Shooting a martial arts flick the hard way

Director Xu Haofeng shoots his martial arts flicks in a more traditional way through training the star to be a real kung fu master. [Photo provided to China Daily]

The title role in The Master－a practitioner of the Wing Chun from southern China's Guangdong province ambitious to earn a reputation in northern China's onetime martial arts hub, Tianjin－can be seen as a salute to Lee.

For Xu, 42, another dream woven into the film is to revive the glory of Chinese wuxia movies, a genre which was very popular in domestic and overseas markets a couple of decades ago.

The efforts can be seen in the casting of Liao, who gained recognition in the West thanks to his Silver Bear prize.

The Black Coal, Thin Ice star was the first Chinese mainland actor to win the best-actor award at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2014, one of Europe's top three movie events.

Veteran actresses Song Jia and Jiang Wenli also star the movie.

Besides its overseas debut, The Master also garnered attention from foreign distributors at the recently concluded American Film Market－Hollywood's largest trade show, says Li Xia, the producer.

Xu's previous martial arts titles, The Sword Identity (2011) and Arrow Arbitration (2014), have won critical acclaim at several international film festivals.

The consensus about Xu's work is that he has revived a martial arts genre which highlights real fights, unlike most wuxia movies which rely on wires and computer-generated technology to create a supernatural effect.

A professor at Beijing Film Academy and a best-selling novelist, Xu is from a Chinese generation born in the 1970s, a group that had few opportunities to see their cultural icons on the big screen when they were growing up.

For that generation, the first Hollywood blockbuster officially released in Chinese mainland theaters was The Fugitive in 1994.

Before that, Chinese moviegoers could access American movies only through videotape.

Paying a tribute to Lee is one way of making up for lost opportunities.