James Schamus

On one day last year you might have found James Schamus in the classroom discussing the relevance of classical Chinese philosophy to Hong Kong action films, and, later in the afternoon, emailing script changes to China or speaking by phone with production managers on a movie set in Tibet. Schamus, an associate professor of film, shares with his fellow faculty members at Columbia's School of the Arts the distinction of being both a practicing artist and a teacher.

What makes him a little unusual, this year at least, is that he is executive producer and co-writer of the most financially successful foreign-language film in American history—Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. And not only has the film broken box office records, but it is a critical hit as well. It has received rave reviews and 10 Academy Awards nominations, including for best film, best foreign film, and best direction; two of those, for best song and best adapted screenplay, have gone to Schamus, personally.

Representing Schamus' seventh collaboration with Taiwan-born director Ang Lee, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is set in ancient China and is both an epic love story and a martial arts film. The script is adapted from a 70-year-old, five-volume novel in Chinese by Wang Du Lu; Schamus collaborated on it with Chinese co-writers Wang Hui Ling and Tsai Kuo Jung (also Oscar-nominated) in a cross-cultural and cross-continental process that Schamus likens to a ping-pong game.

Now widely distributed throughout America, the movie has transcended the traditional art house audience for foreign films. When asked who composes the next wave of audience members for this Mandarin-language film, Schamus replied, "teenagers."

"This is probably going to be the first subtitled film that about 10 million people in America have ever seen—and a lot of those people are younger," he said.

"What we're finding is that the subtitles are not an impediment. Many have pointed out that there is a whole new generation of young people who have grown up with text through email and with a mixture of text and image on their computer screens, on Web pages, and that this enables them to make a much easier transition into the subtitled film environment."

Twenty-two-year-old actress Zhang Ziyi plays Jen Yu, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon's center role.

The blend of romance and action in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon certainly accounts for much of the popular appeal of the film. With respect to younger audiences, the character at the center of the film, Jen Yu, resonates. She is a rebellious teenager from a noble family who has been slated for a traditional life, but who secretly trains as a martial artist with a master who has an evil agenda.

"She is both a destructive force and at the same time, what I think is actually rather revolutionary is that she's the one who finds the way, the Tao," said Schamus. "There's a real Taoist undercurrent here which is traditionally associated with the mad Taoist male monk fighter and we've transposed that to a young girl, who on the one hand has to understand what human obligation and responsibility are and on the other hand has to tear all that stuff up in order to find herself. I think centering the story around a young woman gave the film an enormous cultural valence that otherwise it wouldn't have had."

Whereas Schamus said there isn't much historical basis for women becoming martial artists in China, the source material for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon suggested the idea. "And the genre itself has often accommodated female characters," he said. "What it hasn't done, and what this movie has done is make them the center of consciousness and of the narrative, which is quite a change." The novel that forms the basis for the movie is a historical romance that draws on China's ancient literary tradition.

"The Wuxia Pian genre is something that emerged at the beginning of the 20th century," said Schamus. "It was part of a very specific cultural movement on the part of Post-Manchurian China to recover and reorganize its own national myths, folklore and heroes, and to create new ones for the 20th century."

"These books represent a real efflorescence of emerging mass culture in China, not elite culture. A kind of pulp fiction, they're very exciting and carry an enormous amount of social energy within them. That said, they also draw on the enormously venerable literary, philosophical and cultural history that was embedded in the Chinese language itself—5,000 years of continuous linguistic history."

While the film's young leads Yhang Yi-Yi and Chang Chen may speak to a new audience for foreign films, their co-stars Chow Yun Fat and Michelle Yeoh already have international reputations. Schamus noted, "I do think that there's a cross-generational appeal to the film, the parallel stories of the older folks and the younger folks seem to have been working well for both audiences."

The movie offers two love stories that defy the expectations of the moviegoer. Schamus said the Chinese setting and source material created the opportunity to create a film that departs from cliches.

"These days it is very difficult to craft anything really resembling a romantic movie within the Hollywood system," he said. "Your options are pretty limited. Once you spend that much money casting star A and starlet B, we know they're getting together, so it's just a matter of watching a course of events unfold that will leave them in a clutch by the end of the movie. And if the characters are relatively young, there's a limited repertoire of obstacles that one can throw in their path. So it was nice to be able to make a movie which offered a completely different range of experiences."

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a phenomenon in Asia as well as in America. It won Taiwan's equivalent of the best picture Academy Award and was last year's top-grossing Chinese-language film in Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Korea and Taiwan.