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Enter the lethal weapon himself, $10-million-per-movie actor and martial-arts master Jet Li. Engrossed in the Buddhist texts he travels with everywhere, Li has reposed catlike at Zhang Yimou's side throughout Ziyi's ordeal. "Don't worry," he says with an easy smile, "this scene for me is like taking lunch for you." He rehearses once with Ziyi, hand in overcoat pocket, gives her a couple of last-minute pointers, removes the coat, gets a final makeup fix and the cameras roll. The shot is done in the blink of a Jet fighter kick. Li beams and mirthfully shadowboxes with the stunt guys, while Zhang Yimou can at long last call it a wrap. Best case scenario: a sequence that took three hours to make will translate into three, perhaps four, seconds of the final movie.

Despite Zhang's experience and many successes, this is unfamiliar territory: his first action picture. A mainland Chinese director both praised and feared because of his near mania for absolute artistic control and excruciating detail, he is uncharacteristically feeling his way as he shoots the fight scenes. Huddled behind a portable fortress of boxes and monitors, with his Marlboro baseball cap pulled low, Zhang watches Ching direct take after take without so much as a word. In an early morning moment of candor the next day he mulls over the scenes with Ziyi. "Yesterday," he concedes, "I was completely lost. I didn't know where that scene was going. It's hard to invest this fight with the right emotional tone. The actors sense my uncertainty and get frustrated. But," he hastens to add, "that only happens with the action scenes."

Chris Doyle, the Mandarin- and Cantonese-speaking Australian cinematographer and self-appointed court jester, may have helped blueprint the nihilistic and neon mood that so defines Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai's work, but he, too, has never lensed action. Even those working on the movie who are veterans of the genre are feeling the pressure. Action master Ching is expected to exceed the visual pyrotechnics that Yuen Wo-ping created for Crouching Tiger, but he acknowledges their styles are as different as chalk and cheese. Ask him to compare Yuen's work with his own and he parries the question like a judo master slipping a throw: "He's power, I'm beauty."

If Ang Lee's film was ambitious, Zhang's target sounds positively utopian. His goal is nothing short of reinventing martial-arts entertainment altogether. "If you look at the history of Chinese martial-arts literature," he says, "the plot always hinges on revenge: 'You killed my master, now you must die.' It's the same for American Westerns. For years, this has been the only theme in Chinese martial-arts films, whether it's Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan. I want to take the genre in a new direction. In my story the goal is the negation of violence. The characters are motivated by their desire to end the war. For real martial-arts masters, true heroes, the heart is far more important than the sword."

In Zhang's work, beauty has always been the hallmark. Hero will be no exception. The film will offer three versions of the story, told from different perspectives and each shot in its own color—blue, white or red—from costume to furniture to bedsheets. As Doyle enthuses, "This film will be a real journey into color."

It will also be a comparatively silent journey. Zhang has deliberately kept the dialogue to a minimum. "I wanted the language sparse and spare to reflect the elegant austerity of classical Chinese literature," he says. "In many scenes the visuals and music will carry the narrative." Such news will be heartening to mainland Chinese ears. One of Crouching Tiger's few blemishes was Hong Kong actors Chow Yun-fat's and Michelle Yeoh's shaky Mandarin. While immaterial in the U.S. and European markets, it didn't go down well in the film's own backyard.

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