James Schamus: Interview
By Eric Wittmershaus

When James Schamus began work on director Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, he was a martial-arts-movie outsider faced with adapting a screenplay from a novel written in a language he does not read or speak.

Rather than follow the conventional read-the-book/ write-the-screenplay approach to adaptation, Schamus, one of three screenwriters on the film, found himself fabricating a story from Lee’s understanding of the book.

Fortunately, Schamus understands a lot about Lee’s understanding — although the accomplished producer of independent-film landmarks like The Brothers McMullen, Office Killer and Happiness, Schamus is perhaps best known for his collaborations with Lee. Schamus has produced and written or co-written all of Lee’s films with the exception of Sense and Sensibility, which he produced but did not write. But whether Lee was charting Taiwanese mores in Eat Drink Man Woman or the darker underbelly of ’70s suburbia in The Ice Storm, it was Schamus he was doing it with.

It was this shared history that helped inform Schamus’s adaptation of Wang Du Lu’s novel — a complex, multi-faceted story about an elite class of martial artists in ancient Western China — but that doesn’t mean it was easy.

“It was weird because on the one hand, I was writing an original screenplay because I didn’t know the novel ... And on the other hand, I knew that I had to maintain fidelity to something I didn’t know,” Schamus said in a recent interview. “It was nervewracking, to say the least.”

Compounding the weirdness of the situation was that Schamus’ collaborators on the martial-arts epic’s script included martial arts choreographer Yuen Wo-Ping, cellist Yo-Yo Ma and two Chinese scriptwriters. Charged with the responsibility of taking Schamus’s English words and translating them back into Chinese for the final script, the writers picked up on a few nuances of Chinese culture to which Schamus was ignorant.

“I was culturally tone deaf,” Schamus said. “So it was a shock, I think, when my Chinese collaborators got the script and realized a Martian had written a Chinese movie.”

Not that the Martian realized it himself. “It was just as big a shock for me when I got (fellow screenwriter) Hui-Ling Wang’s rewrite back and realized just how far off the mark I’d been and how much more still had to be done to make the film work,” Schamus said. “We went through months and months of that process.”

Language barrier aside, Schamus said one thing that was agreed upon very early was the film’s heavy female angle. And in a development markedly different from other movies in the genre, Chow Yun Fat’s character is the only real male powerhouse.

In one scene, the young student Jen (Zhang Ziyi) singlehandedly dispatches an entire inn filled with martial-arts-practicing men. It’s one of the movie’s best-shot fight scenes, though it’s the sort of thing that might cause a purist fan of the genre to react in alarm.

“In the West, we have the fan culture for martial arts movies, which is often ... exemplified by teenage white males with bad acne [writing in] a chat room,” Schamus said. “But in fact, I feel very indebted to that culture. ... It’s laid the groundwork for a more general appreciation for these movies.”

And initial returns from this faction have been promising.

’I was really, really happy when the first Internet responses to the film came up in places like Ain’t It Cool News and elsewhere and there was a real sense of excitement and genuine discovery about the movie.”

If the screenwriter seems a bit obsessive about the movie, it’s because Schamus has a bit more involvement with movies made from his work than the average writer. Since the film has been completed, Schamus and Lee have undertaken a non-stop promotional compaign, hitting the festivals and running the interview circuit.

But this pales in comparison to what Schamus went through during the film’s production.

There were numerous trips, back and forth between West and East. Given that he’s an active family man who likes to spend time with his two children, Djuna, 4, and Nona, 8, Schamus had little time for culture shock.

“I have what I call the ‘two weekend rule,’” Schamus said. “I won’t be away for more than one weekend at a time. Often it would take three or four days to even get out to location ... and then back, so I would literally take 10 days, six of which were transit and four of which were just working non-stop.

“Time differences? Who cares? It was surreal.”

And in a move unusual for screenwriters but not unusual for Schamus, he logged time helping whip the film’s English subtitles into shape.

“When I wrote the [original] script, I told Ang, ‘I’m gonna write this dialogue in the international subtitle style,’” he said. “I wanted to make sure that the film, from the very beginning, would function for international audiences.

“And then it was really rewriting the script so many times, translating back to English, back to Chinese, writing it and, of course, finally rewriting the film one last time in the form of the subtitles and at that moment, through discussion ... realizing how little of the movie I understood. [The film’s] meanings remain embedded in the Chinese language and culture.”

Further demonstrating his status as a man of letters, Schamus also worked with French translators in preparing the subtitles for the version presented at the 2000 Cannes Festival.

