Bey Logan
"Warriors Two" HKL Interview (Making of):
'… in 1978… at GH actor, director, Sammo Hung was looking for his own style, something that would define him as a martial arts movie maker. He found it in the Souther Chinese Kung Fu style, Wing Chun, and he used a story of that stly to craft one of the greatest martial arts movies of all time. Its title: „Warriors Two”.
The
genius of Sammo Hung is that even though he himself was not a master of
Wing Chung style, he could look at the system and take those elements
that would work on film and used them to craft his amazing kung fu
fight sequences. This man and the actors had to be .... in at
least the basic movements of Wing Chun. In this Sammo was lucky. Wing
Chun itself is .... as a system, it can be learnt in a relatively short
amount of time. Most of the traditional Shaolin systems take about ten
years to master. Wing Chun can be learnt in three. Even so Sammo
emplyed the services of a Wing Chun master, Sifu Guy Lai.
„Warriors Two” was one of the most expensive and complicated films in productin at Golden Harvest in 1978. It’s been shot on two locations, at the Golden Harves Studios in Hong Kon and in various locations scattered around South Korea. To add the complexity Sammo was crafting a whole new style for martial arts choreography, while working with a bilingual cast and crew. Actors like Leung Kar-yan were speaking only Cantonese and Casanova Wong only Korean. And as ever, Sammo rose the occassion, great art was performed and we ended up with a martial arts masterpiece.
Sammo Hung is one of the great masters of modern filmmaking. He can ... fine Hong Kong Kung Fu choreography. Prior to Sammo there had been some films that highlighted a kind of acrobatics of Chinese Opera. Others had focused on Chinese Martial Arts Systems. Sammo brought the two together to create a whole new hybride form of choreography, he allowed the traditional kung fu forms to shine, while on top of them as a polishing layer of the kind of exhuberant physical skills that he and his fellow classmates had learnt in the Chinese Opera School. Beyond that Sammo has a great sense of pacing, of style, of the blending of comedy and horror. He also has a great sense of character. Nowhere in Kung Fu cinema do you find characters as colourful as those in a Sammo Hung film. Just look at the supportive cast in „Warriors Two”, it’s virtually the prototype from modern-day bashing up videogames. With „Warriors Two” we see Sammo Hung at the top of his game. And for Kung Fu Cinema that’s about as good as it gets.
„Warriors Two” had the all-time all-cast from Kung Fu Cinema. Leung Kar-yan really comes into his own as Leung Jan. Leung Kar-yan had a unique masculanity about him. He never come from a traditional background of kung fu, nor from a Chinese Opera. He was more of a natural athlete, a soccer player, a weight-lifter, who had this unique mimicry, any style you showed him he could learn effortlessly. In the background of the film you also see Yuen Biao. Yuen Biao would later find fame playing Leung Jan as a younger man in Sammo’s second Wing Chun masterpiece, „The Prodigal Son”. Cast opposite Leung Kar-yan is Ka Sa Fa, Casanova Wong, a Korean superkicker, who never became a superstar on his own right, buti n wonderful cameos in the films „Duel to the Death” and „Tower of Death”, in fact any movie with „death” in the title.'