Jet Li’s Fearless
Directed by Ronny Yu
Ronny Yu has practiced cinematic scare tactics in films like Bride of Chucky and Frankie vs. Jason. The Hong Kong-based director was also slated to pilot Snakes on a Plane, but opted out when Plane producers refused to let him kill off Sam Jackson mid-script. That freed him up to move on to direct Jet Li’s final (so they say) martial arts movie. In Jet Li’s Fearless, master horror flick-maker Yu makes a huge departure from his usual genre game, and puts a unique spin on formulaic martial arts yarns.
“I think of Fearless as my graduation thesis,” says Yu. “I grew up watching martial arts movies. I love them, know what’s fascinating about them, but I also see what’s wrong with them.”
“There’s been so much change in style from early martial arts movies up until now. Then production values weren’t great, and directors didn’t pay attention to story. A lot of people who watch the DVDs fast forward to fights … I didn’t want to make that movie. Fearless is Ronnie Yu’s point of view about martial arts movies, and how people should perceive martial arts.”
MERIN: What are the biggest differences?
YU: Well, we—me and Jet Li—wanted to show the true nature of Chinese Wushu, so audiences understand it isn’t just about competition and form and technique and revenge and violence and negativity.
Actually the word Wushu is formed from two Chinese characters: one means “stop” and the other means “fight.”
So, Wushu is really meant to avoid conflict. It embraces body, soul and mind, and is a means of finding health and harmony.
The usual kung fu chop socky movies misinterpret it, make it a medium for violence. For me, that’s depressing because Chinese Wushu’s part of our culture, like painting and calligraphy.
I didn’t want quick cuts showing fighters flying around everywhere. I wanted to do the real Chinese Wushu movie, letting audiences appreciate the art—see one punch clearly, one kick, and feel the spirit behind them.
In Wushu and other martial arts, chi, energy, flows fluidly through the body. It’s amazing that you express that fluidity on film—a medium structured by cuts and edits. How did you accomplish this?
We shot it that way. For example, in the shot on the hill top, I used three cameras on long tracks, and told Jet to forget the choreography and just do his stuff, going back to when he was six or eight with his master teaching him—to go to that state of mind and follow his heart and I’d follow him. We did one take. Jet asked if we should do another, but I said, “No, this is the truth, and we won’t get it again.”
Why did you avoid using CGI in Jet’s fight sequences?
That’s the flow of technology, not the individual. I wanted to show Jet. You cannot fool the camera, and what you see is all Jet. He’s really the only one who can do the traditional Wushu, and I wanted to capture him on film. It’s all his movement, no cuts, no editing. It’s spontaneous, not choreographed. Every kick comes from his spirit, his chi. That’s the beauty of Chinese Wushu. Everything Jet learned practicing Chinese Wushu for the past 30 years—the philosophy and spirit, as well as form and technique—he poured into this movie. He’s 43. Every bone in his body’s been broken, so he doesn’t know how long he can perform at this level so audiences can appreciate the graciousness and poetry of Chinese Wushu. After we finished the movie, Jet told me that I have a mission to explain this to everyone.
Fearless is the story of Huo Yuanjia, the real, live man who transformed Wushu from an exclusive clannish practice to a more widely accessible sport. How does your script change his story?
This isn’t Huo Yuanjia’s biography. We used his chronology to a degree, and that he opened an academy to teach Wushu to all sorts of students. And we kept true to his philosophy—that Chinese Wushu’s part of our culture and we shouldn’t be arrogant or selfish in the way we practice it. The rest is fabricated—a simple man’s life journey of how he’s misguided, tries to run from responsibility, then finds enlightenment in a farming village. Why a farm? Because we Chinese started as farmers. And I always remembered seeing The Good Earth—with Hollywood stars pretending to be Chinese—about Chinese farmers breaking their backs working but sharing their rewards with others, and the respect that they had for nature.
That’s my inspiration: to put Huo Yuanjia in a farm village, where he sees other things in life that are more meaningful than being a champion fighter. He learns from the blind girl that there’s much more to life—like the air you breathe, the work you do. Then he expresses that in Chinese Wushu.
Do you think Americans misinterpret Chinese martial arts?
It isn’t Americans. It’s the Hong Kong or Chinese filmmakers—because we planted the seed with kung fu movies. We made them so simple, so stereotypical. We thought we had a goldmine: Western people are fascinated by Chinese martial arts because it’s so different and has so much variety. So forget story and character, and give them action action, action about revenge—easy to understand, but total laziness. It’s wrong. But now we’re grown up, and we can present different types of movies showing different perspectives.
