Yuen Woo Ping has made Jet Li, Keanu and Uma fly through the air. RYAN PEARSON on the martial arts choreographer wizard.
Not many guys can boss Jet Li around and have him smile about it. Yuen Woo Ping can. (AP Photo/HO/Courtesy of Rogue Pictures/Chen Jinquan)
And this is for your bad taste in shorts. (AP Photo/HO/Courtesy of Rogue Pictures/Chen Jinquan)
Jet Li kicks it with Yuen Woo Ping's guidance in "Jet Li's Fearless." (AP Photo/HO/Courtesy of Rogue Pictures/Chen Jinquan)
Yuen Woo Ping shows Jet Li how it's done. (AP Photo/HO/Courtesy of Rogue Pictures/Chen Jinquan)
Imagine Fred Astaire's longtime collaborator Hermes Pan, jazz-dance legend Bob Fosse, and contemporary genre-crossing master Twyla Tharp all rolled into one.
Yuen Woo Ping is that guy -- a choreographer wielding their combined influence over his own chosen field with quiet authority. Now in his 60s, Yuen dominates martial arts action from behind the scenes.
He has precision-guided the genre's stars to balletic heights.
Yuen directed Jackie Chan's 1978 breakout hit "Drunken Master" and Sammo Hung's "Magnificent Butcher" the next year. He linked up with Jet Li as action choreographer for 1991's "Once Upon a Time in China" and the influential "Fist of Legend" three years later. The two have paired for eight movies overall, including "Jet Li's Fearless," released Friday.
"He still is the top guy in the world. He always does it the best," Li said.
The Wachowski brothers were the first to invite Yuen from Hong Kong to Hollywood, for 1999's "The Matrix." He made Keanu Reeves fly and introduced many mainstream Western audiences to qing gong, in which the rules of gravity are suspended for combat. Yuen even made Uma Thurman look hard-core with elegant slicing and dicing in Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill" movies.
The fantastical qing gong style appears regularly in wuxia films, particularly 2000's successful, star-studded "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," which Yuen also choreographed. Any character can turn into Superman at any moment. Battles are engaged mid-air, sheer walls are scaled like stairs, quivering and delicate tree branches hold the weight of two people.
"Audiences just want to see something different," said Ronny Yu, the Hong Kong-based director of "Fearless." "It's the fascination that people can fly and fight in mid-air. The beauty of the movement, in a way it's very romantic. That's why it caught on in the Western world."
In "Fearless" -- described as Li's final martial arts epic -- Yuen's trademark moments of "lightness" are sudden and exhilarating.
During one fight, Li is knocked off a tall platform. While nearly horizontal, he grabs its edge and flips himself back on. When he's pushed from a boxing ring, he grabs the top rope with a hand, and puts a foot on a post to bounce smoothly in the opposite direction.
To their benefit, such moves are brief and powerful. They require suspended disbelief for just a split second. Then it's back to the brutal, more realistic on-the-ground battles, where Yuen and Yu focus on Li's expert footwork.
"Woo Ping shows the actor head to toe," Li said. "The whole body moves, and the action shots (are) real, as long as possible for the actor, not chopped. It's not just: the computer will edit it later."
While working on relatively low-budget Hong Kong films like "Fearless," Yuen doesn't plan out the fights in advance. That can cause problems on set.
"He doesn't storyboard. He only does it on the date that we shoot," Yu said. "That creates a lot of communication barrier, not only between the director, but all the departments. How many chairs do we make to be broken, how many swords?"
On major studio films like "The Matrix," though, producers hired full warehouses for months on end to allow him to experiment and plot out fight scenes blow by blow.
"We always say Woo Ping, you are lucky," Li said. In Hollywood, Li said, "they always give him the time to do what he needs to do."
Yuen, who speaks only Cantonese and was not available for an interview for this article, remained in Hong Kong for his next feature, a drama starring Ziyi Zhang titled "The Banquet." It is out now in China.
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asap staff reporter Ryan Pearson wants to have his fights choreographed by Yuen.
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