Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon

Let's talk about a less famous movie you may not know. Nevertheless, I do encourage you to see this colourful movie, with a strong artistic sense. When I first saw this movie, I thought it would be a great martial arts movie. After the watching, I realized I was wrong: it's not only a martial arts movie, it's also a beautiful story about a girl who decids to actually live her life the way she wants.

The movie is the tale of two warriors in Ancient China in pursuit of a stolen sword and a well-known bandit. The plot is very simple, but it leads us through a 2-hours epic story.

Did you know that:

1. Ziyi Zhang studied calligraphy for several months along with her other training for the movie.
2. Michelle Yeoh did not speak Mandarin, and the script was presented to her phonetically with help from Mandarin-speaking crew members - her Malaysian accent can be heard throughout the movie.
3. Michelle Yeoh tore her anterior cruciate ligament during the shooting of a fighting sequence and had to return to the U.S. for knee surgery. She went back to the set at different times to film non-action scenes until the knee had recovered.
4. "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon" is a quote from Chinese mythology. It refers to hiding your strength from others.
5. In Chinese, Lo (Dark Cloud) 's name is "Little Tiger", and Jen's name is "Gorgeous Dragon".
6. The kung-fu scenes were choreographered by Woo-Ping Yuen, the one who had already orchestrated fighting scenes from The Matrix (a movie you can find in our blog !).
7. Yun-Fat Chow had to do 28 takes of his first scene on the first day of shooting because of his difficulties speaking Mandarin. When asked in an interview with Time how he felt about his Mandarin pronunciation, he replied "It's awful".
8. Crouching Tiger Hidden Tiger is nowadays the only martial arts film to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture.
9. Most of the weapons used in the movie, including the Green Destiny Sword, were made in Taiwan. The Blacksmith is a neighbor of the movie director Ang Lee in his residence in Taiwan.
10. The movie holds the record for the most Oscar nominations for a foreign film. It was nominated for 10 Oscars, such as Best Music, Best Art Direction, Best Costume Design or Best Picture. In the end, the movie won 4 Oscars: Best Foreign Language Film, Best Art Direction, Best Music and Best Cinematography.

To complete this article, here is the duel scene between Michelle Yeoh and Ziyi Zhang. If you haven't seen this movie yet, I recommand you not to watch this video: go watch the whole movie!!