From the beginning, the film seemed cursed. "We started shooting in the Gobi Desert," Ang Lee recalls. "That night, the crew got lost in the desert and it wasn't until 7 a.m. that we found them. We delayed shooting until 2 p.m. After the second shot, a sandstorm came in." halfway through the shoot, cast and crew looked like survivors of the Long March, with no Tiananmen Square triumph in sight. "We shot around the clock with two teams," says the 45-year-old director, dimpled but unsmiling. "I didn't take one break in eight months, not even for half a day. I was miserable — I just didn't have the extra energy to be happy. Near the end, I could hardly breathe; I thought I was about to have a stroke. It was bad. Six months later, I'm still resting now, trying to get fit again. But since I'm middle-aged, I'll probably never come back to normal."

The gentle listener wants to shout: "It's only a movie, Ang." But people working on even the lamest film know it's never only a movie. So much is at stake. So many egos, fragments of an artistic vision or commercial ambition, battling like Qing Dynasty swordsmasters. It's amazing — not that a film emerges from this mix of summer camp and boot camp, but that the combatants survive and come back for more.

Now consider the cinematic and emotional vectors converging in Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. A $15 million action movie and a poignant tragic romance. A fight choreographer, Yuen Wo-ping, who had won international acclaim for his work on The Matrix and was bound to tangle with the soft-spoken, hard-to-budge Lee. A top-flight, all-Asian cast, with Chow Yun-fat (Chinese Hong Kong), Michelle Yeoh (Malaysia), Zhang Ziyi (Chinese Beijing) and Chang Chen (Chinese Taiwan). Only one of the cast — Zhang, then a 19-year-old ingénue — spoke anything like the mainland Mandarin that Lee demanded. (Lee, also raised in Chinese Taiwan, didn't speak it either.) At least these dangers were built into the scenario. What no one expected was that Yeoh would break her knee and need a month's rehab, or that it would rain sheets in the Gobi.

As the sage said: dying is easy, filmmaking is hard. But everyone was so serious on Crouching Tiger because Lee, who made his reputation with adult dramas-of-manners like The Wedding Banquet and Sense and Sensibility, had a child inside screaming to get out. He was finally ready to pay homage to his lifelong ardor for martial arts novels and pictures. He had made beautiful films; now he would bend his considerable artistry to make a movie. And nothing only about it.

Based on part of a Wang Dulu novel that runs to several volumes and thousands of pages, the script concerns the theft of a sword, the Green Destiny. This is the holy weapon of Li Mubai (Chow), a noble and expert warrior. Looking for peace in his later days, he entrusts the sword to Yu Shulien (Yeoh), a gifted martial artist with whom he shares an unspoken love. Then Jen (Zhang), daughter of a political bigwig, arrives, and everything tips off-balance. The wiser, more cautious adults are both drawn to and upset by Jen's avidity for rare toys like the Green Destiny. They are also suspicious of her governess (Cheng Peipei), who bears a resemblance to Jade Fox, a ruthless thief and the killer of Li Mubai's master. And then one night, the sword disappears.

The Green Destiny is what Hitchcock called the MacGuffin: the object that kickstarts the adventure and puts everyone in frantic, purposeful motion. In Crouching Tiger, that motion has its own poetry; for these semi-gods and demidevils have a buoyancy to match their gravity. The film's first action scene, with Shulien chasing the sword's thief (who, we soon learn, is Jen), sets the tone and the rules. The two fight hand-to-hand and foot-to-foot, with elbows at the ready. Jen suddenly floats up, as if on the helium of her young arrogance, and cantors up and down the courtyard walls as if they were velvet carpets, with Shulien in graceful pursuit. Jen executes a squat spin, then rises like a vertical dervish and escapes.

