Hero was a bona fide hit in theaters! Find out what went into making this Chinese martial arts film a success — and why its successor House of Flying Daggers didn't fare so well.
Zhang Yi-mou directed three well-received motion pictures — Red Sorghum (1987), Ju Dou (1990) and Raise the Red Lantern (1991) — and even though the latter two were Cannes Film Festival award nominees, the Chinese film auteur didn’t attract mainstream attention in the West until he tried his hand at the martial arts. Specifically, it wasn't until 2002 when he made Hero, which stars Jet Li and Donnie Yen.
The irony about Zhang's ascendancy into the worldwide wu xia film craze is that he never saw a Bruce Lee movie until 1979. And as of 2004, he’d watched only 15 martial arts films, one of them being his second wu xia film House of Flying Daggers (2004).
"It's not that I don't like the films," Zhang said when I interviewed him in 2004. "But growing up during the Cultural Revolution, we never saw these films, and it wasn't until film school that I learned about Bruce Lee movies and watched wu xia films."
Rather than making a film adaptation of a work from Chinese literature, Zhang spent three years developing an original story for Hero. However, just as he was about to start shooting, Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) was released. That caused Zhang to shelve the project.
"I was concerned that people would always think that I was trying to emulate Lee and have Hero be China's answer to Taiwan's Crouching Tiger," Zhang said.
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Fortunately, Jet Li persuaded Zhang to resurrect the Hero project and finish the film. In the movie, which boasted a $17-million budget, Donnie Yen plays Lone Sky Iron Shield, part of a trio of assassins trying to kill Emperor Qin Shi Huang Di, the infamous dynastic figure who fought to unify China during the third century B.C. (He’s the historical figure whose burial site is guarded by 8,000 life-size terracotta warriors near the Chinese city of Xian.) Jet Li plays Qin's bodyguard. "I loved the script so much that when I finished reading it, I cried twice because my character Nameless has strong feelings about what's going on,” Jet Li told me before heading to China to film. “In my career, it's the first script that made me cry. It's an incredible story where drama is first and action is there to help the story."