IRON MONKEY

About The Production
In 1993, top Hong Kong film producer Tsui Hark sought out a new challenge. The producer's revival of a number of popular characters from earlier films and serial fiction had reinvented Hong Kong Cinema, but he wanted to breathe life into a lesser-known character. The most successful of his projects by far was the Once Upon a Time in China series. (The series was responsible for Jet Li's rise to fame for his portrayal of Wong Fei-hong, a real-life, turn-of-the-century martial artist and patriot.) He met his challenge in both adding a new dimension to the screen life of Wong Fei-hong, and in breathing life into the Iron Monkey.

"After the Once Upon a Time films became successful," explains actor Donnie Yen, "Tsui thought it would be fun to use the childhood of Wong Fei-hong to re-introduce another potential franchise character, the Iron Monkey. The Iron Monkey was not a real person like Wong Fei-hong. He was a sort of Chinese Robin Hood. There was a legend and I think some novels. There had only been one movie about him in the 1970s."

But soon there would be another, directed by the 30-year-veteran of Hong Kong action cinema Yuen Wo Ping. Yuen Wo Ping is known as the man responsible for Jackie Chan's rise to stardom in 1978's DRUNKEN MASTER, and as the choreographer of the intensely beautiful sequences in CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON and heart stopping action sequences in THE MATRIX.

Very few facts are known about the real-life Wong Fei-hong. He was born in Guangdong (Canton) in Southern China in 1847. His father, Wong Kei-ying, was a legendary figure in his own right, one of the original Ten Tigers of Canton, a group of loyalist students of the Shaolin Temple who adhered staunchly to the martial arts training school's altruistic principles---even after the Temple was demolished by imperial conspirators. Wong Fei-hong continued to live in Guangdong until his death in 1928 at the age of seventy-seven. He established a local militia, became famous for his skill as a Lion Dancer, and founded a Kung Fu school.

However, like many heroes of the American West, Wong Fei-hong's fictional exploits - as depicted in both pulp novels and on the silver screen - eclipsed his actual achievements. In fact, he has been the leading "white hat" hero in Cantonese-language cinema since the late 1940s, and the protagonist of a series of ninety-nine black-and-white B-movies.

The very first Wong Fei-hong film, Whiplash Snuffs the Candle Flame, was released in 1949. As portrayed by Kwan Tak-hing, Wong was (according to critic Lau Shing-hon) "an ideal ethical model, embodying the Confucian virtues of wisdom, benevolence and courage. He is a strict sifu to his disciples, a paragon of self-restraint who has recourse to violence only when nothing else is possible, and a pillar of morality who resists advances from women."

Shanghai-born actor and martial arts choreographer Simon Yuen Siu-tin was one of the performers who worked regularly on the series, and who soon recruited five of his twelve talented children (all "home schooled" by Simon himself) as stunt men and bit players on the series.

The oldest of the chosen five was Yuen "I learned everything I know from my father," he declares. "My father was the first person who worked out how to choreograph movements in martial arts movies so that they looked beautiful."

The Wong Fei-hong films were low-budget "quickies," filmed on three-week schedules at a rate of up to six installments a year, until an aging Kwan Tak-hing decided to retire in 1968. "The budgets were very low," Yuen Wo Ping recalls, "so we did things as fast as we could. All the kids who were there were experts, more or less, they had all been studying their moves. But they only got one or two tries in front of the camera. If it didn't come out quite right the director would just say 'Good enough' and then move on. Sometimes we didn't have time to plan anything and we would just fight amongst ourselves."

Throughout the 1960s, Yuen Wo Ping rose steadily in the ranks as a Hong Kong movie stuntman, and by the end of the decade he was playing significant supporting roles at Shaw Brothers, the city's top studio. But Yuen began to wonder, he says, "if there was any future for me as a stunt man. I might be able to work until I was thirty, and then my career would start to decline. I saw some of the senior stunt men I worked with become fight choreographers and then directors, and that made more sense to me."

Shaw Brothers reigning martial arts director at the time was Chang Cheh, who made films with ferocious titles like The One-Armed Swordsman and Vengeance. "In those days everybody was copying Chang Cheh," Yuen recalls. "I thought I could make an impression by taking the opposite approach, by making the movies lighter or even humorous."

