Trivia / Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

• Dyeing for Your Art:
  • Chow Yun-fat shaved his head for the film.
  • Michelle Yeoh deliberately didn't work for a year before filming began so she could concentrate on martial arts training and learning Mandarin.
• On-Set Injury: During a fight scene, Michelle Yeoh tore an ACL on her knee after a bad landing and had to be flown from China to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore for surgery.
• Irony as She Is Cast:
  • While Jen is obviously highly trained and skillful in martial arts, Zhang Ziyi never had any official martial arts training at all. Instead she uses her dance techniques to learn her moves in these scenes, as if they were a dance rather than a fight (which in terms of creating and filming them is actually not that far from the truth).
  • This was also Chow Yun-fat's first martial arts film.
• No Stunt Double: The actors almost invariably performed their own stunts. CGI was used to remove the wires holding them up.
• Referenced by...: In The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius, the episode "Crouching Jimmy, Hidden Sheen", a riff on the Wuxia genre, is named after this film.
• Star-Making Role: For Zhang Ziyi.
• What Could Have Been: Jet Li was originally cast to play Li Mu Bai, but turned the part down to appear in Romeo Must Die. He also promised his wife that he wouldn't work while she was pregnant.

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