Script To Screen: “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”

A great fight scene from the 2000 movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, screenplay by Hui-Ling Wang and James Schamus and Kuo Jung Tsai, book by Du Lu Wang.

IMDb plot summary: Two warriors in pursuit of a stolen sword and a notorious fugitive are led to an impetuous, physically skilled, adolescent nobleman’s daughter, who is at a crossroads in her life.

The combatants: Jen Yu (Ziyi Zhang) and Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh).

Here is the scene in the movie:

Well… the summation of the fighting, all of those moves, summed up in a scant few paragraphs. But when the movie’s choreographer Woo-ping Yuen staged the combat and has also handled The Matrix and the Kill Bill films, I guess you pretty much just let him figure it out with the director.

That said, this is a script that was going to be produced with the knowledge the fight scenes would require heavy staging and rehearsal, so the writers could afford to provide such minimal description. For those of us writing spec scripts, we need to provide more. Not a blow by blow account, but enough to convey the length and visual nature of each fight as well as the emotional undercurrent.

One of the single best things you can do to learn the craft of screenwriting is to read the script while watching the movie. After all a screenplay is a blueprint to make a movie and it’s that magic of what happens between printed page and final print that can inform how you approach writing scenes. That is the purpose of Script to Screen, a Go Into The Story series where we analyze a memorable movie scene and the script pages that inspired it.

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