Striking thoughts

Wong Kar-wai's The Grandmaster is likely to be film fans' last chance to catch Zhang Ziyi's kung fu moves. It's true, the 33-year-old actress says, in response to rumours that she's planning to stop making martial arts films.

From Jen Yu, daughter of an aristocrat in Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), to dancer Mei in Zhang Yimou's House of Flying Daggers (2004), to kung fu exponent Gong Er in Wong Kar-wai's The Grandmaster, the Beijing-born Zhang has played a wide range of action heroine roles that have cemented her status as a top actress. But these achievements can no longer keep her in the martial arts genre.

"I don't mind exhausting myself or suffering," she says. "I'm just afraid that I will not be able to improve further."

Zhang says some media reports have claimed she is leaving the martial arts field because she's getting older, but "this is not true. I feel this decision is the highest compliment that I can offer The Grandmaster, because I feel that in future I will not have the chance to play another role that can surpass this one."

If so, she's getting a grand send-off: the film, released on the mainland on Tuesday, took in 30 million yuan (HK$37 million) on its opening day, exceeding the total box office takings of 30 million yuan for Wong's 2004 film, 2046. In its Thursday opening in Hong Kong, it scored more than HK$1.3 million, compared to The Impossible's HK$551,139, second in the daily box office record.

Interviewed in the presidential suite of the Harbour Grand hotel in Hung Hom, Zhang is the antithesis of how she's been portrayed by the Chinese media: she is gentle, cheerful - in fact, she's nice. Having spoken to countless journalists in the three years she spent playing Gong Er, she is still animated when she talks about The Grandmaster, which has taken Wong almost a decade to bring to the big screen. Like a good hostess, she even makes sure that journalists in the suite are served drinks.