At its screenings in Cannes, this scene was greeted with spontaneous applause, even from those professional misanthropes, the critics. From that moment on, Crouching Tiger had the Riviera swells in its pocket. They gasped with glee as Jen and Jade Fox soared into the night (Who does that? Angels and witches). They misted up at the friendship of Mubai and Shulien, two brave warriors who haven't quite the courage to say I love you. They happily took the film's 20-minute detour to the Gobi, where in a flashback Jen meets her bandit beau Lo (Chang) and makes love with the spontaneity of a first-time tryst. At the end, they sobbed farewell to an old friend who gives a beautiful valediction.

To West viewers, Crouching Tiger has the tang of novelty. But Asian moviegoers, especially those of Lee's age, need no scholarship to plumb the lore of martial arts, or wuxia (knightly chivalry). In the '60s and early '70s young men came to maturity watching sabre-rattling heroes of both sexes in such classics as Chang Cheh's The Golden Swallow and King Hu's epic A Touch of Zen. Some of the Crouching set-pieces, like Jen's one-woman stand against half a dozen marauders at an inn, are echoes of more recent films; Yeoh herself laid righteous waste to many a hostelry (in Tai Chi Master, etc.). But as a newly illustrated memory book of youthful obsession, the movie has its roots in films of 30 years ago.

In A Touch of Zen, the knights prudently do battle under bamboo trees. Lee had the inspired — or crackpot — idea to stage the fight between Mubai and Jen on the tree's branches. Says Zhang: "I had to swing up and down, swirl and remember to try and act, all at the same time." Chow was grateful to the action director: "Wo-ping gave me as much protection as he could. He knows I'm not a martial arts man. And when you're hanging 60 feet up in the air in a bamboo forest, you need protection."

When he thinks about the scene, Lee is both chagrined and giddy. "It's nuts," he says. "It's sexy. Nobody wanted to do it. And there's a reason why people don't do that: because it's almost impossible! The first three days of shooting we did were a complete waste of time. There were 20 or 30 guys below the actors trying to make them float. It was just chaotic." Finally it worked: a scene so buoyant that the audience roars and soars along with the stars.

In other martial-arts scenes, it was Yuen, the old action pro, who had to bring Lee back to earth. "Ang would say he didn't want to shoot things the Wo-ping way because it was an Ang Lee movie," Chow recalls. "But his ideas couldn't be worked out in reality. Finally, he'd go to Wo-ping and say 'Master, I'm wrong. Let's do it your way now.'" Lee doesn't dispute this account of his Method martial artistry. "I wanted kung fu to be a dramatic experience as well as a performing experience," he says. "I wanted action, suspense and emotion — and those are almost contradictory things. I'd fantasized about this since boyhood. And I was full of ideas, but a lot of them weren't feasible or didn't look good. It was difficult for Wo-ping and distracting to the actors."

Lee is a visionary and a perfectionist; the movie he's directing rarely measures up to the one in his mind's eye. "The art of film," he says, "is the art of regret." So he fights for what he can get, which is often more than his colleagues can freely give. "Detail by detail, we had to find a way to make things work. And the actors aren't machines. After a few takes they're worn out. Then you're doing Take 31, and things are getting worse instead of better." Yet Lee's doggedness impressed and inspired at least one participant: Yeoh. "Usually when we do martial arts," she says, "we shift the focus — the action becomes everything. But here there's such a balance. It's emotional, it's dramatic. It transcends everything."

Lee might not like to compromise, but he has to adapt. He had first thought of Jet Li, he of the flying feet and dour demeanor, as Li Mubai. When Chow took the role, the action scenes were reduced but the character ripened. And, at times, what seems like a disappointment can be a sweet surprise. That was the revelation of Zhang Ziyi.

For all its pan-Asian star power, the movie depends on Jen and the actress who plays her. When first seen, Jen seems lovely but unformed, a dreamy adventuress who wants the freedom of the heroes she reads about. In one sense, she's the spoiled rich girl with a racing emotional motor. She aches for the forbidden thrill because she knows she would like it. Gradually, though, Jen (or, rather, Zhang) reveals the steel will beneath her silky ways — and a more toxic, intoxicating beauty. On the cusp of womanhood, she could tumble either way: become a fearless heroine or a ferocious harlot. We know that she is guilty of one theft: she steals the film.

