The King of Wuxia
Directed by Jing-Jie Lin
Featuring Pei-Pei Cheng, Ann Hui, John Woo
Runtime: 3 hours, 36 minutes
U.S. Premiere at Metrograph’s Old School Kung Fu Fest

by Ryan Silberstein, Managing Editor, Red Herring

I’ve written about two of King Hu’s films previously at MovieJawn, Come Drink With Me and Raining in the Mountain, and so I jumped at the chance to watch the new, extensive documentary on the director, The King of Wuxia. Again, I want to reiterate that I am a total novice when it comes to this genre, still finding ways to learn more and appreciate it. After watching a few of King Hu’s movies and the Cinema Hong Kong: Swordfighting bonus feature on the Come Drink With Me  Blu-Ray from Arrow, The King of Wuxia was a great next step on my wuxia journey.

While the length is intimidating, especially since it features a lot of talking head interviews, and almost none of them are in English, there is so much love and affection for its subject that there is an infectious energy sustained for most of the runtime. Sometimes a filmmaker speaks to you across time and space, and that’s how I feel about King Hu. From the first thing I saw of his, The Valiant Ones, I found something magnetic about his work. There’s a subtle emotionality to the way he tells stories, and his use of locations, tension, and editing all come together in a transfixing way. So I am very thankful for The King of Wuxia because there is very little written about Hu or his work in English, and having such an expansive documentary has deepened my understanding greatly.

The King of Wuxia comprises three roughly equal sections. The first section steps through Hu’s career as a director, from his early success with Come Drink With Me (1966) and Dragon Inn (1967) through Raining in the Mountain and Legend of the Mountain, both released in 1979. This 10 year period was the most fruitful for the director, and won him worldwide acclaim with A Touch of Zen, albeit mostly from non-Taiwanese audiences and not until it was screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 1975. The second section covers Hu’s work as an actor, which I knew nothing about, and the third section tracks his struggles in making new movies in the 1980s through the end of his life in 1997. There’s a long time spent specifically talking about The Battle of Ono, a project about Chinese immigrants in the United States that at one point had Chow Yun-Fat attached to star, but the financing never came together.

For American viewers, John Woo is one of the most engaging talking heads, and were this a shorter documentary, his inclusion would make it easier to recommend to a broader audience. King Hu is one of Woo’s biggest influences, and his crossover into Hollywood is even more fascinating given Hu’s attempts. Once the Hong Kong New Wave hit (one of the reasons for A Touch of Zen’s box office failure was the popularity of Bruce Lee’s breakout The Big Boss), Hu was fully out of step with the culture. It is an interesting parallel that so many legendary filmmakers like King Hu, Akira Kurosawa, Martin Scorsese and others have struggled to get financing for later projects even as their renown is cemented in the popular culture as well as more intellectual circles. 

When discussing his directorial work, The King of Wuxia affirmed the things I’ve enjoyed about Hu’s work. His appreciation of history (not unlike that of John Ford) and research when writing his scripts, his use of on location shooting, and his passion shine through, even for those not intimately familiar with Chinese history or culture. If there’s one word most repeated in this documentary, it’s “meticulous.” According to his collaborators and appreciators, he was obsessed with details, wanting to get everything as right as he could. The care and passion shows in the final works, and I hope this documentary becomes more widely available.

The second weekend of the 10th Old School Kung Fu Fest is happening at the Metrograph in New York City this coming weekend, and if you are able to attend, you can catch two King Hu films, The Fate of Lee Khan on Saturday, and A Touch of Zen on Sunday. These play alongside a number of other wuxia films, with a few more available on Metrograph’s streaming service. I have a bunch added to my watchlist, and will be keeping an eye out for future events there and wider availability of wuxia films overall.