 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

 Made in 2000  Directed by Ang Lee  Also directed Sense & Sensibility and Brokeback Mountain  Chow Yun-Fat as Master Li Mu Bai  Also in Pirates of the Carribean: At World’s End  Michelle Yeah as Yu Shu Lien  Also in Tomorrow Never Dies  Ziyi Zhang as Jen Yu  Also in Hero and Rush Hour 2  Budget est. at $15 mil.  Grossed over $128 mil.  Jet Li originally cast as Li Mu Bai, but wanted to do Romeo Must Die instead.  Romeo Must Die grossed only $56 mil.

 Ziyi Zhang studied caligraphy for several months.  Michelle Yeoh didn’t speak Mandarin, lines were written phonetically.  Michelle Yeoh strained her ACL during fight sequence  Became first foreign language film to earn over $100 mil. In the USA.  Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon refers to a proverb that says to hide your strength from others.  Woo-ping Yuen was the fight coordinator who also did The Matrix.  Tan Dun only had two weeks to compose the music.  An adaptation of the fourth novel in a pentalogy by noted kung-fu novelist Du Lu Wang.

 Holds record for most Oscars nomintations for a foreign film (10)  Won Art Direction, Cinematography, Foreign Language, and Original Score.  Four main actors all spoke Mandarin but with different accents.  #10 in Hong Kong Film Awards list of 100 best Chinese Films (2005)  According to Tawainese newspaper there was an earlier edition of the novel made in  Swordsmith who made the movie swords is a neighbor of Ang Lee’s in Taiwan.  According to stamped documents presented at the city-gate the fictional time period is 1778 somewhere in June or July

 Ziyi Zhang had never had any official martial arts training at all. She used her dance experience to learn the martial arts.  This is the only martial arts film to date to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture.  If you listen to the night-watchmen during the first fight scene you can accurately tell what time it is. They indicate this with a series of knocks on clappers/rods.