Yuen's first opportunity to put this fresh idea into practice arose a few years later, when he went to work for rising young producer, Ng See-yuen, as a Martial Arts Choreographer. Impressed with his work, Ng offered Yuen the opportunity to helm a new action film he was preparing, a Kung Fu picture with a comic edge called Snake in the Eagle's Shadow. The film was a great success, propelling star Jackie Chan toward his current eminence as Hong Kong's most famous export since Bruce Lee, and establishing Yuen Wo Ping as one of the local industry's top action directors.

Over the next decade, Yuen directed one hit after another. It was a heady period for martial arts films, as two groups of ambitious young filmmakers egged each other on to increasingly sensational accomplishments. (One of these groups was the Yuen Family Clan, headed by Wo Ping, while the other coalesced around Sammo Hung, who had been Jackie Chan's dailo - "older brother" - at a draconian Beijing Opera school in Hong Kong.)

Donnie Yen joined the Yuen Clan as a stunt man in 1983 before making his acting debut in Wo Ping's Drunken Tai Chi in 1984.

"There was a lot of macho behavior involved. I guess it's the nature of competition, when there's a strong rivalry between two groups." Yen recalls of the fiercely competitive attitudes of the period. "We would brag that we didn't need any padding. We would really fight and kick each other across the room. There was not much plot in those films so all you did was fight from beginning to end. We literally got up at 6 AM, when the sun came up, and fought until sundown. We might spend all day working out ideas for a scene, until Master Yuen said, 'OK, I like that part'. Then we put it on film. There was a saying we had: 'You go into the studio vertical and you come out horizontal.'"

In addition to inspiring some of the most exciting action movies ever made, this period of intense competition in the 1980s also produced a pool of highly-trained and disciplined craftsman whose influence on cinema is still being felt---not just in Hong Kong but around the world. "It's a really interesting story," Yen agrees, "how all these people, Jackie and Sammo and Master Yuen, started off in Beijing Opera and have now influenced all of filmmaking. Ten years ago Hong Kong films were a joke to the US movie industry. Now all of sudden we are the main influence on how action is done here. It's unbelievable."

Yuen Wo Ping moved on to contemporary urban action pictures like Tiger Cage (1988) and its three sequels, all starring Donnie Yen. Period martial arts pictures had a renaissance, however, beginning with the success of Tsui Hark's Once Upon a Time in China in 1991. And with the unique expertise he had acquired, Master Yuen Wo Ping was a natural choice to choreograph the martial arts sequences in Once Upon a Time in China 2 the following year. When Tsui decided to explore hero Wong Fei-hong's boyhood in Iron Monkey, Yuen was tapped to direct.

The producer and director each contributed a top star who they knew from their own stable of performers. Tsui had placed Mainland Chinese actor Yu Ruang-guang under contract after seeing his work in Ching Siu-tung's A Terracotta Warrior, which Tsui had produced on location in China in 1990. Yu won the title role as the Iron Monkey while Master Yuen's protegé Donnie Yen was cast as Canton Tiger Wong Kei-ying, Fei-hong's father and first teacher.

Tsui's nontraditional casting decision was a bold one: A young girl, Tsang Sze-man, was selected to play Wong Fei-hong as a young boy. As Yen recalls, "Tsui wanted a very likable, softer look for Wong Fei-hong. He didn't want to have this real masculine tough guy kid in the film. But it also had to be someone who was able to perform martial arts, and this girl was already competing in wushu tournaments. Also it's just one of the gimmicks that Tsui Hark likes to bring to the table. He had a man playing a woman in A Chinese Ghost Story and a woman (Lin Ching-hsia) playing a man in the Swordsman films. It had become a sort of trademark."

Several roles in Iron Monkey went to other members of the fabled Yuen Clan. Wo Ping's younger brother "Sunny" Yuen Shuh-yi, was cast as Chief Fox, the corrupt local governor's head security officer, who ultimately sides with the Iron Monkey and Wong Kei-ying against his own boss. Sunny Yuen appeared in several of his brother's films, most frequently as an imposing villain: he was as an evil Taoist priest in Miracle Fighter (1982), and a kung fu serial killer in Beijing Opera make-up in Dreadnaught (1981), in which Kwan Tak-hing appeared for the last time as Wong Fei-hong.

