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).

INT. YUAN COURTYARD - DAYJen soars out to the front courtyard where the guards are
still practicing.They raise their weapons at the sight of an intruder. YU
(calling out)
Jen!Jen greets Yu with the Green Destiny. YU
Everyone out. Shut the doors.The men leave. YU
Fine... the friendship is over.Yu scoops up a weapon from one of many lying around and
begins her battle with Jen.Yu uses every weapon that's available against Jen but none
are any match for the Green Destiny.After slicing through another set of Yu's weapons, Jen looks
admiringly at the Green Destiny in her hands. YU
Don't touch it! That's Li Mu Bai's
sword. JEN
Come and get it if you can. YU
Without the Green Destiny, you are
nothing. JEN
Don't be a sore loser. Go ahead.
Take your pick. I'll wait. Go
ahead.Yu picks up a huge broad sword and attacks. Just as the
Green Destiny slices it in half, Yu holds the broken blade
at Jen's neck. She pauses before hurting Jen, then pulls
back. YU
Give me the sword.Jen, taking advantage of Yu's trust, slices her arm. JEN
Take it!Yu, her shoulder bleeding, falls back as Li Mu Bai jumps in. LI
(enraged)
Stop it! You don't deserve the
Green Destiny. JEN
Not another lecture! On guard! LI
Let's end this here. JEN
Only the sword will settle this.Jen soars up to the rooftop, with Li right on her tail.

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 series on GITS where we analyze a memorable movie scene and the script pages that inspired it.

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