King Hu

Biography

King Hu (29 April 1932 – 14 January 1997) was a Chinese film director based in Hong Kong and Taiwan best known for directing various wuxia films in the 1960s and 1970s, which brought Chinese cinema to new technical and artistic heights. His main filmic inspirations were the early Soviet call-to-action films and the Marxist themed spaghetti Westerns. His films Come Drink with Me, Dragon Inn, and A Touch of Zen inaugurated a new generation of wuxia films in the late 1960s. For criticizing Japan and Britain respectively whilst in the British occupied Hong Kong, Hu's early films faced great censorship. However, they did receive great acclaim and success in Taiwan. After completing Come Drink with Me, Hu attempted to leave the Shaw Brothers studio, but Shaw insisted Hu still owed him six more films contractually, sending his deputy to threaten a thorough investigation of King Hu's background and blacklist him as a communist. Hu was already on location in central Taiwan at this point shooting his next film, Dragon Inn. With far more artistic freedom, the film was an instant hit and became the top-grossing film of the year in Taiwan, also breaking records in Hong Kong and Korea. His next film, A Touch of Zen was a box office failure, however it was awarded at the Cannes Film Festival and became an international sensation. Two years after King Hu's death, Ang Lee began principal photography of his first martial arts film, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, in which he paid the ultimate tribute to Hu. Martial arts cinema leaped into the twenty-first century to new heights, owing much of its legacy to King Hu.