Thanks to Tsui Hark, who co-wrote the script, Iron Monkey had a much more intricate storyline than earlier films in this genre. And Yuen Wo Ping had matured as a director. "He had much more of a temper in the old days," Yen remembers "He would bang his head against the wall and yell. But on this film he was like a different person, very easy-going. Times had changed, the old harsh sifu style of director had gone out of fashion, and Master Yuen adapted to that."

One thing Yuen had not lost, however, was his zeal for perfectionism. Iron Monkey was budgeted at US$2.3 million, a large amount by Hong Kong standards, and Yuen spent most of the money to buy the time to carefully execute his vision, stretching the shooting schedule to three full months.

"He always manipulates every little detail," Yen says. "An actor can be drinking tea in a scene and he wants to embellish that. He wants to do something physical, something gimmicky, and something entertaining. I would ask him, 'Shouldn't we save this idea for next time?' And he would say, "You never save. You give it all, and then you think of something new.' Nowadays people think of this as the Hong Kong movie spirit, but Master Yuen was one of the pioneers. He influenced the entire Hong Kong industry."

In the wake of The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Yuen Wo Ping has been recognized as the world's preeminent living exponent of a stunt technique that was refined to perfection in the high-flying Mandarin-language swordplay films produced in Hong Kong in the 1950s and '60s. In an interview published last year, Crouching Tiger's producer and screenwriter James Schamus described the hand-suspension method known as "wire work" from personal observation:

"Imagine putting on a corset, a heavy canvas corset with a bunch of metal cables attached, and getting strung 75 feet up in the air while hanging from a crane. The crane is just an arm supporting wires on pulleys that are being manipulated by five guys wearing construction gloves. They have to maneuver in synch, both with the other cranes and with a team that is pulling another set of wires, attached to a different actor who is whipping through the air only a few feet away. One slip up, just two or three steps in the wrong direction, and someone could get really badly hurt."

Donnie Yen admits to some mixed feelings about the technique. "As a trained martial artist," he says, "I prefer a more solid interpretation on screen. But as a filmmaker it really depends on the plot and the themes. There are several different genres in Hong Kong martial arts movies. If it's a modern-day kung fu film, like the Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan pictures, you want something very grounded and realistic. But if it's pure old style wu hsia film, like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon---those films are fantasies. The characters are really superheroes. Iron Monkey fits somewhere in between those two types."

Representing the "Shadow Legs Kick" on screen proved a major challenge for the filmmakers. Jet Li, who had just played Wong Fei-hong in the first two Once Upon a Time in China films, had already executed a crowd-pleasing version of the Shadow Legs Kick. Yen remembers getting together for lunch with Yuen Wo Ping just to discuss the problem:

"How can you represent something on screen that is supposed to be so fast that it cannot be seen? The technique was so well known that we couldn't leave it out, but how could we improve upon what Jet Li had done? Master Yuen had the idea that it was Wong Fei-hong's father who would do the kick, as if he later taught this to his son. And I thought we could improve on the way it was presented visually. In Once Upon a Time, Tsui Hark used quick cuts shot from various angles. I thought we could do it all in one shot, by manipulating the camera speed and the performances."

In the end, the highly effective Shadow Legs Kick in Iron Monkey was achieved with a very simple technique, though meticulously choreographed and photographed: Yen was shot with the camera under-cranked to speed up his movements, while the stuntmen playing his opponents reacted to the blows with exaggerated slowness. On film they appeared to be moving at normally. "The extra speed seems to be all in my legs," Yen explains. "It worked out pretty well and people seem to like it."

The Shadow Legs Kick was the first of two groundbreaking sequences in the film. Donnie Yen gratefully recalls his appreciation for shifts in safety standards when shooting the films breathtaking finale: "When we did the fight on the burning poles for the final sequence," Yen says, "we actually had special effects guys with gas pipes who could turn the fire on and off. That was unheard of. In the old days with Master Yuen it would have been a real fire! On Drunken Tai Chi there were real flames coming right at my face. I got third degree burns on both arms. Even in Hong Kong the stuntmen don't put up with that anymore." The result of Yuen Wo Ping's careful consideration is evident in what is considered one of the best sequences in the history of Hong Kong Cinema.

Yuen's focus, both as a martial arts choreographer and as a director, has shifted away from verité displays of brute force to balletic, superhuman displays of strength and power. "I want to bring out the aestheticism of the art form," he says, "because I really believe that this is a type of art. I want to bring out its beauty by incorporating dance movements, so that the elegance of the gestures can be seen more clearly."

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