“It gives me some [other language] to bounce off of. They’ll go back into Chinese and translate things I’d translated into English, and their translation has nuances or windows on the meaning that weren’t available in English, so I’ll go back and change the English.”

Schamus wasn’t the only one on set wrestling with multiple languages. The film’s dialogue was written in Mandarin Chinese, the language spoken throughout most of China, but not the Hong Kong region, where Cantonese is widely spoken. Since many of the film’s actors and actresses came from the Hong Kong martial arts film tradition, they found themselves delivering lines in what was essentially a foreign tongue.

“Chow (Yun Fat) and Michelle (Yeoh, who shares top billing on the film with Chow), in particular, had a very tough time,” Schamus said. “Michelle’s first language is actually English.

“They both struggled very hard, but Ang succeeded in keeping their voices. They’re not dubbed. Though [Mandarin-speaking audiences] can hear the accent, [they] still took to the film.”

And they took to it in numbers. Schamus says the film will very likely become the highest grossing Chinese-language film ever in some countries, and many critics in New York and Los Angeles (where Crouching was released two weeks ago) have touted the movie as one of the best of the year, an opinion seconded in the film’s Golden Globe nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. This is in no small part due to the movie’s smooth merger of an incredibly complex plot with slick, eye-poppingly brilliant fight scenes choreographed by Wo-Ping.

Though it might seem a tough task to juggle an epic tale that includes two love stories, an extended flashback and dozens of characters with high-flying theatrics, Schamus said it was quite simple.

“For me as a screenwriter, it’s very easy,” he said. “Whenever I get to the fight sequences, the way I wrote them is very specific. I wrote two words: ‘They fight.’

“Because I know with Yuen Wo-Ping and with Ang, there’s nothing I could put on a page that could match what they would do on set.”

So then it was really Wo-Ping and Lee who had their work cut out for them, Schamus explained.

“Part of our job was to make sure the fight sequences further the narrative and developed the characters and deepened emotions,” he said. “They weren’t just pauses for people to beat each other up.”

Actually, despite the high number and intensity of fight scenes in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, its choreography puts greater emphasis on finesse and grace than on the idea the audience is watching two people try to kill one another. This is due in no small part to the talents of Wo-Ping, who, before he became famous for his fight scenes in The Matrix, helped define the Hong Kong martial arts cinema with films like the original Drunken Master.

“Watching [Wo-Ping] work, the only analogy I can make was to watch a Russian chess master move around a large auditorium playing chess with 250 people all at the same time,” Schamus said.

“It’s that kind of concentration and that kind of cool. He knows when he gets up in the morning that if he doesn’t do everything right, somebody could be dead.”

And in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, one of those somebodies could be Chow Yun Fat, the most popular actor in Asia and, by extension, the world. Chow’s agent surely cringed at the potential for disaster, particularly since the star did his own stunts, as did all the players in Crouching Tiger.

“That’s the great thing about the movie and I think one of the reasons Americans are responding so strongly to it,” said Schamus about the film’s realistic effects. “You know instinctively that unlike most American effects-driven films where the guy gets $20 million (and is) on a sound stage in front of a green screen and a fan blowing air into his hair from behind the camera, when Chow Yun Fat is standing 60 feet above the forest floor on top of a bamboo tree, that’s him, standing there.

“I think audiences really get the sense that’s real. And, yeah, we did digitally remove the wires, but you know what? It’s still magical that the guy’s even doing it.”

Perhaps most magical, though, is that this diverse cast and crew that also includes film score composer Tan Dun and Hong Kong action movie superstar heroine Pei-Pei Cheng have created a non-English language film with the power and scope to capture movie audiences’ attention worldwide. Take a look at the Top 250 films on IMDb (where it’s listed under Wu Hu Zang Long, a phonetic rendering of its occidental name) and you’ll get an idea of how rare a feat this is.

Schamus, not surprisingly, is beaming.

“It was a thrill,” he said. “I still believe, even as an outsider to this, that we’ve managed to maintain the quintessential Chinese identity,” he said. “The film still remains wonderfully foreign to me. ... I’m very pleased to have played a role ... in making a movie that has the appeal of a Hollywood film but that is decisively not a Hollywood film. It’s an Asian film.”

Up next for Schamus and Lee is Same Old Song, a “Godardian [romantic] comedy with music,” which Schamus said he hopes to set to the music of The Magnetic Fields’ critically acclaimed three-disc album, 69 Love Songs.

“I’m really a huge fan of [Fields singer/songwriter Stephen Merritt],” Schamus gushed. “We’re actually talking to him right now about the possibilities. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.”

E-mail Eric Wittmershaus at eric@flakmag.com