At the time, Yen had no plans to be an actor. But as it happened, his mother had a connection to the Hong Kong kung fu director Yuen Woo-ping. (Yen’s mom had taught Yuen’s sister.) Yuen—known in Hollywood for his choreography on films such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; The Matrix; and Kill Bill—had helped to revive Jackie Chan’s career, directing the cult classics Drunken Master and Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow. “Yuen Woo-ping,” Yen says, “was trying to make another Jackie Chan.” Yen was heading back from Beijing to Boston to see his family but arranged to stop off in Hong Kong to audition. Yuen ended up signing Yen, then just 18 years old, to a three-year, multi-movie deal.
Suddenly, Yen found himself apprenticed to one of the great action directors of what might be the last golden age of kung fu filmmaking. At the time, Hong Kong cinema—as personified by Jackie Chan—was producing the most electrifying action movies in the world. Each studio was determined to outdo its rivals for the most elaborate action sequences and flat-out dangerous stunts. “There was the Yuen clan, the Jackie Chan clan, and the Sammo Hung clan,” Yen says. “It was very competitive…. We literally spent the entire day coming up with moves, and then Yuen Woo-ping would say, ‘Not cool enough.’ The entire day, without coming up with one shot.”
Those early films with Yuen provided Yen with a crash course in the art of making action movies. “You learn to be so precisely on point and accurate at every angle,” Yen says. “I know exactly where the camera is. If you place the camera over there, I already know exactly where the frame is.” Later, as Yen began to work on his own choreography, he learned to compose the film as he went, editing in his head, “so that when I move—okay, I move this way towards this medium shot, then I reserve this movement, four, five, and six, to the wider shot. I know seven, eight is going to be the close-up.” Yen demonstrates, throwing little blocks and jabs as if training at the wooden dummy. “I was able to perform like a robot.”
The Hong Kong studio system was a strict no bullshit environment. “It was old-school military,” Yen says. “When Yuen Woo-ping is talking, everybody would just listen. You’re not allowed to look at the camera. You’re not allowed to ask questions. That was the old Hong Kong way.” As Yen grew in confidence, he and Yuen would regularly fall out. “As an outspoken person, I always questioned,” Yen says. “ ‘Why do we do this? Why is it this way?’ [Yuen] said, ‘You’ll know when you’re a director.’ ”
Yen eventually started to exert more of his own control, first of stunt choreography, then assuming directing duties. At the time, the demand for martial arts movies was waning, and Yen was determined to innovate within a genre starting to grow stale. One question that had always bugged him, for example: Why doesn’t anybody miss? “Everything is so staged it’s fake,” he says. “And the rhythm—bop-bop-bop-bop—is perfectly timed. It doesn’t look real at all.”
Oliver Franklin-Wallis
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