You couldn’t be a martial arts hero without honour and a moral code in this director’s eyes
- Lau Kar-leung, a prolific choreographer and actor, also directed 25 martial arts films, and he set the template – ethical heroes, pure action – in a 1976 movie
- Challenge of the Masters is about a real-life martial artist, Wong Fei-hung, who fights a wanted criminal and, instead of killing him, turns him over to police
The prolific Lau Kar-leung, also known as Liu Chia-liang, who died in 2013, was a major contributor to Hong Kong filmmaking for 60 years, working as a martial arts choreographer, actor, and director.
Lau choreographed 176 films, appeared in 215 films, and directed 25 of his own, including the classic The 36th Chamber of Shaolin . He choreographed, with long-time colleague Tong Kai, most of Chang Cheh’s earlier films, and directed the first kung fu comedy, 1975’s The Spiritual Boxer.
Challenge of the Masters, Lau’s second film as director, along with his follow-up Executioners from Shaolin , set out the framework for his approach to martial arts filmmaking. “My only aim in making a film is to exalt the martial arts,” Lau said in an interview, and his goal was always to present the different styles of kung fu as accurately as possible.
Lau, who was born in 1937, had an impressive martial arts lineage. He learned kung fu from his father, Lau Cham, a well-known martial artist who ran the Hua Chiang Martial Arts Society in Guangzhou in the 1930s, before moving to Hong Kong in 1948. Lau Cham had studied under Lam Sai-wing, a student of the legendary Wong Fei-hung.
According to Roger Garcia, whose 1980 essay The Autarkic World of Liu Chia-Liang is still the definitive work on the director, Lau studied martial arts between the ages of nine and 28, initially because of a need “as a fairly weak child, for self-protection from bullying”. He became an expert in the southern styles of kung fu, notably hung ga.