An interview with Tarantino
Posted on May 12, 2004
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Quentin Tarantino totally geeks out in the best movie interview in recent memory:
TM: I can’t remember the title, but there is a Hong Kong movie where Jimmy Wang Yu fights with 100 enemies. The fight in the House of Blue Leaves reminds me of it.
QT: That’s from Chinese Boxer (Jimmy Wang Yu, 1969, Hong Kong *Bigger image). It’s where he’s created the iron fist. He’s turned his fist into iron and they’re burned black. He’s got a surgical mask over his face and he’s got these mittens on his hands and Lo Lieh is the bad guy and he goes into the casino. Well, did you know that this is very historically important movie? That was the first full-on open handed contact movie in Hong Kong. Chinese Boxer is the first movie where the hero didn’t fight with swords. He just fought with his hands. That was the first time that was done. I mean, there are kung fu movies before that. But this kind of like, what we know today as a real kung fu movie. Before that, they were doing wushu, swordplay; and even though they were doing it in a Chinese style, they still had one foot in the Japanese samurai movies. But with Chinese Boxer, they took that foot away. And that fight scene is so fantastic. That’s become one of the staples of the genre: one against a hundred. Well, that was the first one. Wang Yu directed it too. It was so cool because I remember showing Yuen Woo-ping that scene to show him something I wanted to capture and Woo-ping goes, “Hey! That’s my dad!” His father was one of the guys in the movie. You know, when all the guys are circling Wang Yu, he’s the one with the chain. His dad was Simon Yuen, the old guy from Snake in Eagle’s Shadow and Drunken Master. That’s Woo-ping’s father.
Awesome!