Women on the Verge of a Breakthrough

Standing in a wind-swept Chinese desert, Michelle Yeoh is stared down by a fiendish, thin-whiskered man who snidely remarks, “When it comes to martial arts, men are better than women. When it comes to having children, well, that’s another matter. Go home and bear some children.”

Within seconds, she lets loose a blitzkrieg of furious kicks, punches and somersaults, not only proving him wrong, but also leaving him a yelping, helpless heap.

So much for his theory on a woman’s place in martial arts.

If you missed Yeoh in that 1994 Hong Kong film, “Wing Chun,” don’t worry, you can watch her prowess next month in Ang Lee’s much anticipated “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” The film, a martial arts romantic fantasy, features three generations of women--Yeoh, Cheng Pei Pei, the first female martial arts star in Hong Kong, and newcomer Zhang Ziyi--flying in the air, scaling walls, leaping buildings and dueling with 40-pound swords.

Women kicking butt--stylishly, charmingly and, yes, lethally--is very much in vogue now. “Crouching Tiger” is one of a number of recent movies and TV shows featuring women as the action heroines. From Carrie-Anne Moss of “The Matrix” to the trio (Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz and Lucy Liu) of the new blockbuster hit “Charlie’s Angels” to TV’s “Dark Angel” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”--being strong, athletic and feminine are no longer seen as contradictions.

But in Hong Kong, tough and attractive women have long been a staple of cinema. Before Jackie Chan, Jet Li--even Bruce Lee--women like Cheng Pei Pei were igniting the silver screen with their martial arts wizardry, often running circles around their hapless male counterparts. Known as “the Queen of Martial Arts,” Cheng starred in the groundbreaking 1965 film “Come Drink With Me.” That film paved the way for scores of other Hong Kong movies starring women, including “The Heroic Trio”--a 1992 Hong Kong version of “Charlie’s Angels”--and the supernatural “Bride With White Hair” in 1993. “In the classic martial arts movies, you needed to show not only the soft and pretty side, but also an energy. That is the mix people love to watch,” Cheng said recently on a visit to Los Angeles, reflecting on her many action films and her career as a martial arts maven. “If you only act tough, then it’s like you are a man. Women came in and did things differently. Martial arts uses women really well, but you have to make people think that you can really fight. You can’t just put sexy bodies there.”

Sexy bodies, of course, help. But the true female warrior must be fear-inspiring, and that takes a lot of training.

“We had to be brought to a [top] physical level to do the martial arts,” said Diaz, who plays Natalie in “Charlie’s Angels.” “After practicing hundreds of kicks, we just kept building our strength, and it became more about how high and how powerful we could kick.”

Initially, Yuen Cheung Yan, the famed Hong Kong martial arts choreographer who worked on “Charlie’s Angels,” didn’t think the actresses could pull it off.

“In the beginning, I really had doubts,” said Cheung Yan. “They were in such pain that I thought, ‘Oh God, could they do this while shooting?’ But after one month, I saw the heart in these girls and that they really wanted to improve for me. I realized they even had the physical potential for it.”

The timing of a female breakthrough in action films couldn’t be better. In the U.S., the popularity of female athletes, such as the women’s soccer team players and Olympic track star Marion Jones, showed that women could appeal to the public as much for their physical ability as their feminine attributes.

Meanwhile, male action stars who had dominated in the ‘80s, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis, were aging. Their style of bloody, high-body-count action was losing favor--especially in post-Columbine Hollywood. (Indeed, one of the prerequisites of Barrymore and Diaz’s involvement in “Charlie’s Angels” was that the women not use guns.)

With the success of “Charlie’s Angels,” it seems likely that more women will be cast in leading action roles. There’s talk of Jennifer Lopez starring in the film “Enough” as a battered wife who defends herself from her abusive husband by learning martial arts.

“It was bound to happen,” said producer Lauren Shuler Donner, who produced “X-Men” and, along with husband Richard Donner, the “Lethal Weapon” series. “Don’t forget Sigourney Weaver [‘Aliens’] and Linda Hamilton [‘The Terminator’] were two of the first. I know studios feel we need a male action lead but . . . it’s a matter of time before they realize that given a strong female lead, audiences will go and see it.”

With “Crouching Tiger,” director Ang Lee said he wanted to move away from what had become a “macho genre” and transform it into a story-driven action fantasy led by women.

“I wanted to take a journey through these women’s emotions,” he said in a telephone interview from Sweden, where he is promoting the film. “I felt it was important to bring back old-fashioned storytelling, and the best way to do it was through the emotional lives of the women in my film. Luckily, we had the best choreographers available, so we got to have the best of both worlds: the new standards of martial arts with what I hope is an unprecedented level of storytelling in the genre.”

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Behind every warrior, female or male, there is a master--or in this case, two.

