By MEKADO MURPHY for THE NEW YORK TIMES
OCT. 7, 2015
In ‘The Assassin,' a Director Blends the Fantastical and the Realistic
The director Hou Hsiao-Hsien has made a film rooted in martial arts, but with imagery and settings that make "The Assassin” feel almost painterly.
The opening scenes of "The Assassin,” Hou Hsiao-Hsien's ninth-century tale of a young Chinese woman's abduction by a nun and training to be a killer, unfold in black and white. But not long after, color fills the frame, adding vivid punctuation to picturesque locations. The imagery, the scene design and the settings make the film feel almost painterly.
It is the first time this Taiwanese director has made a movie rooted in martial arts, and he was inspired by wuxia, a genre of Chinese fiction that he read as a college student.
"I liked these short stories because they were realistic yet also kind of fantastical,” Mr. Hou said by Skype from Taipei, speaking through an interpreter. And he took an untraditional approach to the martial arts genre, using action to occasionally break up a more subdued, meditative narrative. Here is a look at scenes and imagery from "The Assassin,” with commentary from Mr. Hou.
Landscapes: In the Clouds
To create a sense of a time long past, Mr. Hou and his team traveled to locations in China that had changed little in decades. "We looked for higher-altitude places where modern society hasn't come in,” he said.
One of those spots was the Shennongjia district in Hubei province. Scenes in which the title character, Yinniang (Shu Qi), learns her trade take place high in the mountains where clouds move through the frame like fog. These are not visual effects, just the director and his cinematographer, Mark Lee Ping Bing, taking advantage of otherworldly locations.
Mr. Hou and his team used the environment as part of the filmmaking as well. "We allowed the weather to change the content,” he said. "If it started snowing, we would not stop shooting.” The camera relishes nature, holding on long takes of rustling trees with the sound of birds in the background.
The crew traveled further north into a starker, colder landscape in Inner Mongolia. One fight scene is staged in a windswept birch forest with mostly leafless trees, allowing room for the two fighters to move freely with their weapons.
Fights: True And Messy
Mr. Hou approached the martial arts action from a more practical perspective. "The fighting sequences are based on the limits of the characters themselves,” he said. "When we watch fighting movies and see people flying, I don't find that realistic. So developing the characters and the action, I kept them in the realm of what they could actually accomplish.”
This meant choreography that was a little messy. Additionally, the actors were not trained in action or stunts, so the choreography needed to work for people with limited skills. Mr. Hou asked the cast to break the fighting into small sections, which he would shoot one at a time.
Some of the action was captured in wide shots, a perspective Mr. Hou has frequently used in his films. He put his camera on a track at a distance; sometimes the actors didn't know exactly where it was. He wouldn't call action but instead just let the actors start fighting when they felt ready.
Interiors: Natural Light
As much emphasis is placed on the warm interiors as on external shots. From the stories he read, Mr. Hou had long been interested in traditions of the Tang dynasty, but he did more research into life then. He studied paintings from the period to get a sense of what a room needed. And the stories he had read offered more specifics. "Much of the furniture was multiuse,” he said, "so you could sit on it, sleep on it or stand on it.”
Mr. Hou has a 20-year working relationship with the production designer Hwarng Wern-Ying, who also serves as the costume designer, and they have developed a shorthand over that time. "Before each shot, she draws a picture of the scene and shows it to me,” Mr. Hou said. "I trust her so much that there aren't a lot of changes being made.”
It was important to Mr. Hou for everything to seem natural and authentic: "If we shoot during the daytime, we will try to use natural lighting to light the colors of the room. If it's at night, then the light should look as close to candlelight as possible.” Some interior scenes were shot from a camera outside, so the sheer curtains would move in and out of the frame, covering, then revealing, the characters.
The New York Times interactive feature, complete with visuals and footage, can be found here: www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/07/movies/11the-assassin-feature.html