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A new featurette for ‘The Grandmaster‘ has just been released showing the work of French studio BUF, the VFX group behind the atmospherics in the film.

The full production notes can be read here: http://buf.com/visual_effects.php?display=text&id=1053&year=2013

“In The Mood For Doyle“ is a 2007 documentary on the famed Australian cinematographer which was made for Arte TV around the time he was shooting M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady In The Water, and features of a wealth of interviews including Wong Kar-wai and Gus Van Sant.

Sina:

The 63rd Berlin Film Festival officially opened on the 7th February. Though none of the 19 films that compete for the highest honour Golden Bear prize are Chinese; luckily the Wong Kar-wai directed film ‘The Grandmaster’ is the opening film. Director Wong is the head of the jury and he led American actor Tim Robbins and the rest of the jury to meet the media. In the afternoon he hosted ‘The Grandmaster’ press conference.

Although ‘The Grandmaster’ has been in general release in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan for a month and its Mainland box office even exceeded 290 million yuan RMB which is the highest for a Wong Kar-wai film, to Berlin film viewers it is still full of mystery. The premiere’s tickets were hard to come by, the remaining 3 shows also already selling out in 1 hour.

In order to take care of the overseas (especially European) market needs, Wong Kar-wai earlier stayed in the Bangkok editing room to remove 13 minutes from ‘The Grandmaster’s original 130 minutes running time to the less than 2 hour International Version. Reportedly the story structure also was adjusted slightly. “The pace is even more intense and the feeling is even more mature.”

Actually, Wong Kar Wai has a deep relationship with the Berlin Film Festival. ‘Days Of Being Wild’ and ‘Fallen Angels’ both participated in past festivals and won European and American film critics word of mouth. This year he is invited to be the jury chair. On the eve of the opening ceremony Wong Kar-wai led the jury members including actor Tim Robbins, Oscar Winning Danish director Susanne Beir, Venice Silver Lion prize winning Iranian director Shirin Neshat and others to meet the media and kicked off the 11 day long film festival.

Another with a Berlin connection was Zhang Ziyi. Her films ‘The Road Home’, ‘Hero’ and ‘Forever Enthralled’ appeared there. Two days prior, Wong Kar-wai, Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Zhang Ziyi completed its Paris promotion and headed to Berlin at night. Zhang Ziyi’s 34th birthday was on the day after the Berlin premiere and four years ago she celebrated her birthday in Berlin.

Tony Leung was ailing when he met up with Zhang Ziyi in Paris, then they walked the red carpet in Berlin. Luckily his mother tagged along, even though he was overseas for this Lunar New Year he would not feel too bad.

Oriental Daily:

Supported by Hong Kong University’s Culture and Humanities Fund, a dialogue session for the film ’The Grandmaster’ was held at the Hong Kong University on January 31. The session was attended by actor Tony Leung, stunt coordinator Yuen Woo Ping, and martial artist Lau Kar Yung. Over one thousand tickets were given out to HKU students a few days prior to the session. All tickets were passed out in two hours. The waiting list for the session also exceeded 600 people.

At the session, Tony Leung openly talked about his filming experience on the set of ’The Grandmaster’. Tony remarked that although it had a tough three-year engagement, he did not regret the experience. Art house director, Wong Kar-wai, never really made movies for money, but ’The Grandmaster’ has now become his most commercially successful film in the box office. The film’s distributors are urging Wong to film a sequel, in which Wong is considering.

Leung is a longtime collaborator of Wong, but upon hearing that Wong may be working on a sequel, he immediately shook his head. Wong and Leung were earlier rumored to have had a falling out due to a disagreement on the film’s script and filming style. Leung insisted that he and Wong still get along really well; nonetheless, he expressed that he will not film ’The Grandmaster’ sequel if it is to be made. The 50-year-old actor explained, “I want to try new things. I like staying fresh. If I do the same things over and over again, it won’t be fun.”

As ’The Grandmaster’ took over three years to film, many actors in the film, including Tony Leung and female lead Zhang Ziyi, had complained about the harsh struggles in working on the film. Song Hye Kyo was also reportedly upset with Wong’s lurching and dragging filming ways, and declined to participate in the film’s promotions.

InSing.com:

Renowned auteur and director Wong Kar-wai revealed that he changed the title for his latest martial arts epic, ‘The Grandmaster’, from ‘The Grandmasters’ after his son asked him why. “My son asked me why my film is titled ‘The Grandmasters’ when it was originally called ‘Grandmaster Ip Man’, then ‘The Grandmaster’. He said ‘wasn’t I making a film about Yip Man?’, so I got to thinking that although my film was about the many grandmasters Ip Man meets, ultimately, it is about a state of mind,” said Wong during his visit to Singapore with actor Tony Leung Chiu-wai recently. The 54-year-old went on to add, “There can be many grandmasters, but not all of them truly deserve the title of THE grandmaster.”

Meanwhile, the title was changed from ‘Grandmaster Ip Man’ to ‘The Grandmaster’ after it was discovered that Wong’s film and another Ip Man film were being made at around the same time. As its title suggests, the film which stars Tony Leung and Zhang Ziyi is inspired by the life of Ip Man (Ye Wen), who mentored the legendary martial arts star Bruce Lee. However, Wong stated that his film will illustrate that there is more to martial arts than violence. “The stories of martial arts films consist only of fighting, but actually all the martial arts styles showcased are well-founded.”