The Yuen brothers, Wo Ping and Cheung Yan, are the film world’s reigning martial arts experts, having brought their elaborately choreographed Hong Kong tradition of cinematic fighting to Hollywood. Their style, what Wo Ping calls “poetry in motion,” has evolved from pure street-fighting kung fu to a more sophisticated, stylized look that sometimes entails elements of the fantastic.

It was Wo Ping who taught Moss how to sail through the air in her skin-tight rubber outfit in “The Matrix”; in “Crouching Tiger,” he taught Yeoh, Cheng and Zhang how to dance in the air, giving swordplay an almost mystical, ephemeral quality.

It was Cheung Yan who brought out a never-before-seen toughness in the willowy Diaz, the bubbly Barrymore and the stern Liu. Their sex-kitten/”tough chick’ appeal has proved itself at the box office with the movie grossing more than $75 million in its first two weeks.

The brothers say they enjoy bringing the female warrior to life on film and hope it is more than a passing fad in Hollywood. In their native Hong Kong and mainland China, after all, women have always played central roles in classic martial arts films and legendary tales.

“Throughout history there have been a lot of heroines who kick butt and stand up for justice,” said Wo Ping. “And what is great is that they fight really hard, but on the flip side they are also women, a good wife and industrious at home.”

They are not surprised by the buzz that women in action movies have stirred in Hollywood. “It’s just very difficult to find women who have the looks and the skill to fight,” said Wo Ping. “But the ones who have both will make it big.”

Wo Ping and Cheung Yan, short, with bony hands and chiseled faces, are in their late and mid-50s respectively. They are part of one of the most revered families in Hong Kong cinema; their father, Yuen Siu Tin, is one of the pioneers in the martial arts film world--an actor, director, choreographer and, in his youth, a stuntman. Eight of his 12 children work in martial arts. Although Wo Ping and Cheung Yan, the two eldest brothers, are gentle in spirit (their names mean Peace and Kind Heart, respectively), they radiate an intensity of men born into an important and rigorous tradition.

To learn their craft, they endured brutal disciplinary methods.

Beatings were commonplace. Stretching exercises that would nearly break their bodies were routine. Every day, from the age of 10, Wo Ping and Cheung Yan would train in the morning with their father. In the afternoon, they would go to another master--who also trained Jackie Chan. The brothers spent nearly 12 hours a day perfecting their art form, leaving no time for a formal education.

“The old days were not as advanced. It was pretty backward,” Cheung Yan said during a phone interview from Hong Kong. “In China and Hong Kong, there were more poor people who could not afford to send their children to school. Parents would find them a master and would say, ‘OK, you go and train with the master.’ The masters were very, very strict. Back then, there were no laws protecting children.

“Now there are laws protecting children, which is good for the children but bad for the art form. . . . If you were not disciplined or if you tried to ‘steal’ laziness, the master would beat you.”

As teenagers, the brothers joined their father doing stunt work on sets. Both brothers broke into directing in the late 1970s, with Wo Ping directing Chan in his 1978 hit “The Drunken Master.” The film, which also starred Wo Ping’s father, was one of the first to combine comedy and kung fu, and helped make Chan a star.

“Early on, there were films where there seemed to be a lot of violence, a lot of blood, a lot of action,” recalled Wo Ping. “I wanted to show movies with some humor so people could watch and be happy and see the poetry in motion. I wanted people to see the humor and also to see the power. With Jackie Chan, I knew he had the moves down no matter what, but he also has a humorous side which I wanted to show.”

In 1991, Cheung Yan shared the best action director award at the Hong Kong Film Festival for “Once Upon a Time in China,” the film that made Jet Li a star. Later, Wo Ping was plucked by Warner Bros. to work on “The Matrix,” and Cheung Yan followed with his work on Sony’s “Charlie’s Angels.”

Working in Hollywood has been a learning experience for the brothers. For example, they’ve been surprised by the amount of time Hollywood filmmakers take in pre- and post-production. Hong Kong film-industry product is pumped out assembly-line style. Because Hong Kong filmmakers do not have the luxury of large special-effects budgets, they make up for it with spontaneous action and sophisticated martial arts choreography.

“In Hong Kong, they are often rolling the camera as they are thinking of the next move,” said Cheung Yan. “The actors have the techniques down, and the choreographers are familiar with how to film them so as to make them look good on camera.”

Nothing--not even wild special effects--can replace technique and choreography, said Cheung Yan.

“If someone is a good fighter but has no acting experience, the choreographer can adjust around him to what he has,” he said. “It is true that good kung fu fighting may not look good on camera. On the other hand, you can have a good actor who does not have real fighting skills but can make it up with a good feel. Ideally it is the combination of people like Jackie Chan and Jet Li. They are both phenomenal fighters and great filmmakers.”

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Though the rigorous training methods are the same regardless of gender, finding the next great female martial arts star is generally harder than discovering a male talent, said Wo Ping.