Everything is pretty in movies, but nothing is easy. And that includes Zhang's immersion into the character. She got to know the actor who would play her demon lover because, as Chang says, "We took acting lessons before we started the parts, so we were familiar with each other before shooting started." Lee's pre-production instructions to the young actor were simple: eat. "My biggest task was to put on weight, as the director said I was too skinny." (He bulked up fine; he's halfway to hunkdom.)

But Lee had stricter demands of his starlet. "For a time," he says, "she was nowhere near where I thought Jen should be. But when you can't get something to work, you improvise. If the mountain doesn't turn around, make the world turn around. So we made the character closer to her until there was a meeting in the middle. We veered the movie toward her. She is very sexy and we thought, sure, let's use that. It makes things start to happen. She is the most marvellous thing I've found."

Zhang Ziyi, though a game gal, was not schooled in martial arts, so lithe young stunt doubles, male and female, executed the more strenuous feats. "To find a good stunt-woman," Lee says, "is harder than finding a good wife." And to find a woman who is tops in stuntwork, acting and all-round allure is almost impossible. That's why Yeoh is so precious. On one good leg or two, she wore those wires, scaled those walls.

"I've waited 15 years to work with this guy," says Yeoh, who signed on early and accompanied Lee on some location scouting. "He's gentle and very emotional. During a sad scene at the end of the film, he kept telling me to do different things, and when he'd come over I saw he was red-eyed, teary. I could barely look at him. He gets so completely involved. And when he says, 'Good take,' after a shot, he really means it." For Lee, that was a great take. "I know those weren't 'acting' tears, they were real tears. It works, and it brought tears to my eyes. Michelle had to cry in every take, for five hours. At the end she was drained."

Lee drove Yeoh nearly to tears with his insistence on precise Mandarin speech. "I don't think I studied this hard even for exams," says the actress, whose family language was English. "Every single word needs the right intonation. I'd deliver a 16-line speech, get one word slightly wrong and Ang would say, 'Let's do it all again.' I'd say, 'Can't we just do the one word again?' 'No, let's do it all.' So many times I thought, 'I'm so stupid, I'm so stupid, why are you using me?' But it builds character. If you don't listen to Ang, then you're gonna do it again and again, so you'd better listen up."

After two Hollywood tough-guy films and a lovely turn as the King of Siam in The King and I, Chow was used to learning a new language with each script: "First English, then Thai, now this." But the experience was, as he says, "awful. The first day I had to do 28 takes just because of the language. That's never happened before in my life. It gave me a lot pressure."

So Chang and Zhang went to acting school; Chow and Yeoh crammed to speak Mandarin. And throughout, Lee was learning the limitations in the laws of stunt physics from Yuen. Movies, like life, are an education on the fly, with pop quizzes every moment. How apt, then that the theme of Crouching Tiger should be teaching. In this war of the generation, the adults are as eager to instruct the young as the kids to rebel against authority. And the wicked carry grievances for years. Jade Fox says she killed Mubai's master because "he would sleep with me but never teach me the secrets of wuxia"; and she bitterly resents Jen because the child hoarded martial lore for herself. Here, knowledge is power. And only the most powerful, like Mubai, can share it.

"She needs direction and training," Mubai says of Jen. Surely that is Ang Lee speaking. A film director is the ultimate father figure, doling out responsibility, praise and censure. On Crouching Tiger, Lee, who secured his early fame with the so-called Father Knows Best trilogy (Pushing Hands, The Wedding Banquet, Eat Drink Man Woman), was a father-teacher to Zhang the budding actress, to Yeoh the first-year Mandarin student, to Chow the man on the flying bamboo. And behind Lee was another family figure: the young Ang, mesmerized by tales of great fighters and images of impossible physical grace.

However much the middle-aged Ang Lee suffered in making this exquisite film, he should take a little pleasure knowing he helped realize the young Ang Lee's dream.

(from TIME， April， 2001)