Hong Kong martial arts cinema: how The Matrix’s Yuen Woo-ping shaped the trilogy with his action choreography
- Martial arts director Yuen Woo-ping had shunned Hollywood until he met The Matrix directors the Wachowskis and heard their plan to make a kung fu sci-fi film
- Although The Matrix movies were heavy on special effects, Yuen also applied the physical wire work techniques he used in Hong Kong
Hong Kong martial arts director Yuen Woo-ping’s action scenes are the defining feature of The Matrix trilogy, yet Yuen himself never sought to work in Hollywood.
When the films’ sibling directors the Wachowskis were preparing the first in the trilogy, a producer for the film had to track Yuen down in Hong Kong and convince him to go to Los Angeles to discuss choreographing the martial arts scenes in The Matrix.
“I’d already been asked to work in Hollywood a couple of times, and I’d said no. I didn’t feel that my English was good enough to work there,” Yuen told this writer in an interview in 2019.
“What happened then was that one of the producers of The Matrix contacted Shaw Brothers to find me. They seemed to want me to go to Hollywood really badly, but I still didn’t want to go. Then Shaw Brothers [studio] told me that the producer was offering me a free ticket to Los Angeles, and all I had to do was turn up there and have a chat, and that I should go, as it would be the polite thing to do,” Yuen said.
At the meeting, Yuen was intrigued by the Wachowskis’ plans for the film.