Articles by Jean L

On Sunday night, Sep. 7, Films at the Gate will wrap up five nights of outdoor films with IRON MONKEY (1993) directed by Yuen Wo-ping. Yuen Wo-ping is one of Hong Kong’s most prolific and successful filmmakers. His father, Yuen Siu-tin, was a popular actor in the early kung fu movies, and Yuen Wo-ping has been acclaimed worldwide as one of the all-time top action directors. In 2001, while working on the MATRIX sequels, he discussed his work in IRON MONKEY with FATG programmer Jean Lukitsh. 

Q: How old were you when you started martial arts training? 

Yuen: I started learning martial arts at about 10 or 11 years old.

Q: And how old were you when you started to work in the Hong Kong film industry?

Yuen: I started in the film industry when I was about 18 or 19 years old.

Q: So this is pretty much your life’s work, practicing martial arts and making movies about martial arts?

Yuen: Yes.

Q: When you first started making your own movies, choreographing them and then directing them, what other choreographers or martial arts directors influenced and inspired you the most?

Yuen: Chang Cheh (Zhang Che) was the main person that affected me the most. Chang was the main director of the Shaw Brothers studio in Hong Kong. (note: Chang Cheh directed a number of prominent kung fu films in the 60s and 70s, including THE ONE ARMED BOXER, HEROES TWO, and FIVE VENOMS.)  

Q: Are there any directors from the West that you liked or influenced you? Or have you mainly been focused on Asian cinema?

Yuen: I feel my influences have been mainly through Asian cinema, mainly from China, Hong Kong, and other parts of Asia. Read the rest of this entry »

On Sunday night, Sep. 7, Films at the Gate will wrap up five nights of outdoor films with IRON MONKEY (1993) featuring Boston’s Donnie Yen. IRON MONKEY contains some of the best fighting sequences ever captured on film. Director Yuen Wo-ping and his team of hand-picked martial arts experts packed this movie with nonstop action, making it a virtual encyclopedia of classic kung fu moves. In 2001, Yen, longtime protege of Yuen Wo-ping, and “Yuen Clan” member, discussed the kung fu techniques on display in IRON MONKEY with Jean Lukitsh, Films at the Gate curator.

Q: Since the choreography in a Yuen Wo-ping film is usually the work of “the Yuen Clan”, perhaps you could explain what it was like to work in a Hong Kong martial arts/filmmaking clan at that time.  

Yen: I’ve been working with Yuen Wo-ping for many years. We have a very long mutual working relationship. For every project, we try to be as creative as possible. With IRON MONKEY, which was Yuen Wo-ping’s first directing project after working with Tsui Hark and Jet Li on the ONCE UPON A TIME IN CHINA series, we were going back to “traditional kung fu” style, which we hadn’t done since starting the TIGER CAGE series (1988). The challenge was to take the standard higher, give audiences something they hadn’t seen before.

We had meetings before we even started shooting. We decided to go back to the traditional martial arts choreography and film it the traditional way too. That means long shots, more movement seen, uncut, in one shot. We wanted to show genuine martial arts skill, on camera.

Yuen Wo-ping asked me, “What do you want to do this time?”, and I said I wanted to do real Hung Gar style. You know, there isn’t really any Hung Gar in ONCE UPON A TIME IN CHINA. But it was popular in the ‘70s, in the Shaw Brothers movies, for instance. And Yuen said, “Isn’t that outdated?” And I said, “Not the way I do it - I’ll use my own rhythm and flavor to interpret it.” Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to Jean Lukitsh, Films at the Gate curator, for sharing this entry about Chinatown’s old movie houses. More photos and theater memorabila here (via Flickr).

When I came to Boston in 1978, there were three Chinese-language movie theaters in Chinatown: the Star, the China, and the Pagoda. The Star, on Essex St. at Harrison Ave., and the China, on Beach St. near the Gate, were owned by Mr. Stanley Wong. The Pagoda was on Washington St. It’s now the Empire Garden restaurant.

One of the projectionists from the China studied tai chi with my teacher. I was looking for a job and I loved movies. Someone was leaving the Star in a couple of months, and I was able to take his place. That turned out to be the best job I ever had!

The Star was an old vaudeville theater that had been partitioned at some time into two side-by-side screens. The original theater was so big that the subdivided spaces were still sizable rooms. At first, only the left side was used. It showed movies from the giant Shaw Brothers studio in Hong Kong. Around 1983, the right side was restored and opened, and indie movies from Hong Kong, like the Cinema City and Film Workshop productions, ran there. The China, tucked under a parking garage where the Hei La Moon restaurant is now, specialized in Taiwanese films. From 1979 to 1986, I worked at both the Star and the China, running double features on all screens in programs that changed weekly.

The ones that made an impression on me back then were Lau Kar-leung’s kung fu epics like SHAOLIN MANTIS, 36TH CHAMBER OF SHAOLIN, and MY YOUNG AUNTIE, Shaw studio wuxia films like THE LADY HERMIT and JADE TIGER, and Jackie Chan’s early kung fu comedies: FEARLESS HYENA, DRUNKEN MASTER, and YOUNG MAS- TER. I have to confess, though, that those last two films played at the Pagoda. Not one of my boss’ theaters. But I went there, paid for a ticket, and spent my day off in a Chinese theater, watching yet another kung fu movie.

As little mom-and-pop video stores appeared all over Chinatown in the late 1980s, the theaters lost their audiences and closed down. It was cheaper for a whole family to rent a video instead of buying tickets. In some ways, the new video technology is good. It’s made Asian film available to a wider audience, and has helped to preserve old films that otherwise may disappear or be forgotten. But the community lost a space where people used to come together and sit for a couple of hours, see old friends and get caught up with each others’ lives.

Jean Lukitsh is the curator of the Films at the Gate series. Jean is a former resident of Chinatown, and was the projectionist for two of the three cinemas that existed in Boston’s Chinatown in the 70s and 80s. Jean is a regular contributor to the popular website Kung Fu Cinema, a student of local wushu Master Bow Sim Mark, and a martial arts teacher in Boston.