Compiled by BEH YUEN HUI, TRACY GUNAPALAN and R. ARAVINTHAN
AWARD-winning director Ang Lee said he felt like “killing” actors Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh while filming the box-office hit Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, major Chinese dailies reported.
Admitting it was the most difficult movie he had ever made, he said the stars’ poor Mandarin added another obstacle to an already challenging process.
Lee explained that he was attempting to combine Eastern and Western cultures into a global product and had repeatedly revised the lines with the American and Chinese screenwriters.
“Many lines were written a week or just days before shooting.
“The process was already very arduous. (Then) we had two artistes whose Mandarin was very bad.
“What could I do? There was no time for them to practise.
“I felt like killing them, but even that wouldn’t help,” he told an audience.
Lee was speaking to the crowd at a special screening in New York, where 14 of his works were shown at a film retrospective hosted by the Asia Society.
On the rise of short videos, he said there is a need to stop recycling ideas and remaking old films.
“We’re starting to think like AI, losing our sense of humanity.
“We need to upgrade our films so people return to theatres. I don’t want TikTok to take over,” he added.
The above articles are compiled from the vernacular newspapers (Bahasa Malaysia, Chinese and Tamil dailies). As such, stories are grouped according to the respective language/medium. Where a paragraph begins with a >, it denotes a separate news item.
