Hero

Hero (Yingxiong in the original) is a Chinese wuxia film by director Zhang Yimou from 2002, shot in Mandarin. It is set in the Warring States period. An official who is called Nameless comes to the capital of the state of Qin to meet the king. The king has survived several assassination attempts, behind which stood Long Sky, Flying Snow and Broken Sword. The film draws on Jing Ke's real attempt to murder the King of Qin in 227 BC, but it reshapes the historical event freely and invents all three assassins. Action choreographer Ching Siu-tung supervised the fight scenes. The main roles are played by two alumni of the Beijing wushu team: Jet Li as Nameless, a master of the sword, and Donnie Yen as the spearman Long Sky, so their duel sets sword against spear. For Jet Li it was the first film made in mainland China since his debut Shaolin Temple. According to PopMatters, Zhang Yimou conceived the duel between the main characters as a fight taking place in their heads, on a subconscious level, and wanted to bring something new to the genre. Ching Siu-tung won a Hong Kong Film Awards prize for the choreography, and the film was nominated for an Oscar for best foreign-language film. At the time of its release it was the highest-grossing Chinese film in history. It reached American cinemas only in August 2004, after Quentin Tarantino persuaded the distributor Miramax.

Martial arts in this work

Fight choreography

Action choreography was led by Ching Siu-tung, son of the Hong Kong martial arts film director Cheng Kang of Shaw Brothers studio. As a child he studied Peking opera for seven years at the Hong Kong Oriental Drama School, and he started out as a stuntman at seventeen. Jet Li had practised wushu since the age of eight and from 1974 belonged to the Beijing wushu team; Donnie Yen joined the same team at sixteen. Jet Li personally invited him to the film; the two had previously made Once Upon a Time in China II (1992). Maggie Cheung, by contrast, said in an interview quoted by PopMatters that she is not an experienced fighter and that the preparation was hard grind for her. According to reviewers at PopMatters and The Cinema Archives, Zhang Yimou uses wind machines in the duels to stir fabrics and robes, along with slow-motion shots and wire tricks. The Cinema Archives describes the sequence in the House of Chess with details of blades and drops of water.

Fact and fiction

The historical core is the assassination that Jing Ke attempted in 227 BC against the King of Qin, Ying Zheng, later the first emperor. He was sent by Crown Prince Dan of the state of Yan. Jing Ke reached the king by offering him as a gift the head of the exiled general Fan Yuqi, and he hid a poisoned dagger in a map scroll. The attempt failed and Jing Ke was killed. The film starts from this event but tells its own story with a different plot: instead of a single historical assassin, the king faces the invented characters Long Sky, Flying Snow and Broken Sword, and the equally invented Nameless comes to the palace.

People and martial arts

• Zhang YimouDirector
• Ching Siu-tungAction director
• Jet LiActor — as Nameless· Wushu Taolu (real practitioner)
• Donnie YenActor — as Long Sky· Wushu Taolu (real practitioner)
• Tony Leung Chiu-waiActor — as Broken Sword· Kung Fu (portrays the art on screen)
• Maggie CheungActor — as Flying Snow· Kung Fu (portrays the art on screen)
• Zhang ZiyiActor· Kung Fu (portrays the art on screen)

Awards

• Won · Hong Kong Film Awards, Best Action Choreography (2003)
• Nominated · Academy Awards, Best Foreign Language Film (2003)