Where to watch Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)

Trivia & production notes

• Jet Li was Ang Lee's original choice to play Li Mu Bai but declined the role to care for his pregnant partner Nina Li, prioritizing family over the film's international potential.
• Shu Qi turned down the role of Jen because she thought the martial arts training would be too demanding and didn't want to commit to such a lengthy production.
• Ang Lee shot the film continuously for eight months while working over 15 hours a day, taking no breaks and rarely going home.
• During the first day of filming, Chow Yun-fat needed 28 takes for a single scene solely due to accent difficulties with the Mandarin dialogue, an experience he said had never happened to him before.
• The four lead actors came from different regions and spoke different variants of Chinese: Chow Yun-fat speaks Cantonese, Michelle Yeoh learned her Mandarin lines phonetically, Chang Chen spoke with a Taiwanese accent, and only Zhang Ziyi had the native Mandarin accent Ang Lee wanted.
• Computer effects were used only to remove the safety wires from the actors during the aerial stunts, with most of the martial arts sequences showing the actors' actual faces as they performed in the trees.
• Ang Lee personally edited the English subtitles for the film to ensure they would satisfy Western audiences, since the production specifically targeted viewers unfamiliar with traditional wuxia films.
• The film's score was composed by Tan Dun and produced in just two weeks, performed by the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, Shanghai National Orchestra, and Shanghai Percussion Ensemble, featuring cello solos by Yo-Yo Ma.
• Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was adapted from the fourth book in a five-novel sequence by Wang Dulu, originally serialized in a Chinese newspaper between 1941 and 1942.
• Though the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film was presented to Taiwan, the film was an international co-production involving companies from China, the United States, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.