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The film is a kind of a dream of China, a China that probably never existed, except in my boyhood fantasies in Taiwan. Of course my childhood imagination was fired by the martial arts movies I grew up with and by the novels of romance and derring-do I read instead of doing my homework. That these two kinds of dreaming should come together now, in a film I was able to make in China, is a happy irony for me.
My team and I chose the most populist, if not popular, genre in film history - the Hong Kong martial arts film -- to tell our story, and we used this pop genre almost as a kind of a research instrument to explore the legacy of classical Chinese culture. We embraced the most mass of art forms and mixed it with the highest -- the secret martial arts as passed down over time in the great Taoist schools of training and of thought.
What is the Tao, the "way"? Of course, if you can say it, it's not the real Tao. It's enigmatic, in that it can only manifest itself through contradictions, through the conflicts of the heart rather than through the harmony it seeks. At least that was my experience of the Tao while making the movie! For example, the martial arts film is very masculine, but in the end or film finds its center in its women characters. It is the women who, in the end, are walking the path of the "way."
Another conflict was how to maintain a balance between the drama and the martial arts in the film. The film is not crafted in the realistic style, as my earlier films have been, but the emotions it conveys are real. So you will see that the drama is itself choreographed as a kind of martial art, while the fighting is never just kicking and punching, but is also a way for the characters to express their unique situation and feelings. At the same time, working with martial arts master Yuen Wo-Ping and his team allowed me to learn an abstract form of filmmaking, where the images and editing are like dance and music.
It was a tremendous privilege for me to make this movie.
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