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COVER STORY:
Brain Drain: |
ASIA | January 26, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 3 |
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By RICHARD CORLISS  t's not as if Chow Yun-fat doesn't know how to treat a lady. In a decade as Hong Kong's coolest movie star, his characters honed a code of macho courtship. The Killer: he blinds Sally Yeh with a stray gunblast. City on Fire: he runs out on lovemaking in the shower to check his beeper. Full Contact: instead of a wedding ring, he gives his girlfriend a deep bite mark on her arm. And in his last Hong Kong epic, Peace Hotel, he smacks Cynthia Yip with his son's copybook. So Mira Sorvino, Chow's co-star in his Hollywood debut The Replacement Killers, should have known what to expect.
But maybe Chow didn't. The 42-year-old actor, who in real life is a genteel and devoted husband, got an on-screen baptism of firearms from Sorvino that was as startling, though not as prolonged, as a shootout scene in one of Chow's great action films for director John Woo. The Mira tussle has already achieved legendary status, with rumors of bootleg tapes of the incident. In back-lot gossip it is known simply as The Fight. Chow plays John Lee, an assassin on the lam in Los Angeles; Sorvino is Meg, a truculent forger he comes to for a passport home. In an early scene, Lee takes Meg hostage. She pulls a gun on him and holds it to his head. He then wrestles the gun away and throws her down on the bed. A simple, but pivotal, moment. Antoine Fuqua, a specialist in commercials and music videos making his first feature film, took the actors aside individually and told each of them to perform the action as realistically as possible. The result was more than he bargained for. "Once they got into the scene and started playing the characters," recalls Fuqua, "it became so intense I had to yell Ścut' and just let them chill out for a couple of minutes. She was poking him in the head with the gun, really putting a lot of pressure on his temple. Then he grabbed it and slammed her onto the bed and put the gun under her neck." Fuqua feels the blowup heightened the film's immediacy: the characters are supposed to have a hate-hate relationship. And, hey, it's just acting, baby."Obviously, Yun-fat is such a gentleman he would never deliberately hurt her. And she would never hurt him. But they're both intense actors. Yun-fat really gets into it, and Mira's a Method actress. It's a movie set, so things like that happen." Cover photograph for TIME by Paul Hu | ||
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