Yuen Wah in foreign film?

[Guest Le Peril Jaune]

Scissored from HKTopten ( www.geocities.com/hktopten/ ):

* (5/5/2007) Yuen Wah and his wife yesterday attended the Celestial

Entertainment HERO (MA WING JING) digital video release lucky drawing, the

winner of which would receive two Shanghai round trip plane tickets. Yuen

Wah will soon go abroad for a foreign film audition in Australia.

        Brother Wah said, in this foreign film he will play a servant at a

ranch. The character needed to know a little gong fu and horse riding.

Brother Wah knew how to make the horse walk but he might not be able to

make it run. However, he expressed that for any highly difficult action

scenes he definitely would first buy a lot of insurance.

        While Brother Wah was in Shaw's and Golden Harvest he has already

worked on foreign films, but at the time he did not need to say any line

in English. This time he would need to speak some simple English. If the

audition was successful, he would perform in Australia for two to three

months. The salary would be three or four times of his Hong Kong salary.

        In recent years Hollywood film companies have favored Hong Kong

film remake and foreign financing has invested in Hong Kong films.

Brother Wah expressed that he would like to see his film ICEMAN COMETH

(GUP DUNG KEI HUP) remade. Earlier he saw a Sylvester Stallone movie that

had a lot of similarities to ICEMAN.

[Guest Markgway]

Earlier he saw a Sylvester Stallone movie that had a lot of similarities to ICEMAN.

Presumably Demolition Man.

[Cognoscente]

On 5/15/2007 at 7:16 AM, Guest Le Peril Jaune said:

Scissored from HKTopten ( www.geocities.com/hktopten/ ):

 

        In recent years Hollywood film companies have favored Hong Kong

film remake and foreign financing has invested in Hong Kong films.

Brother Wah expressed that he would like to see his film ICEMAN COMETH

(GUP DUNG KEI HUP) remade. Earlier he saw a Sylvester Stallone movie that

had a lot of similarities to ICEMAN.

 

I'm grateful for the copy-and-paste method because so many old sites (namely GeoCities) have been taken down, which is why it's good to provide more than just a link. Back in the old days, I would c&p things into e-mail drafts so that I could save the info for potential book projects and general diary-keeping.

Anyway, I find it fascinating that Yuen Wah detected the commonality between The Iceman Cometh and Demolition Man. In the December 1993 issue of Empire, Wesley Snipes discussed the influence of HK action cinema on the Sylvester Stallone movie: "We've taken every great fight scene that we've liked and picked the best things from them."

Even the death of Brandon Lee was brought up by the journalist (Mark Salisbury), to which Sly said: "Last Saturday night, I spent eight hours strapped on top of a police car going 80 miles an hour. Wesley sticks out a machine gun, I grab his hand, he shoots me and it's supposed to be 30 shots. Then I take the gun away and try to break through the window so the gun barrel is in my face and I'm banging away. On the last take, I had a bad feeling and, at the end of the shot, I took the gun and fired off 15 shots which would have taken my head right off. It would have killed me. You have that every day. You never know."

In light of Yuen Wah being cast in Australia, it's a shame that the late '80s remake of Mr. Vampire was cancelled because it could have been a selling point for him to work with for Australia...if not a springboard to do proper U.S. stuff. Maybe Jet Li's The Master wouldn't have been shelved. Had Demon Hunters been completed and released, maybe Police Story III: Supercop would have been an English language production. It had the makings with Michelle Yeoh being an English speaker and Kim Maree Penn in the cast, alas...

On a lighter note, Yuen Wah being cast in Kung Fu Hustle was like Robert Forster being cast in Jackie Brown.

Edited May 27, 2021 by Cognoscente