20 facts you might not know about 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon'

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is based on a novel by Wang Dulu that was serialized across 1941 and 1942. What’s interesting is that this wasn’t a standalone novel. It’s actually the fourth novel in a series of five, so there’s a lot of story most of the audience had no familiarity with.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is an evocative title, and we can thank the ancient Chinese poet Yu Xin for that. The translation is roughly, “behind the rock in the dark probably hides a tiger, and the coiling giant root resembles a crouching dragon.” It’s basically about being aware of your surroundings, as there may be unnoticed masters around you.

Lee is the one who brought the idea of doing an adaptation of Crouching Tiger to Columbia, and he had the cache to get some notable actors in the mix. However, Lee’s first choice for Jen, Shu Qi, turned him down. Zhang Ziyi ended up in the role.

Lee is Taiwanese, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was an entrant for Taiwan for the Academy Awards. However, four different production companies from four different countries were involved. The production was handled by film producers in America, Taiwan, China, and Hong Kong.

Filming for the movie was based in Beijing, China. Lee shot all over the country, though. His first shooting location was actually the Gobi Desert where, oddly enough, it rained all the time.

The movie is set during China’s Qing dynasty, but Lee was not interested in historical accuracy. He has said that his idea for the film was to make a movie about a “China of the imagination,” rather than trying to accurately depict how China was all those centuries ago.

Lee threw himself into making Crouching Tiger. He says he didn’t take off even half a day for the entirety of the time he was filming, which took him eight months. The filmmaker said he was miserable, and that, “Near the end, I could hardly breathe. I thought I was about to have a stroke.”

If you aren’t well-versed in Mandarin, you may not have noticed, but Mandarin speakers knew what was up. Only Ziyi was a native Mandarin speaker with a native Mandarin accent. Chang Chen spoke it with a Taiwanese accent. Chow Yun-fat was a native Cantonese speaker, not a Mandarin speaker. Michelle Yeoh had the most trouble, though. Yeoh is from Malaysia and spoke English and Malay growing up. She said all her Mandarin lines phonetically.

Lee has become synonymous with pushing special effects in films like Life of Pi and Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. That wasn’t the case with this movie, though. Lee had the actors do most of their own stunts, and he says he only used special effects to remove the safety wires on the actors.

Chow Yun-fat and Yeoh had action movie experience, but Ziyi had never done any martial arts training or fight choreography. However, what Ziyi did have was a ton of dance experience. As such, she decided to learn her fight choreography as if it were dance choreography, which worked quite well for her.

Lee didn’t want to make a movie just for Mandarin speakers and wuxia fans. He was hoping for a breakthrough film that would work in the American market as well. That meant needing quality English subtitles. Fortunately, the director had an ace up his sleeve. Lee had done his undergraduate and graduate work in the United States, so he knew English fairly well. He edited all the subtitles himself.

Early in filming, Yeoh suffered a torn ACL. She had to fly to the United States for surgery. As she recovered, Yeoh would periodically pop in to film non-action scenes until her knee was good enough to finish shooting her more action-oriented stuff.

James Schamus was a longtime producing partner of Lee’s, and they would also write films together. On this particular movie, Schamus was the one non-Asian writer on the project. He also had never written a martial arts movie before, but he clearly trusted in his friend’s directing skill. At one point in the screenplay, he simply wrote, “They will be the greatest fight scenes ever written in cinema history. Period.”

For his role, Lee wanted his star to shave his head. At first, Chow would not agree. Lee had to go as far as have a computer generate a mockup of what Chow would look like with his head shaved. That was apparently enough to get the actor to agree.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon debuted in American theaters on Dec. 8, 2000. It would not make much of a dent in the box office, finishing 15th. Over a month later, though, it earned a wide release, and it rose to sixth in the domestic box office. The movie managed to stick around…and stick around. It would be 31 weeks until Crouching Tiger left theaters. By that point, it had made $128.1 million domestically. It also made $85.4 million in the rest of the world.

Given that it was made for $17 million, making over $200 million worldwide was a massive coup for Crouching Tiger. However, it also broke records. It became the highest-grossing foreign-language film in America history, and it also became the first foreign-language movie to break $100 million at the North American box office.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon won awards all over the globe. Of course, the Academy Awards remain the biggest of the film award shows. The movie was nominated for 10 Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. That remains a record for a non-English language film, having been tied with Roma.

While Lee didn’t win an Oscar, and the film didn’t win Best Picture, Crouching Tiger did take home four Academy Awards. It won for score, cinematography, art direction, and also Best Foreign Language Film.

Winning Best Original Score at the Oscars is impressive, no matter what. Tan Dun’s win is perhaps even more impressive given the time crunch he was under. Dun had only two weeks to both compose and record the entirety of the film’s score.

In 2016, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon got a sequel. This time, though, it was filmed in English and dubbed in Mandarin for China. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny starred Michelle Yeoh and Donnie Yen. Ziyi did not return because Lee did not return to direct. Instead, Yuen Woo-ping, the action choreographer of the first film, directed it. The movie was released on Netflix in the United States.