So my only urge to you is to beware of the trap of genre-based criticism that defines genres in such a way that boundaries seem as if they have an existence, but in fact these are ever mutating. James Schamus: We’re dealing with genre based research that also carries with it an enormous amount of historical weight vis-à-vis changing formations of national and cultural identities – to draw up boundaries that individual works either fall into or out of, depending on boundaries that have been drawn as a result of the study of the history, or the nature of the genre through a very specific paradigm.

So I’d like you to maybe start off from there. So I’m very intrigued by the idea of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, with your input into the genre – a Westerner’s perspective, if you like. Then, there came a view that the martial arts genre was purely a Chinese national form. Chinese directors tend to look at the genre as a form of historical precedence, saying “Look, we’ve got this venerable tradition of the martial arts – it’s history”, and they would justify the genre in those terms. Stephen Teo: I am doing my research for my next project, which is on the Chinese martial arts cinema, and so far I’ve only come across what is essentially a Chinese perspective on the martial arts – what I would call a historicist perspective. Schamus’s office in Canal Street, New York City.

The interview took place on 13 March 2001 in Mr.

I recorded this conversation with him during a visit to New York while on a tour of the United States following my participation in a symposium on Hong Kong cinema at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Schamus is also credited as one of the film’s executive producers. As a long-time collaborator of Ang Lee (they have worked together on all of Lee’s films from The Wedding Banquet onwards), Schamus is really the man who shaped the screenplay of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon into its final form, helped along with the cultural input of two Chinese scriptwriting colleagues. James Schamus is a founder of Good Machine, the company behind Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Ang Lee’s wuxia picture that has earned not only four Oscars in the recent Academy Awards ceremony, but also the distinction of being the most successful subtitled foreign-language movie ever released in the United States.

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