Swordfighter: Hong Kong star Donnie Yen plays the assassin Sky, the adversary in the lead action sequence in director Zhang Yimou's Hero.

Hong Kong leading man Chow Yun-Fat was already famous overseas for roles in action movies like A Better Tomorrow and Hard-Boiled before he starred in Hollywood movies Anna and the King and The Replacement Killers. But it took director Ang Lee's 2000 costume epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, an extravagant homage to King Wu martial arts movies, to make Chow well known to U.S. audiences.

Chow's lesson is clear to Hong Kong actor Donnie Yen. Like him, Yen is also a celebrity in his native China, an action star whose career goes back close to 25 years. He's starred in his share of forgettable Hollywood movies -- Blade 2, Highlander: Endgame. And, like Chow, his best shot at boosting his profile to U.S. audiences comes with the release of a Chinese costume epic.

In Yen's case, the film is director Zhang Yimou's expansive martial arts film Hero, a biopic of China's first emperor Qin that's become the top-grossing domestic film in Chinese history. The all-important lesson for Chinese actors, Yen agrees, is that if you want to win over new audiences it pays to return to your roots.

"I have respect for Chow Yun-Fat," Yen says, speaking recently from San Francisco at the beginning of a planned month-long visit to America. "A lot of actors in Hong Kong grow up with western films. They watch Godfather so many times that their acting lessons are influenced by Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro. But what makes us special in our performances is to go back to the source, to our culture. After all, who can portray a Chinese king better than a Chinese man?

"You know, I won't play a Japanese samurai in a movie because I'm not Japanese. If you want to win the hearts of American audiences, you do what you do best."

Zhang's Hero is a kindred spirit to Tsai Ming-Liang's Goodbye Dragon Inn, a mature, serious treatment of the martial arts genre. Hero recounts the third century B.C. China adventures of the warrior Nameless (Jet Li) and his battles against the famous assassins Sky (Donnie Yen), Broken Sword (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), Borken Sword's lover Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung) and Moon (Zhang Ziyi), Broken Sword's smitten apprentice. Nameless tells the stories of his battles to Qin King (Chen Daoming), putting his own interpretation on the outcomes.

Hero was filmed in numerous far-flung locations throughout China, although Yen's big sequence, the film's leadoff battle scene, was shot over 21 days on a soundstage.

The physical expectations on Yen are always high. He was expected to realistically float through the air on wires and handle his sword like an ancient warrior. But the stunts didn't compare with the mental challenges surrounding Hero, an expensive film with an unprecedented cast of well-known action and dramatic stars and the services of China's best-known director, a film expected to surpass the success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

"It's hard to come up with a film like Hero," Yen says. "It requires a person or a company or a studio to know what they're doing and to have financial back up. There were enormous expectations for our fight scene because of what Jet and I did in Once Upon a China II. Plus, everyone was looking at Crouching Tiger. So this was more about mental challenges and mental pressures."

American success has extra meaning for Yen, who was born in Guangzhou, China (formerly Canton), but grew up in Boston. He was the son of a martial arts teacher, although it was his mother who first taught him the martial art of Wu Shu. When representatives of the Beijing Wu Shu team invited Chen to return to China with them, he agreed.

Yen's movie career began as a stunt double and then moved up to staring roles with the 1984 kung fu comedy Drunken Tai Chi. His acting career took off, and it wasn't long before Yen was directing and producing films.

The flipside of director Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill films -- a two-movie kung fu series described by one British critic as a plunging hypodermic needle -- Hero emphasizes landscape, color and quiet over bloodletting. Zhang, a fifth generation Chinese filmmaker who emerged in the late 1970s along with Chen Kaige, is famous for his period dramas Raise the Red Lantern and Shanghai Triad.

Its cinematography is by Australian-born Christopher Doyle, who has regularly worked with Wong Kar-wai. As Nameless tells his battles, Doyle shifts the color from gray to red, blue, white and a spectacular emerald green.

The fight between Li and Yen might be spectacular, but the action is only part of the elaborate tapestry. Hero treats action like art instead of pulp, which separates it from many Hong King martial arts films and their Hollywood imitators.

"I remember when Crouching Tiger first came out and Hollywood loved the wire stunt work," Yen says. "So they put the wire work into everything, even reality TV shows. It became a novelty. They even gave it a name, wi fu. But in Asian filmmaking, wire stunts were just a technical element. It was never more than that. I understand the imitation. I just wish they paid more attention to the action."

Once his American visit is over, Yen returns to Hong Kong to finish a new cop thriller and start work on a martial arts epic from veteran filmmaker Tsui Hark.

He laughs about his stamina for action movies, joking that his legs still have a couple more films left in them. If Hero matches Crouching Tiger's success in America, Yen might need to stretch his action legs for a few extra years.

"It will be interesting to see if Western audiences will continue to have their minds open about Chinese culture, a culture so different from their daily lives," he says. "Crouching Tiger was a breakthrough. Was it just a trend, or are people here ready to embrace more films like Hero?" ©