by RIC MEYERS & CAROLINE VIE
2000

Chow Yun-fat knows it will take time and plenty of plum roles for American audiences to accept his unique talents.

Chow Yun-fat didn't really know kung-fu when he took over the role of a master martial artist in Ang Lee's new film, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon from Jet Li, who was occupied by the filming of Romeo Must Die. But then, Chow wasn't a master gunman when he arrived on the set of A Better Tomorrow, either.

The first time I ever laid eyes on Chow Yun-Fat was in 1986 Hong Kong, the day before John Woo's Triad Gangster masterpiece was to premiere. He looked out at me from a remarkably sedate movie poster, standing behind the majestic Ti Lung and the ultra-cool Leslie Cheung, with an "I know something you don't know" smile on his face. Turns out he was right. As I watched his remarkable performance in the only theater in Hong Kong or Kowloon that had an extra seat available, I witnessed his ascension from "box-office poison" to hometown superstar in a brilliantly brutal 96 minutes. From the moment he appeared on screen, buying a snack off an illegal food cart, then helping the hawker get away from an approaching cop, he all but announced his true arrival to the entertainment world.

But he wasn't done with the audience...not by a long shot. With the flick of his finger, rubbing it mischievously against Ti Lung's lips after the elder actor asks how the snack tastes, he establishes the pair's intense friendship, after which both men explode into laughter. This deft display of acting completed, the next indelible image is the sunglassed Chow's lighting of a cigarette with a counterfeit $100 bill, showcasing the ultimate in screen cool.

Still, he wasn't finished. His easy camaraderie and naturalness had revived his moribund screen career, but it was his style and emotion which cemented his superstardom in the subsequent sequence where he takes mistaken revenge for the framing and arrest of his mob "big brother."

Hollywood Here He Comes

It is a scene that remains seminal in his career - his smiling, slow-motion flirting with restaurant hostesses as he secretly drops 9mm automatics in potted plants lining the wall of a private dining room hallway...then the way his expression changes from leering charm to deadly seriousness as he approaches the door of his target's party.... It was a sequence that was to be repeatedly misunderstood as he made the transition to American films. His astonishing death scene — shot in the back of the head while berating Lung's younger cop brother to stop blaming his sibling for his own failures, but gently patting the cop's face before falling — was a stunningly fitting bookend to his earlier restaurant slaughter, setting the stage for many masterful action films to follow. But Chow, to his fans' delight and amazement, was not a one-shot pony, even in the rigid stereotypical typecasting for which the Hong Kong films were famous.

Certainly, he appeared in many action films as a variation on his groundbreaking "Better Tomorrow" character. After years of struggle, he was going to take advantage of his hard-won popularity. In fact, he starred in a staggering 23 movies over the next three years (11 in 1987 alone).

"That is my record, I think," he later told me. "I might work on three a day. More, maybe. It's hard to remember." Then he laughed. With that schedule, it wasn't surprising. But more important to him and his career, dotted among such great crime thrillers as City on Fire, A Better Tomorrow II, and Tiger on Beat, were romances, comedies, and dramas. Even though that really was unusual for a Hong Kong actor, Chow downplays it in his trademark humble fashion.

"The Hong Kong audience wants everything," he says. "So actors have to be able to do many things." That may be true, but only a very few have been cast in different types of films, and Chow has been the most successful in all of them. He made audiences cry in All About Ah-Long, laugh in The Fun, The Luck, and The Tycoon, gasp in Prison on Fire, and do all three in God of Gamblers and Treasure Hunt. When he finally left Hong Kong in 1995 to try his luck in America, he had starred in more than 60 films, and was that country's most popular non-kung-fu male star. "I have been very lucky," he says modestly.

Celebrating Chow

He was more than lucky to utterly charm an entire room of hardened New York reporters, which he did the second time I saw him, on the occasion of a special day in Manhattan, organized by Peter Chow. There he was feted in a press conference, party, and opening night of a Chow Yun-Fat film festival at the Cinema Village. "Acting questions you can ask me. Personal questions you can ask my wife, Jasmine," he joked. His American fans were already so voracious for his attention, that we were only able to spend a few minutes together. Having already witnessed Jackie Chan's rough road through the minefield of the American film market, I asked how his transition was going. Resisting his traditional manner of deflecting a difficult question with another question (such as "How do you think it should go?" or "What would you suggest?"), he smiled. "Every weekend I make breakfast with John (Woo), while our wives talk, and he instructs me on ...." Chow looked for the proper English phrase. "...The care and feeding of American movie executives?" I suggested. He laughed, and we changed the subject. The reason he touched audiences with even the most brutal of his characters was that he brought passion, compassion, emotion, and effort into his gunplay — four elements that were virtually alien to American action stars, who gave the impression it was the easiest thing in the world to pull a trigger. "I truly admire Alain Delon and Robert DeNiro," he said, but even they didn't communicate the power and fear of gunplay the way he did in such film festival, video, and cable favorites as John Woo's The Killer and Hard Boiled. That oversight was clear in his first American effort, The Replacement Killers, which established him as an unsmiling, uncharming, nearly mystical macho hitman in the very first scene - trying to capture the style of the "Better Tomorrow" slaughter with none of the content.

