Wang Bin Rewrites Fearless Script While Avoiding Pitfalls of House of Flying ...

-- Legend of A Fighter 2005 --

In Hero and House of Flying Daggers, the most common faults are the nondescript storyline and having more style than substance. Wang Bin says that actually, Zhang Yimou didn't want too much focus on character development and storytelling, for he thought that wuxia movies had already reached their very peaks and the only way to make a breakthrough was through style, not the story or the character development [which explains why House of Flying Daggers is so abysmal], which seriously impeded what the scriptwriters could do.

He says that he had the most satisfactory time working with Jet Li on Legend of A Fighter 《霍元甲》. They had great rapport, Wang Bin very much agreed with Jet Li's notion of expressing the growth of the protagonist and his discovery on the true meaning of Chinese wushu, "When I first saw the script, I thought it was of third-rate, and couldn't even be compared to TV productions. Jet Li told me that because of the inherent problems in the script, the production incurred a lost of 170 thousand yuan every day as they waited for the script to be amended. So, I [and Li Feng] spent 13 days to rewrite the entire script, and very little remained of the original. After the revision, the storyline is particularly interesting, with good pacing and heartfelt sentiments, and I incorporated my own thoughts on life, on people, on nationality, it was very thorough."  Dazhong Daily, Fazhi Evening