WONG KAR-WAI - GRANDMASTER FIGHT SCENE
Wong Kar-wai tells the story of martial arts legend.
Conquering the kung-fu movie genre for the first time in his career, and with the same sense of yearning and sensuous melancholy that made his previous work so powerful. Epic Film !
" Originally, we were going to shoot this scene first, and we were going to shoot in winter. Then lead actor Tony Leung broke his left arm during rehearsal. When you’re actually shooting, there are small protections, but sometimes during rehearsal you forget to wear them. We couldn’t afford to stop, so we moved the production to the North of China, and shot three months there, and came back to the South. By then, Tony’s recovered, so we can shoot the scene. But it’s getting hot now, and we know it’s going to be a long shoot. So we thought, Maybe it’s a good idea to have some rain, so you don’t feel that hot. But that caused a lot of trouble.
It was actually freezing, with all that rain. It was terrible. But what the rain also gave us something really rich. Because Wing Chun is not actually very eye-pleasing; it’s too straightforward, too simple. The only thing you can emphasize is its directness, and also its power. And with the rain, with something constant, when you shoot it at, like, 500 frames per second, you can actually see how these raindrops interact with the actions, and it’s very beautiful.
This scene is not about violence. I want to introduce the audience to this man, at this time. This is not a fight for anything — it’s more like a playground, to refine his technique, because you always have challenges as a martial artist. When we look at the background of Ip Man, he’s not just a street fighter, he’s from a very rich family. So that’s why I wanted to make him different from the rest of the fighters and give him this white hat, which gives some flair, some humor ". ~ Wong Kar-Wai