Out Of Character

We met again at the premiere of Godzilla, where we now both knew how Hollywood could be as unforgiving as Hong Kong when it came to reducing fully developed characters into satires of themselves. Chow was looking for freedom from the archetype he had put to rest in Asia, but he found it on the Malaysian sets of Anna and the King, star Jodie Foster's and director Andy Tennant's songless remake of the true tale of Siam which inspired The King and I. "I sometimes get tired of carrying guns," Chow says, "and it was great to be able to make myself known in Hollywood for something else than action. People tend to forget that I did many dramas and comedies in Hong Kong. It was a good way to remind them." True to his character, however, Chow downplayed his ascension to the royal role that stereotyped Yul Brynner for the rest of his career. When asked how he secured the part, Chow laughed. "I think it's because I have black hair, a thick Chinese accent and yellow skin. I didn't even have to act!" Of course, he was still being modest. He was lucky the producers didn't make him shave his head, to make him more similar to the bald Brynner. "This version is more modern," Chow maintains. "It was important to show the Siamese in a more serious and respectful way. That's what I like in this new version. It's less of a comedy, and the relationship between the King and Anna is more adult and believable." Ironically, the head shaving would come next, as he traveled back to China to co-star with ex-Tomorrow Never Dies Bond girl Michelle Yeoh in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Here the ironies would be rampant, as this was Ang Lee's first mainland martial arts epic, after a filmography of serious dramas in Asia, Canada, and the U.S. (the most prominent being Sense and Sensibility and The Ice Storm). Who would have thought that the actor's and director's first pairing would be on an action movie, and a kung-fu film at that?

Gunman Hits The Mark

Hailed as the world's finest screen gunman, Chow had scant experience with movie wushu, except for a role in his "box-office poison" days as a kung-fu conman who met an untimely end from an incognito ninja in the incongruously titled The Postman Strikes Back (starring "Thundering Mantis" Liang Chia-yen and directed by Bride With White Hair and Bride of Chucky helmer Ronny Yu). Chow has scant memories of that 1982 flick, but according to him, it was his Tiger/Dragon co-stars who were the real martial arts masters, while he was a mere sword and dance man.

"The shooting was hard because I had to do some stunts myself and to learn fencing," he reveals. "But I think it's going to be great as it's Ang Lee's comeback in China. It was shot mostly in Beijing with Michelle Yeoh and Zhang Zhi-yi as two woman warriors of the 19th century. There will be a lot of martial arts as Yuen Woo-Ping did the choreography for the fighting scenes. He's now quite popular in Hollywood because of The Matrix." And Chow is quite popular in Hollywood, as well as the rest of America, because audiences and critics alike applauded his charisma and charm as Anna's King Mongkut. Chow, himself, has nothing but fond memories of the experience. "Jodie Foster is a great actress and we got along quite well. Of course, I was a great admirer of hers before actually working with her, and I wasn't disappointed. She's a nice woman and has a great sense of humor. The children were great! As for the King's many wives, it was fun as an idea but I don't thing I'd be able to put up with it. I guess that's why Chinese kings used to die so young. I don't think my wife would like that idea either...!"

Everyone, however, loves the idea of Chow teaming up with the man who helped make him a superstar, John Woo, whom Chow attributes much of Hong Kong cinema's success in America. Film fans, especially, have clamored for a reteaming ever since both men set foot on American shores. And while Chow understands that his Hollywood weekend breakfast mate might be more in demand than he might, both men look forward to that day as well. "I have a rule not to mention any project before I actually sign a contract," he hints, "but I might work again with John Woo when he finishes Mission: Impossible-2 and the war movie he's scheduled to do afterwards. I'm looking forward to working with him again." As are we all, but until then, Chow continues to make his way from gunman to swordsman and beyond. With his skill, talent, intelligence, and charisma being even greater than his cooperation and modesty, he will most likely become the versatile star here that he was in Hong Kong. "It's harder to make yourself known here," he admits, "but things have worked out quite well for me. I've been very lucky. But I know that I'm still a newcomer and I'm not a superstar yet. I still have to pay my dues."

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