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Interview: ‘True Legend’ director Yuen Woo-Ping
What follows is an interview Gross did with Yuen Woo-Ping during last year’s Fantastic Fest.
Yuen Woo-Ping is sitting in an upstairs room at the Highball, dressed in a light blue and white checked shirt and jeans, a baseball cap pulled over his head. You would not look at him on the street and think, “That man is a legend.” Nor would you think, “That man could probably beat me senseless in about 3.2 seconds.”
Yet both are true.
Yuen is about as famous as martial arts fight choreographers get. He is almost as famous as martial arts movie directors get. He is, quite frankly, one of the most influential artists in the history of Hong Kong action movies.
He is in town to promote the martial arts fantasy “True Legend” the first movie he’s directed since “Tai ji quan (Tai Chi Boxer)” in 1996 and, oh yeah, pick up a lifetime achievement award from Fantastic Fest.
Yuen has worked with everyone from Jackie Chan to Stephen Chow to Jet Li, to Michelle Yeoh. You have seen his work in “The Matrix” trilogy, “Kill Bill” Vol. 1 & 2, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” “Iron Monkey,” “Kung Fu Hustle,” and many, many more.
“True Legend” returns to the legend of Su Can, Drunken Fist master, a myth Yuen has played around in movies such as “Drunken Master.” While some of these films played the notion for full-contact laughs, “True Legend” is straight-faced and epic, the tale of a humble warrior reduced to a shell of his former self when his half-brother, Yuan, destroy’s Su Can’s family. Su Can, now a beggar, must redeem himself.
Yuen comes from a martial arts family. His father was Yuen Siu-tien, a renowned martial arts film actor. Yuen Siu-tien’s character Ol’ Dirty in “Ol Dirty & The Bastard” inspired the rapper Ol’ Dirty Bastard. (Not for nothing is Wu-tang Clan producer RZA presenting Yuen with his lifetime achievement award — the crew’s names and lyrics were heavily influenced by ’70s and ’80s martial arts movies, many of them in which Yuen had a hand. And a fist. And a foot.
“This is what my father taught me,” Yuen says. ” He wold being me to the sets and for many years, this was all I knew how to do. But once you are on the set for years and years, you learn from others how to be a director. You experience things you cannot learn in schools.”
Read the rest of the interview after the jump.
Yuen says the script for “True Legend” attracted him. “It had a really good emotional story,” Yuen says, more or less, through an extremely hard-working interpreter. “The emotional corruption, the man coming back to find his national identity, this was important.” But Yuen added in the notion of the character becoming the Drunken Fist master. “I think that made it better,” Yuen says.
The fighting in “True Legend” moves from style to style and set piece to set piece, some strictly combat, some blended with CGI weapons. “I tried to put some strict dance patterns into the drunken fist action to make it more appealing to modern audiences,” Yuen said.
“If I am doing the choreography for my own films, I get to design all the sequences by myself,” Yuen said, “If I work with another director, I have to get to know what the directors ideas are and work them into the fights.
Fights are always based on the character’s personality rather than a desire to work a certain style into the film. “If the person is more moderate, the style is more moderate,” Yuen says. “If he is bad guy, the style is more evil. The style always follows the characters.”
Yuen is best known in the West for his work in the Matrix and Kill Bill. The jaw-dropping fight between Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne in the first Matrix was the first time many Westerners had ever seen Yuen’s work in action.
“Western actors usually have no knowledge of martial arts,” Yuen says, “I usually have to do four months of training for specific actors. With Chinese actors in Hong Kong, I gets to take the camera myself and shoot. In the West, I have to write a run down and give it to the director. There’s more preperation for the Western films.”
So which series is more authentic Yuen? ” Both major films (The Matrix and Kill Bill) represent my style,” Yuen said. “With the Matrix, I got to combine choreography with computer generated special effects. In Kill Bill, I there was more straight-forward violence because that is Tarentino’s style.”
And he’s not don. “Now, I think my movie ‘Iron Monkey’ is pretty good but at that time, I thought this is the best movie I will make. Once I worked on ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,’ which is a different style, I thought that will be my best. Now I think it is ‘True Legend.’ I get more new ideas and different styles. I just try to improve myself, to do more and more.”
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