“A man can be ugly and fight well and audiences will watch him,” said Wo Ping, who directed Yeoh in “Wing Chun.” “With women, there is much more involved. It takes a woman who can take a beating. It takes a great toll on your body with the sparring, running through walls and collisions.”

Women bring something special and different to the martial arts. Their style is more graceful, balletic, and tends to be more defensive in nature. In Hong Kong films, the female warriors are usually minding their own business until a man dares them to a duel, insults them or attacks them. For the most part, female warriors don’t kill--unless they have to.

The first martial arts director to cast a woman in the lead was the legendary King Hu, who revolutionized the look of martial arts film, not only with faster editing and a varied use of camera angles, but also in the style of martial arts. When Hu spotted Cheng Pei Pei at a Beijing stage performance in the early 1960s, he knew he had found his leading lady.

“When he saw me dance, he said he wanted to do martial arts like my dance,” recalled Cheng. “He wanted to make a movie that was not just like a Chinese opera. He wanted some fighting that was real, with some power.”

Cheng seemed a natural for the part, not only because of her stature--she’s 5 feet 7, unusually tall for a Chinese woman--but also for her beauty. In “Come Drink With Me,” Cheng played an undercover warrior in one of China’s dynastic periods who duels 20 or 30 men at a time. She fought with long-blade knives, swords and poisonous darts. She scaled walls and leaped over buildings. In her battle scenes, she always had an elegant rhythm to her movement, never taking her eyes off her opponents.

The villainous witch in Lee’s “Crouching Tiger” was the first film role in 30 years for Cheng, who had retired to raise three daughters. In “Crouching Tiger,” the fight scenes are reminiscent of her 1965 debut. Not only are females the protagonists, but the film also revived the old tradition of the wuxia pian--or film of martial chivalry--where honor, loyalty and duty collide with passion, desire and revenge--themes King Hu used in some of his films as well.

When Cheng began her career, she had to learn how to look like a convincing fighter. She was brought from Beijing to Hong Kong, where King Hu’s company trained her in horseback riding, swordsmanship and knife-throwing.

“In a movie, the action is bigger,” she said. “When you kick, you kick high and it looks very pretty. Then you put powder [on the target] so the powder comes out and looks like you kicked hard. Or you do the splits [in the air]. In a real fight, you can never do the splits.”

Her training sessions were grueling, but not nearly as bad for her as for some of the men who did not have a background in dance.

“I was ballet-trained, so I was very lucky,” noted Cheng. “If you were not flexible, they would have you hold your leg up, maybe against a wall or something, straight to hit your nose. And then they would light an incense and you would have to hold that position until the incense finished. If I had been trained like that, I think I would have failed.”

Most Hong Kong martial artists usually have experience in dance, rhythmic gymnastics or kung fu, and it usually takes at least six months of rigorous training to get the moves down. But with most films, the masters have only a couple of months to train the stars.

In the case of “Charlie’s Angels,” Cheung Yan had three months to prepare the women, who had some background in dance, but very little in kung fu or even gymnastics.

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The “Angels” trained in an old gymnasium at the Park Plaza Hotel in New York for six hours a day, doing kicks, leaps, somersaults and wire work before filming began. They had pulleys hold their legs sideways, inching up as close to their heads as physically possible. They held a seated “horse stance”--as if sitting without a chair--for 60 seconds at a time.

Indeed, there were many moments when the actresses doubted their own ability and would break down in tears.

“You are going through so much pain, you are thinking, ‘What is going on?’ ” said Diaz. “[Cheung Yan] was watching us every step of the way. He would notice who was hitting their leg higher, who had more strength.” And no one would receive positive feedback, because it is Chinese tradition not to give praise during training.

Cheung Yan would insist on doing a scene over and over until the precise movement was down. He has so much film experience that he could remember exactly when the best kick or punch took place in a series of 100 takes, for example, said Diaz.

Over three days, Barrymore did at least 70 takes each day of a scene where she leaps from a chair with her hands tied behind her back. She was so exhausted that she could only look wearily at Cheung Yan for a sign of encouragement. Knowing that Barrymore needed some sort of support to push through the pain, he looked at her and gave her a thumbs-up, and finally, after so many takes, she got it right.

Barrymore said she would try to fight through the pain of the horse stance by imagining herself somewhere else. “I would picture myself in a glass bubble deep inside the ocean and I only had a straw to breathe from,” said the actress, adding only half-jokingly, “If I just kept breathing, I would survive. If I stopped breathing, I would die.”

Cheng says her role in “Crouching Tiger” has revived her career. Recently, she starred in a Chinese movie with her Santa Monica-based daughter, Eugenia, who has also learned the martial arts. Now that her family obligations are complete, Cheng says, she can return to doing what she gave up decades ago.

“[In ‘Crouching Tiger’] I felt like I was going back to the old times,” said Cheng. “It’s something I had missed all these years.” *