Zhang’s ‘Flying Daggers’ to follow ‘Hero’

A few years back, Zhang Yimou was a bit miffed that fellow filmmaker Ang Lee was faster on the draw in elevating the martial-arts epic to serious cinema.

But now that Lee’s “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” has broken the genre into the mainstream among Western audiences, Zhang is happy to follow his lead.

Zhang’s Mandarin-language “Hero,” a saga of ancient China starring Jet Li, topped the box-office for two straight weekends after its belated U.S. debut in late August.

Close behind is Zhang’s “House of Flying Daggers,” another martial-arts historical tale due in U.S. theaters late this year.

A fan of martial-arts novels while growing up, Zhang, one of China’s most acclaimed filmmakers, decided to give the genre a try after a string of more contemporary films.

About the time the screenplays for “Hero” and “House of Flying Daggers” were finished, “Crouching Tiger” became a sensation, topping $100 million at the U.S. box office — the first foreign-language film to cross that mark.

“I appreciate the success of ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’ because that film did create the market for and the commercial success for ‘Hero’ and ‘Flying Daggers,’ ” Zhang said at the Toronto International Film Festival.

“Hero,” in which different versions of an assassination plot unfold through repeated retellings, earned a foreign-language Academy Award nomination after it came out in China in 2002.

“House of Flying Daggers,” which premiered to an enthusiastic reception at last spring’s Cannes Film Festival, centers on a romantic triangle involving a ninth-century rebel (Zhang Ziyi) and two men whose love for her results in tragedy.

Like “Crouching Tiger,” Zhang Yimou’s two films lift martial-arts sequences to balletic grace. Combatants float through the air in dreamlike fashion, arrows rain down like swarming locusts, and duelists chase one another through treetops.

The characters have greater depth than in more traditional martial-arts flicks, where the action is the main attraction.

“It’s maybe because both Ang and I are directors of dramas,” Zhang said. “We’re not experts in this genre, so maybe we’re looking at it from a different angle.

“Maybe there’s something special about this type of director shooting a martial-arts film. For example, we pay attention to the story lines, the relations of the characters in the film.

“We have beauty in the action. It’s not the traditional way of shooting martial-arts films.”