Ray Pride

With its two milestones in one week in mid-February -- surpassing "Life is Beautiful" to become the highest-grossing foreign language film in the U.S., followed a couple days later by ten Oscar nominations -- "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" has outgrown producer-co-writer James Schamus' tag that it's "'Sense and Sensibility' with martial arts."

Great populist filmmaking, filled with grandeur and straightforward, self-effacing craft, "Crouching Tiger" is a gem. Just before its release, I sat down with Schamus to talk about the challenges of filming a Hollywood-scale epic in China, Schamus, notoriously busy, is on the faculty at Columbia University, collaborates on the production and distribution activities of Good Machine, the company he founded with Ted Hope, and spends an awful lot of time writing, when he's not talking about writing.

Of "Crouching Tiger," Schamus quips, "Ang realized his job was to make a summer blockbuster in the East and an arthouse movie in the West. He had to make both those movies in one. We know he's done the first of those already. And we know he's done the second already, whether it breaks out of the arthouse. Hey, we'd be thrilled, but that's somebody else's job! And I'm very grateful to those guys. My feeling is that we're going to keep our feet on the ground. We're going to be happy with what we think will be a significant box office. If it grows from there, if competition allows it, Sony Classics is ready to go. At the same time, if it doesn't hit astronomical numbers, I'm not losing a second's sleep. I'll be in New York when it opens, but... I dunno. It's weird. We are Zen."

I wonder if it troubles him that so many conversations and articles about movies nowadays focus as much, if not more, on business than on aesthetics. "No, it's part of what's fun about the business. Certain stuff has become appropriate in terms of the culture. The fact is that a big chunk of film culture really is business reporting. It's about the maneuvering in the marketplace. It's about how you find the slot, the muscle, the whatever. On the one hand, you can criticize the introduction of these kinds of discussions, as the end of film culture. But in a weird way, I don't think that's the case. To a certain extent, it's a democratization of what this business has always been. I think that as that information diffuses and becomes part of the culture, it does a couple of things. One of which is not so great, which is I wish we could spend more time going to Lincoln Center retrospectives and spend less time talking about box office and niche markets and how the arthouse box office went down fifty percent last year, and what does this mean, blah-blah-blah. On the other hand, these students are much savvier about going into the film world, having a sense of what it's gonna take for them to get done what they need to get done to make their movies. Not to be people just sitting there waiting to have the crap beat out of them by a bunch of industry executives. I do think it's salutary overall."

I ask the obvious question of why most of his collaborations with Ang Lee have been adaptations. " Well, this was less adaptation than putting on a blindfold and trying to walk through someone else's apartment without bumping into anything. There are so many genre-specific things, so many gestures and beats."

But working with Ang and the other writers should have been a safety net? "I didn't know where I was half the time. That was the point. Even though I've seen all those movies and read a lot of literature in translation, I've never lived and breathed it as a kid. It was not part of my daily culture. As a result of my ignorance of that, I was able to add a lot of shape and structure and a narrative pulse."

It was fresh to you, so -- "No, I was too much of an idiot! Honestly, my first draft, the Chinese group thought I was insane. It would be as if you're a Chinese writer doing a John Wayne western, and John Wayne rides into town, goes to the sheriff, says 'howdy,' then kowtows nine times. It'd be normal, right, you were Chinese, 'Yeah, he's the sheriff. You've got to kowtow!' I think my draft really read that way. Then it was six months of pure learning for me and pure pain for Ang as I went back again and again to craft and shape through preproduction and into production. Even when we were out there in the Gobi [Desert], I was there with the computer getting the rest of the movie together. It was not fun, honestly. The pressure was much greater because I was free-falling half the time. On the other hand, the pressure was less because I knew it wasn't me."

So what's the secret of taking on so much work? Is procrastinating on one thing being productive on another? Schamus laughs. "That's exactly right! Until you reach a certain point... Then, believe me, it does freeze."

"Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" continues to break records. (2001-02-22)

Also by Ray Pride

HANNIBAL THE AMICABLE
Loving and hateful, luminously rendered, an examination of what love is forbidden, wrong, impossible; "Hannibal" is great for its contrariness alone.
(2001-02-08)

WATERY, GRAVE
A pungent succession of an impoverished Cuban childhood and voice-overs of poetry by the late, exiled Cuban novelist and poet Reinaldo Arenas situate painter Julian Schnabel's second feature (after "Basquiat") as a lyrical memory piece, steeped in sensation and sound.
(2001-02-08)

SLIPPERY SLOPES
There's always much to dispute with Sundance jury choices, but the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for "Memento" was apt, as was the Dramatic Audience Award for rock opera, "Hedwig and the Angry Inch," which also earned writer-director-star John Cameron Mitchell the Dramatic Directing Award.
(2001-02-01)

SLY CONCEPT
Early reviews have thrashed "The Wedding Planner" for being a straightforward, old-fashioned, almost irony-free romantic comedy. A bad call, I think, as the innocence and earnestness of this tale of two fated lovers who are kept apart by chance has its own charm.
(2001-01-25)

GUY STUFF
(2001-01-18)

CINE-MAGIC!
(2001-01-18)

KIDS IN TULSA
(2001-01-11)

FIGURE IN THE MIRROR
(2001-01-04)

HUMANE TRAFFIC
(2001-01-04)

THE SEA OF EMOTIONS
(2000-12-21)

DON WAN
(2000-12-14)

SAME RIVER TWICE
(2000-12-07)

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