Master Of The Flying Somersault

Audiences watching the aerial ballets, lightning swordplay and Astaire-worthy foot fights in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon may gasp with childlike wonder and delight. Who is brilliant and daft enough to choreograph these nonstop battles? The answer is Yuen Wo-ping, stunt master supreme and, not incidentally, the director of a couple of dozen films--among them some of the most exciting in Hong Kong movie history. "He's directed more movies than I have," says Ang Lee. "And better ones."

Lee certainly owes much to his action choreographer, as both a colleague and an inspiration. Some of Crouching Tiger's most sensational exploits echo earlier Yuen films. The spectacle of a lady thief flying over rooftops is a highlight of Yuen's 1994 Fire Dragon. And the up-a-tree skirmish? Catch the warriors perched on flaming poles in 1993's Iron Monkey.

The old master, 55, doesn't mind collaborating with younger auteurs--like the Wachowski brothers, whose The Matrix, that kung fusion of Hong Kong technique and Hollywood technology, featured some prime Yuen sorcery (he is now preparing the two sequels). "When I'm working with good directors," he says, "they'll often come up with ideas that profoundly inspire me. And then if I can make them workable, we'll shoot them."

To fans of Eastern action epics, Yuen is revered as the deviser of artful torture for Asia's top actor-athletes: Jackie Chan (the 1978 Drunken Master), Sammo Hung (Magnificent Butcher), Jet Li (The Tai Chi Master) and Michelle Yeoh (Wing Chun, with its amazing battle over a plate of tofu). In period epics and modern cop dramas, his heroes and villains have used chopsticks, pigtails, calligraphy brushes, umbrellas and robe sleeves as impromptu weapons. His melodrama is never mellow: a little girl is bundled in dynamite (The Red-Wolf); a heroine battles a predator on the top of, on the side of and nearly under a speeding ambulance (In the Line of Duty 4); and at the end of a Yuen movie, nearly anyone is likely to catch on fire. Yuen revels in the Hong Kong rule: these are moving pictures. In one Yuen thriller, a policewoman somersaults through a suspect's window. Why? Because she can.

Yuen comes from an illustrious family of martial artisans. His father Yuen Siu-tin (Simon Yuen) was a martial-arts teacher in films as far back as the 1920s and earned late stardom in the title role of 1978's Drunken Master. Wo-ping's four brothers have carved notable, knockabout careers in movie action; one of them, Cheung-yan, supervised fight scenes for the new Charlie's Angels. The brothers often work together, billed as the Yuen Clan.

In Lee, though, Yuen had a collaborator as stubborn as he is gentle--determined to put on film the beautiful, impossible stunts he had dreamed of since childhood. Yuen had to play the stern adult. "Ang would say he didn't want to shoot things Wo-ping's way because it was an Ang Lee movie," Chow Yun Fat recalls. "But his ideas couldn't be worked out. Finally, he'd go to Wo-ping and say, 'Master, I'm wrong. Let's do it your way now.'" But Lee did persuade Yuen of the need for the film's bamboo scene. "He liked the way the swaying limbs of the bamboo mimicked the postures of the actors as they fought," Yuen says. "He was very insistent."

The result is a vertiginous, romantic clash--a war of wills between a wise god and a defiant young goddess. Just like the fruitful friction between a martial master and his demanding director.