says. "And for them to go out of their way and name these wonderful collaborators from Hong Kong, China and Taiwan was pretty great."

Not your average foreign-language film: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon - 'an irrestible combination of sweeping epic, intimate romance and mind-boggling action sequences'

The wind from the East is approaching galeforce these days. After all, it was a Hong Kong action thriller - Ringo Lam's City on Fire (1979) - that provided Quentin Tarantino with the plot for Reservoir Dogs. Jim Jarmusch paid homage to venerable Japanese director Seijun Suzuki in Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai (1999), while this year's The Cell (directed by Tarsen Singh) is only the most recent showcase for the visionary costume designs of Eiko Ishioka.

Another Hong Kong veteran - Sammo Hung - stars in his own American TV cop show; kung-fu superstar Jet Li graduated from Lethal Weapon 4 villain to leading-man status in Romeo Must Die; and while Jackie Chan's attempts to crack the American market are invariably accompanied by an occidental co-star, there at least seems to be a move away from Fu Manchu stereotypes and cringe-making impersonations such as Mickey Rooney's irascible Japanese lodger in Breakfast at Tiffany's.

Anthony Lane, film critic of The New Yorker, has suggested this oriental influx is on a par with that of the east European emigres who revitalised Hollywood in the 1930s and '40s, but Schamus isn't entirely convinced. "Thankfully they don't see that as their job," he says. "And they don't have Hitler around to kind of throw them into our arms, so that their approach to Hollywood is very different from the wave of German Jewish emigres. Because, quite frankly, while they love Hollywood, they don't need it. And that's a different place to be, isn't it?"

Schamus should know. He co-wrote and co-produced Ang's first feature, Pushing Hands, in 1992, and they've been working together ever since on films such as The Ice Storm and Ride with the Devil (though he has also found time to executive-produce notable American indies such as The Brothers McMullen and Happiness). But Crouching Tiger is their first Chinese-language film since Eat Drink Man Woman in 1994.

Being voted Best Picture by the LA critics is no mean feat for a costume pic shot with Mandarin dialogue in mainland China, but then Crouching Tiger is not your average foreign-language film; it's an irresistible combination of sweeping epic, intimate romance, and some of the most mind-boggling action sequences you'll ever see. These characters are members of the wuxia warrior class, which means they can pull off the sort of semi-supernatural stunts the rest of us can only attempt in our dreams. One minute, they're walking around like normal people, the next they're running up walls, leaping from roof to roof, or poised on swaying treetops.

The last arthouse hit to play this fast and loose with gravity was King Hu's A Touch of Zen in 1969, but Crouching Tiger takes it much, much further. And the strangest thing of all is that we accept what we're seeing without question. "One of the compromises that we didn't do? We didn't sit around and explain why people could walk up walls or over rooftops," says Schamus. "We just thought 'Just go! Do it!' And, oddly, it seems to work."

Even more extraordinary is the way that the actions are not just stunts tacked on for the sake of showmanship, but an inextricable part of the characters and their emotions. "There's a tradition that makes these specific supernatural elements function very well in this genre - not just literary or filmic, but also philosophical and religious," explains Schamus. "And so there's a weight and a gravity to the weightlessness of the characters!"

In a nation notorious for its preference for spoon-fed dialogue, Crouching Tiger has already notched up the biggest ever US box-office opening for a subtitled film. Those in the know are whispering the magic words crossover hit, or "Crouching Sleeper, Looming Crossover", as the trade magazine Variety put it. Of course, it helps that one of the film's two romances is played out between the two most famous Asian actors in the world - the inimitable Chow Yun Fat, who has already made his mark as a Hollywood leading man in last year's Anna and the King, and the exquisite Michelle Yeoh, familiar to Western audiences as the butt-kicking Bond-girl from Tomorrow Never Dies.

But maybe, just maybe, it's also a sign of the times. Western action audiences have already been softened up by the gravity-defying fight scenes in The Matrix, which like the ones in Crouching Tiger were choreographed by Yuen Wo Ping, veteran director of innovative kung-fu films such as Drunken Master, which was Jackie Chan's first big hit. But when even bog-standard Hollywood fare such as Charlie's Angels hires Wo Ping's brother to stage its combat sequences, you begin to sense a trend.

Of course, this is hardly the first time that Western cinema has turned eastward for inspiration. Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai and Yojimbo (themselves inspired by Hollywood westerns) provided blueprints for The Magnificent Seven and A Fistful of Dollars respectively, while George Lucas cites another of Kurosawa's films, Hidden Fortress, as a major influence on Star Wars. Bruce Lee was responsible for a wave of kung-fu mania that swept America in the 1970s, and Schamus reminds me that before Yun Fat and Yeoh, there was Sessue Hayakawa, who in 1915 gave a ground-breaking performance in Cecil B. De Mille's The Cheat, though he's more often remembered nowadays for his Oscar-winning turn as Colonel Saito in The Bridge Over the River Kwai.

But there has always been something a bit apologetic about Hollywood's eastern leanings in the past. Oriental influences crept in only when disguised as westerns or space operas. The difference now is that the Pacific Rim style is being flaunted, rather than smuggled in under wraps. And it's two-way traffic; where Ridley Scott and Michael Douglas went to Osaka to make the 1989 thriller Black Rain, Japanese director Takeshi Kitano has just shot his latest yakuza movie, Brother, on the streets of Los Angeles. Yet Crouching Tiger, despite its exotic setting, may turn out to be the most perfectly realised synthesis of East and West we've yet seen. The story is based on part of a five-volume novel by Wang Du Lu, published just before the Second World War. "It's never been translated," says Schamus, who doesn't himself speak Mandarin ("I know how to order beer, though").

L ee prepared a precis of the parts that interested him. Schamus drafted a screenplay, which was translated into Mandarin to be worked on by Wang Hui Ling and Tsai Kuo Jung, before being translated back into English. "And then translated back into Mandarin, and then back again, and rewritten each time. It was like ping-pong."

While there were inevitably compromises between the two cinematic traditions, Schamus shies away from the idea that he might have forged a middle way between the Chinese and American approaches to screenplay. "Probably because of my distaste for American electoral politics, I definitely don't want to think of it as 'seeking the centre'. I have to say it was more 'a yin and yang thing'. We made one film that attempted to balance all the elements."

And the story and characters aren't so far removed from Western culture as you might think. Referring to one of his previous collaborations with Lee, Schamus admits that when he describes the film as "Sense and Sensibility with martial arts" it's a typically Hollywood pitch. But, on the other hand, "It represents a reality, it really does. Ang's central focus for much of his work has been the notion that individual freedom, as you grasp for it, can often lead to a clash with social values, and that maintaining that balance, or finding a destiny that encompasses both your obligations to the social order and your yearnings for freedom - that's the narrative.

"And it's a narrative centred on female characters in the late 18th or early 19th century, whether they kick butt or make tea."

  • Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon opens on Friday
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