How difficult was it working in a foreign language and genre?
I shared the writing of this with a number of colleagues - translators who were tending to the language. It's a 5000 year-old language and there's a lot going on that I'll never get. I'm not a native Chinese speaker, and it wasn't a genre I had a particular affinity for, even as a nerdy film buff.
How do the emotional sequences fit alongside the fabulous fight sequences?
I very much equated it with opera. I said to Ang: "We're working at a very high pitch here." Just like opera, which is very high culture, it's also very corny. Let's not be cynical about this. If someone says: "With my dying breath, I want to say I love you," I'm not cynical... I bought it myself. And that was important. The emotions of this film are working at a very high level, very choreographed. This is not "The Ice Storm".
Where does the film fit in the martial arts genre?
There's no such thing as just a martial arts film. The genre itself, as we understand it, is a collection of many different kinds of genres. If you look back to some of the great Mandarin efforts of the Sixties - people like King Hu who made "Touch of Zen" - there was a moment in the history of the martial arts film that represented its height at this time, before Bruce Lee came and really kicked the shit out of it. This time was very much associated with a classical, traditional, more Northern Chinese Mandarin-speaking, very historically orientated culture. It was a class act. Ang making this film doesn't go back to King Hu. There isn't an enormous sense of patro-lineage there, but there is a sense in which he's deriving a lot of what his film does from strands that were already nestled in tradition.
Read a review of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon".
Read an interview with "Crouching Tiger" star Michelle Yeoh.
Read an interview with "Crouching Tiger" director Ang Lee.
Will "Crouching Tiger" increase the popularity of foreign language cinema?
