Los AngelesTimes|2013-8-23

Playing now in Los Angeles, the long-awaited film has already been the biggest commercial hit of Wong's career in China, even with its unlikely combination of a rousing martial arts story and a moving tale of romantic longing.

Wong began his career as a screenwriter, frequently writing fantasy martial arts films. But he researched The Grandmaster story for about three years, traveling across China to learn of forms of martial arts. Shooting the film in an arduous 22 months over another three years, he worked with stunt choreographer Yuen Wo Ping, known for his work on The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, with individual fight scenes taking months to capture on film.

None of his main stars practiced martial arts, and so Tony Leung, Ziyi Zhang and Chang Chen trained tirelessly for the film before and during production. Leung broke his arm while training, waited for it to heal and then broke the same arm again in the same spot on the first day of shooting, forcing the production to shuffle its schedule.

"I just wanted to make a kung fu movie of my kind," Wong said of the film's inspiration. "That's why I needed to spend so much time, I have to understand the world of martial arts. And I feel I have to find my angle to tell the stories."

Unlike martial arts film in the Wuxia style, such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, that are typically set in a fantasy pre-modern era, "The Grandmaster" is set against the specific backdrop of the political upheaval in China from the 1930s to the 1950s, including the Japanese invasion and civil war.

As Ip Man (Leung) trains in the martial arts style known as Wing Chun, marked by a fluid simplicity, he encounters — and fights — practitioners of other martial-arts styles. Among those is the woman known as Gong Er (Zhang), who has become sole inheritor of her father's dynamic Bagua fighting style, though circumstances conspire to keep the two from acting on the attraction between them.