Cory Yuen Kwai has spent much of the past decade turning actors into gravity-defying warriors by suspending them on a wire. The veteran martial arts choreographer, who has given Hollywood fight scenes a much-needed facelift, says the future of Hong Kong-style action cinema now lies in Asia.
Yuen first gave Hollywood a taste of Hong Kong action when he directed the fight scenes for No Retreat, No Surrender (1986) starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. He returned to the US to take charge of the choreography for Lethal Weapon IV (1998), then X-Men (2000) and Luc Besson's Kiss of the Dragon (2001).
Although he is hot property in the west, Yuen says Hollywood action cinema may have hit a dead end. 'Nowadays, the audience doesn't get such a thrill going to an action movie. They prefer playing video games. It's not like in the past when people knew the actors could really fight,' says Yuen.
His latest project as action director is Blood: The Last Vampire. Adapted from a popular Japanese anime film, it stars Korean starlet Gianna Jun Ji-hyun as a katana-wielding vampire slayer who works for a shadowy government organisation in Japan.
Yuen had Jun train in Los Angeles for a month to hone her fitness before hiring 10 martial arts stuntmen from Shenzhen to fight with her for another two months. 'For now my change in style is to try not to use CG [computer-generated] effects if possible,' says Yuen.
His decision to eschew special effects in favour of real action comes after his previous project, DOA: Dead or Alive, an effects-laden film adapted from a popular video game, was panned by critics for its flimsy plot and comical acting, and flopped at the US box office.
Yuen, a graduate of Yu Jim-yuen's China Drama Academy along with Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung Kam-bo, concedes that DOA was 'purely a gimmick' with little drama. Good action, he says, is a result of combining solid martial arts skills with a story; a physical expression of the drama rather than acrobatics complemented by special effects.