Wong Kar Wai does kung fu in ‘The Grandmaster’

By Bob Strauss

Published on 08/19/2013 in Los Angeles Daily News

In recent years, Chinese martial arts master Ip Man has become almost as famous as his most celebrated student, Bruce Lee.

Of all the films made and stories told about Ip in the past decade, though, Wong Kar Wai’s “The Grandmaster” — which opens in area theaters today — stands apart.

That’s no surprise. Wong himself has long been a singular presence in Hong Kong’s deep ranks of talented filmmakers. While most of them excel at action and other popular genres, Wong is a world-renowned art film master, best known for such lushly gorgeous, stylistically complex and regretfully romantic movies as “Happy Together,” “In the Mood for Love” and “2046.”

All of his usual creative trademarks – revelatory voiceovers, memories taking over the screen, melancholy walks down night-emptied streets – can be found in “Grandmaster.” He’s even done an action film before, “Ashes of Time,” but he calls that a fantasy. The realistic emphasis on martial arts in “Grandmaster” is new for both him and, Wong claims, kung fu movies in general.

“Most martial arts films are about who is the better fighter,” Wong explained on a U.S. visit last month, wearing the ever-present sunglasses he said were designed by a Japanese samurai sword maker. “They’re always about skill, and sometimes they’re about revenge. But never do those films address the issue of the legacy.”

Wong, who spent six years researching and writing and three years filming “Grandmaster,” wanted as accurate a portrayal as he could get of various Chinese martial arts techniques. He traveled to remote parts of China and Taiwan to meet aging masters of assorted kung fu schools, a quest recorded in the documentary “The Road to the Grandmasters.”

To persuasively portray the Wing Chun school of fighting, Wong’s regular leading man, Tony Leung, who previously had no martial arts background, trained for three years. Zhang Ziyi, who proved her prowess in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” trained just as long in order to look like an expert practitioner of a different fighting school, Bagua.

When, after several false starts, it finally came time to shoot the movie at locations all across China, Wong brought on action choreographer and wire stunt expert Yuen Wo Ping (“Crouching Tiger,” “The Matrix”).

“He’s been involved in martial arts films with Jackie Chan, Jet Li and Donnie Yen, and he’s an amazing person, very supportive,” Wong noted. “But I made it very clear that I didn’t want anything against gravity and minimal wire work. I wanted it to be authentic.

“And I wanted to be very serious about each of the schools. I wanted to see the Northern schools, the Southern schools, and he looked at me and said, ‘Are you sure?’ Not until he came to our rehearsals did he realize I was serious. Until then, he was skeptical that the actors could perform.”

Similarly, Wong did not want any of the fictitious embellishments found in the Yen-starring series of Ip Man movies to pollute what he wanted to be a historically accurate portrait of the man.

“Other Ip Man movies happened after we announced ‘The Grandmaster’,” he recalls. “But I never really worried about it because most of those movies are more interested in Ip Man the hero, and sometimes they invented certain episodes in his life to make it more dramatic, like fighting with the Japanese and the Westerners. Mostly, this is not correct.

“ ‘The Grandmaster’ is very accurate,” Wong insists. “There’s only one element which is fictional, the character of Gong Er (played by Zhang.) There was no such person in his life. To me, the character is not only a remarkable woman, she was also a symbol of the time, like the Golden Time of Chinese martial arts. It’s almost like a paradise lost for Ip Man. So in a way, their last scene – the so-called Long Farewell – is the farewell of Ip Man towards his past. She’s not just a woman, she also represents a time, which is very important.”

Born into a wealthy family in the Southern Chinese city of Foshan in 1893, Ip devoted his time to the study of Wing Chun until the age of 40, when the invading Japanese took his house and fortune. After World War II, he and his family continued to live in poverty as the country plunged into civil war. Following the Communist victory over the Nationalists with whom he was associated, Ip fled to Hong Kong in 1950, never to see his wife and children again.

It was in the British Crown Colony that he eventually opened the Wing Chun school where Bruce Lee learned his moves.

Wong’s parents brought him from Shanghai to Hong Kong when he was 6. He was quickly fascinated with the huge kung fu culture there, but his mother refused to let him sign up for anything that could result in his head getting bashed in.

“I grew up on streets where there were several different schools, but I never had the chance to learn it,” Wong says with the longing for an unfulfilled past that runs through all of his best films. “So ‘The Grandmaster’ is a way for me to understand the mystery of Chinese martial arts, and why these traditions are so special and important among Chinese.”

Now, with Hong Kong and its once mighty film industry gradually being folded back into the Mainland’s embrace, Wong is seeing the world he’s known slip away.

“Of course, I’ve been affected,” he acknowledged. “If, today, you look for Hong Kong filmmakers you haven’t seen in a long time, you’d better go to Beijing. Ninety percent of the industry people are working on projects in China. You have to cope with their rules there, but it’s a bigger playground, you have more people and more resources. I don’t think collaboration is a bad thing.

“You have to deal with the censors,” he admitted. “But with a film like ‘Grandmaster,’ you don’t have any problems with them.”