Lee reflects on seminal work
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS NEW YORK — It’s physically impossible to get to the forest fight scene that hovers atop slender bamboo trees in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and not say out loud “Whoa.”
Twenty years later, the exhilarating grace of Ang Lee’s martial-arts masterwork is just as breathtaking. The way figures glide across the water. The extraordinary lightness of it. Its craft and choreography are only further evidence of a mantra uttered in the film: “A sword by itself rules nothing. It only comes alive in skilled hands.”
Take that scene, where Chow Yun-fat and Zhang Ziyi clash in a dance across bamboo stalks. Asked what he remembers about shooting it, Lee doesn’t hesitate: The sweating. Not from heat but from the stress of suspending a few of Asia’s biggest movie stars high in the air, held aloft by cranes over a valley.
“You use very heavy ways to imitate lightness,” said Lee, speaking by phone from Taiwan during a recent trip from his home in New York. “Each actor hanging up there, you need
30 people down on the ground mimicking how the bamboo swings in the wind. I probably did about a third of what I wanted to do. The way you dream about a movie, it’s very difficult to make real.”
Tuesday marked the 20th anniversary of the release of “Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.” An international co-production filmed in China and shot in Mandarin, it still ranks, easily, as the most successful non-English language film ever in the U.S. The $17-million movie grossed
$128.1 million in North America. Arguably more than any other film, “Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon” opened mainstream American moviegoers not just to a new genre known predominantly in Asia — the wuxia tradition — but to subtitled films in general. It set another record with 10 Academy Awards nominations, a mark since equaled by “Roma” and “Parasite.” “Crouching Tiger” took home four Os
cars.
Did Lee feel that when Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite” became the first non-English language best-picture winner in February that he had helped pave the way?
“Yeah, I did,” says Lee, laughing. “I wouldn’t say it happened because of me. But as people paved the way for me, I paved the way for that movie. And that movie paved the way for future moviemakers and goers. We’re a community. We’re all part of a history.”