‘The Grandmaster’ will see a wide release in Singapore on 31 January 2013.

Sina:

Two days after being released in Hong Kong, Wong Kar-wai’s ‘The Grandmaster’ accumulated HK$2.82 million at the box office (excluding late shows). With stronger and stronger momentum it pulls away from the same week release, Wong Jing’s‘ Young And Dangerous: Reloaded’; the latter grossing only HK$860,000 over two days.

Wong Kar-wai initially cut ‘The Grandmaster’ into a 4 hour version. Due to running time restrictions he cut it down to the current release of 130 minutes; many scenes were “missing”. A newly-released production special showed glimpses of some of the deleted scenes. Tony Leung personally explained Ip Man and talked about his kung fu training.

In Tony Leung’s eyes Ip Man was mild mannered and elegant, he did not resemble a kung fu person; he rose and fell and in the end he was able to calmly be himself. Wong Kar-wai hoped that Leung’s Ip Man performance would be a mix of Ip Man and Bruce Lee. He tried to combine them for the effect. Leung said that Ip Man enjoyed kung fu as much as Bruce Lee but normally he was so mild mannered that no one knew he could fight. He said that Bruce Lee was his childhood idol. When he was 7 or 8 he was already a kung fu fan. Because his family was poor and felt that he would get into fights after learning kung fu, he was not permitted to learn.

When he explored the character, he thought that the character’s appearance could be expressed through technique. Yet if he did not understand the inside of the character he had no way to express its aura, which was not something that could be achieved over night; this his long term training was necessary.  ”The first the fracture was only a hairline, the second time it was already cracked like shark teeth!” Because he did not want to hinder the progress, Leung originally wanted surgery but the doctor did not suggest it. He could only tell Wong Kar-wai to wait 4 months for him; thus Wong Kar-wai could only head to the Northeast of China and shoot the Zhang Ziyi train station duel first, but he ran into the coldest winter in history. Zhang Ziyi had to shoot in 30 degrees below zero.
Wong Kar-wai revealed that Tony Leung was reluctant. After recovering for about three weeks he headed to the Northeast to look for him and said that he could work on dramatic scenes. In the film Ip Man said that if life had four seasons, his before age 40 was all spring. Turning 50 this year Leung said, “Now is still spring for me. Because I have been very lucky to run into very excellent film people to work with. Making this film has changed my view on life. In the future I will choose to be optimistic because the character of Ip Man is different from my characters in recent years. My recent characters are all depressed, but this time he is very positive and optimistic. Now I like to happy and joyous, I feel the world has hope. Thus after ‘The Silent War’ I wanted to make some happy and warm movies.” 

In the production special the removed scenes included Tony Leung and Song Hye-Kyo’s sweet romantic couple scene, Ip Man sweetly smiling with his wife in his arms. When the Japanese military arrived, they got into a struggle and she slapped him. In the released version of the film, Chang Chen’s exciting duel with Leung at the end of the film was removed. His appearance with a razor to fight Leung was also unveiled.

Leung in one scene washed his wife’s (played by Song Hye-kyo)’s feet. He said, “I was forced to, Wong Kar-wai asked me to choose between bathing my wife or washing her feet. I could only choose washing her feet.”

The production special even uncovered that Ip Man once visited Master Gong Er in the Northeast. Leung in the drifting snow passed through the plum blossom courtyard, where they encountered each other again. Leung said he did not mind so many scenes and dialogue being cut because ‘The Grandmaster’ was Wong Kar-wai’s film. The director shot so much that cutting was necessary. Chang Chen agreed with Leung and said that he did not mind.

The featurette also revealed Julian Cheung Chi-lam as two characters, not only as a Chinese Opera actor but also Zhang Ziyi’s fiance. In this scene he only made an appearance in a flash.

Although the film received good response, Leung never thought about winning Best Actor with this film again because that was not his goal for making the film.

Sina:

Earlier in the first part of ‘The Road To The Grandmasters’ fans saw how hard the actors trained, some online even praised Tony Leung for being willing to drop his big star persona and learn martial arts from the start despite being known primarily for his acting skills. Yesterday the second part of ‘The Road To The Grandmasters’ was released online. Viewers were able to see Tony Leung’s training with Wing Chun master Ip Man’s final disciple Mr. Leung Siu Hung. Over three years of tough training, Leung managed to gain a solid martial art structure and powerful attacks. He was able to cleanly break through a wooden board several inches thick. His improvement was shocking. Master Leung said, “(Tony) Leung Chiu-wai’s advantage is that he has no burden or bad habits from any other kung fu, gradually he is able to absorb the spirit of Wing Chun.” Director Wong Kar-wai also said, “I hope that Tony Leung’s portrayal of Mr. Ip is a mix of Ip Man and Bruce Lee. I have to break everything about him and shape a person anew.”

http://ent.sina.com.cn/m/c/2012-12-06/08153804966.shtml