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When it comes to independent film stalwarts, James
Schamus has worked with some of the biggest. For Ed Burns’
breakthrough film, The Brothers McMullen, Schamus served
as executive producer and he helped to produce that film’s
follow-up, She’s The One. He has also worked alongside
Todd Solondz, again as executive producer, on his much-talked-about
film Happiness. Yet, one can’t think of Schamus without
immediately thinking of director Ang Lee. Schamus holds the rare
distinction of having collaborated on all of Ang Lee’s feature films,
serving as either producer, co- or executive producer or screenwriter,
beginning with Lee’s debut feature film Pushing Hands. High
points of this collaboration include co-writing the art house hits Eat Drink Man Woman and The Wedding Banquet; adapting
Rick Moody’s novel The Ice Storm (which won Best Screenplay
at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival); writing the Civil War epic Ride
with the Devil; and, most recently, co-writing the martial arts
film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. In a MovieMaker interview,
Schamus shares how he tackled the martial arts genre, worked with
his Chinese counterparts to fine-tune his Western sensibility, and
what it feels like to have taken part in a film that seems likely
to become the first Chinese blockbuster.
MovieMaker: How familiar were you
both with the Chinese classical culture and Kung Fu movie tradition
of Hong Kong when you first started working on the (Crouching
Tiger, Hidden Dragon) script?
James Schamus: I had read a lot of classical
Chinese literature in translation and I had seen a lot of the classical
wuxia pian as well as Kung Fu movies. I felt as if I knew what I
was doing when I sat down and started working on the screenplay,
but it turns out I was completely wrong. In fact it was an enormous
learning curve working on this screenplay. When I began I was culturally
tone deaf. And, to a certain extent was able to use my own ignorance
as something of a strength.
MM: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was originally a Chinese novel. How close did you stay to the original
text when creating the screenplay?
JS: The original text is a five-volume
novel written about 75 years ago in Chinese, so I can honestly say
I don’t know because I didn’t read it. It was never translated.
Ang worked for about a month and half on a summary of the novel.
He just pulled out the elements from the novel-which goes on
for thousands of pages-that he was most interested in focusing
on. So I think, unless we were going to make a 200-hour mini series,
it would have been impossible to be faithful to the book. At the
same time I think I ended up being rather faithful to those parts
of the book that Ang was really interested in seeing make their
way to the screen.
MM: Is it true that the script was
tailored to an American sensibility rather than a Chinese one?
JS: I wouldn’t put it that way. We wanted
to make a quintessentially Chinese film that could speak to worldwide
audiences in much the same way that Hollywood makes quintessentially
American films that speak to worldwide audiences. The film embraces
its international audiences, I hope, with the same amount of generosity
that Hollywood films often have toward worldwide audiences. So,
rather than making a kind of Hollywood version of a Chinese movie,
I think we ended up making a Chinese version of an international
blockbuster.
MM: In Crouching Tiger, Hidden
Dragon, you worked with two other screenwriters. Can you tell
me a little about this collaboration?
JS: It was basically a great amount
of back and forth, especially with Wang Hui Ling, who added so much
to my first draft in terms of the kind of cultural specificity,
nuance, and sense of propriety that was lacking.
MM: Being a martial arts film, Crouching
Tiger, Hidden Dragon is filled with fight scenes. How do you
write such high-flying action into the script?
JS: In the first draft we would have
all the dialogue up until the fight and then I would write the following
words: THEY FIGHT! At the beginning of the script, I wrote a little
paragraph that said ‘Even though the fight sequences are not
written in the script, you can rest assured that they’ll be the
greatest fight sequences ever in the history of cinema.’
MM: Wasn’t that difficult on
the actors, though, the fact that their lines had to be worked directly
into the fights on set?
JS: Sometimes, yes. It’s a venerable
part of the wuxia pian genre for fighters to pause and exchange
dialogue of various kinds. In American movies, when people start
fighting, it’s because they are so angry they want to kill somebody.
That’s how Americans fight. By then they’re just screaming and their
veins are coming out their foreheads. But in the wuxia pian genre
you fight usually rather reluctantly, and usually you’re engaged
both emotionally and philosophically. So what was difficult for
the actors in this film was that they were required, in our fight
scenes, to really act… In Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,
very few of the fights are between people who actually want to kill
each other. The fights function in a very different way from most
martial arts films, even. They try to teach each other, or learn
more about each other, or figure out a way to stop somebody from
doing something they shouldn’t do for their own good.
MM: What kind of reception do you
expect for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon?
JS: One of the great things about being
a writer and producer is that you don’t have to be a prognosticator
of future events, but I can point out what it’s doing in its first
week in Western release. It just opened in France last week, and
I believe the proper term for its release would be a blockbuster!
Number 1 in Paris; just probably the biggest runaway hit for a non-English
or French-language film maybe ever in the history of France. So
we’re feeling very confident.
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