The Martin Scorsese film Wong Kar-wai said has “the best action scenes in the history of cinema”
The cinematic offerings of Hong Kong’s Wong Kar-wai are rather hard to pin down. He certainly has his own unique artistic style, but it’s spread across a wide range of films in somewhat differing genres, from the emotional tenderness of In the Mood for Love and specific moments of Chungking Express to his takes on the wuxia and martial art genres, such as Ashes of Time and The Grandmaster, via his crime drama films like Fallen Angels and his debut As Tears Go By, the latter of which was inspired by Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets.
The Grandmaster is an exciting part of Wong’s filmography, though, because it’s based on the life of a real person, the Wing Chun martial arts master Ip Man. The film arrived in 2013 with Wong’s frequent collaborator Tony Leung playing the lead role, and though it didn’t become as well-known as some of Wong’s other movies in the West, it was highly considered in China and its surrounding nations.
Amazingly, Leung and the other members of Wong’s cast were actually trained in Wing Chun for several years in order to give the film an air of authenticity and as with his debut feature film As Tears Go By and Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, Wong was again inspired by his iconic American counterpart, although by one of his later films.
When the two filmmakers sat down together to discuss The Grandmaster, Wong admitted that he’d been inspired by Scorsese’s 1980 biographical sports drama Raging Bull, written by Paul Schrader, in which Robert De Niro portrays the former middleweight boxing champion, Jake LaMotta.
Wong told Scorsese: “It was a very hard process to do the action for this film and, in fact, when we were doing the choreography sequence, I always look at your sequence in Raging Bull with my Director of Photography because I think that it’s one of the best action scenes made in the history of cinema.”
“It bears no tricks besides special makeup and blood; basically, it’s a cinematic tool,” the Hong Kong auteur continued. “It’s a cinematic journey that is captured purely by camera and movement and action. [It’s] something we are looking for, not something just for excitement. You have to feel the pain and the substance of it.”
Scorsese then responded, “Amazing. I didn’t realise that”.
Wong is correct right in pointing out the fact that Raging Bull features some of the most impressively authentic moments of action ever caught on camera. The audience can feel every single blow that De Niro’s LaMotta gives and receives, and it’s easy to see why Wong might have had it in mind when he set about making The Grandmaster.
