Cory Yuen and So Close
Born in Hong Kong in 1951, Yuen was a classmate of Chan’s at the now-infamous China Drama Academy, a draconian Beijing Opera school in Hong Kong, where a generation of martial arts greats (including Yuen Biao and “big brother” Sammo Hung) was literally slapped and beaten into shape. In his autobiography, I Am Jackie Chan, the star notes that “Yuen Kwai [his Chinese name] was one of my best friends at the school [and] my match when it came to making trouble.”
As it turned out, Yuen and Chan were part of the Drama Academy’s final graduating class, and by that time, in the late 1960s, Beijing Opera was a dying art form. Academy graduates put their skills to work in movies, as stuntmen, fight choreographers, and if they were very lucky as performers and directors. Yuen was one of the lucky ones.
“I never wanted to be a movie star,” he insists, speaking through a translator from New York, an early stop on the press tour for his snazzy new “girls with guns” action picture, So Close (2002), which opens this week in Los Angeles. “I started out working as a stunt man on martial arts films, at [top Hong Kong studios like] Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest. I figured out right away that unless you are a really big star, it is always the director who’s in charge.”
Apart from obvious giants such as Sammo Hung and Yuan Woo-ping, Cory Yuen has few peers in the highly specialized field of martial arts choreography and direction. And he is second to none in terms of the sheer inventiveness of his action set pieces. There is a fine example in So Close, a knock-down three-way fight that takes place inside a cramped and steamy elevator car. Just figuring out where to put all the arms and legs and cameras in a scene like that must have required the cinematic equivalent of a differential equation.
Like a lot of recent Hong Kong films in these tough economic times, the production of So Close was financed by foreign-based company (Columbia Pictures Asia) and carefully assembled to appeal to a pan-Asian audience: The cast includes a trio of top Chinese actresses, one each from Taiwan (Transporter co-star Shu Qi), Hong Kong (Karen Mok), and the People’s Republic of China (Vicky Zhao Wei), along with a callow young leading man from South Korea (Song Seoung-heon) and a glowering bad guy from Japan (Yusuaki Kurata).
And while Yuen dismisses attempts pigeonhole So Close as a “Hong Kong Charlie’s Angels,” he admits that the success of that 2002 all-female action flick helped to convince his backers that Westerners might finally be coming to terms with the so-called “Girls With Guns” movie, a sub-genre that Yuen pioneered in the mid-1980s. He had one of his first major hits as a director launching the career of latter-day Crouching Tiger-star Michelle Yeoh in the pioneering female-cop action picture Yes, Madam! (1986).
At the time his hard-edged approach to staging the fight sequences was innovative even for Hong Kong; fans still talk about the shot in which Yeoh did a back flip through a plate glass window. But now, Yuen suggests, even wimpy Americans might be ready for something a little stronger: “If you look at The Matrix or Charlie’s Angels, it seems that American men are more comfortable now watching women who can fight. Perhaps before they felt somewhat threatened?”
Over the years, Yuen has been an action movie innovator in several areas. He was one of the first HK action directors to take on an English-language project, the 1985 Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle No Retreat, No Surrender. And he has directed several key Jet Li films, including the fan-favorite Fong Sei-yuk (1993) and has choreographed the martial arts sequences in all of Li’s American movies, from the performer’s debut in Lethal Weapon 4 (1998) to his hard edged turn in this year’s Cradle 2 the Grave.
Yuen has also taken his act on the road to Europe, working on two films for director-turned-producer Luc Besson, arranging fights for the Paris-based Li vehicle Kiss of the Dragon (2001), then staying on to direct Jason Statham and Shu Qi in the blistering car chase thriller The Transporter (2002).
To a large extent, of course, this is what the acknowledged masters of martial arts cinema almost always do now: they circle the globe working as “wired guns,” helping clueless Westerners fake the quicksilver look of a slam-bang Asian martial arts picture. They draw upon the specialized experience of several decades to make people who can’t fight look as if they can. The irony is that this approach is now increasingly necessary even in Hong Kong, on productions like So Close.
Like most of the younger breed of Hong Kong film stars, not one of this film’s extremely photogenic actresses had any martial arts training. Very few people, it seems, are now willing to subject themselves (or their children) to the quasi-military training required to mold a child into a Jackie Chan, a Sammo Hung, or a Cory Yuen. As Chan observed in a recent interview, “You couldn’t open a school like [The China Drama Academy] now. Someone would sue you.”
It’s no wonder Chan announced plans last year to open a “movie martial arts” school in Hong Kong, offering instruction not only in classic fighting techniques but in specialized crafts such as stunt choreography and Crouching Tiger-style wire work. It’s a project that Cory Yuen strongly endorses. “Training is the key,” he says, “but most people don’t want to work that hard anymore.”
One of the few places where the necessary work ethic survives, apparently, is in mainland China, where the government sponsored, non-combat form of acrobatic martial arts known as wushu still attracts many aspirants, youngsters looking to become the next Jet Li, the wushu system’s most famous graduate. Nowadays, Yuen says, most actual training occurs on the job, when aspirants join the “stunt team” of an established master. And Yuen now recruits 2/3 of his apprentices from the mainland.
Luckily, at least for Cory Yuen, action isn’t the whole story. “I believe that the action should always be secondary to the story,” he says. “In Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the fighting grows out of what is happening between the characters. And foe example in my film My Father is a Hero [aka. The Enforcer, 1995], the main thing is the relationship between the father, played by Jet Li, and the young boy. The fighting is a side dish. It is an accent or an enhancement. The main dish is something else.”