Zhang Ziyi has spent more than two decades crying in her sleep, freezing on remote locations and spending years training in martial arts forms that most film audiences have never heard of. Speaking at a masterclass in Hong Kong, she made clear she would not have it any other way.

The masterclass was held Sunday at the Xiqu Centre in West Kowloon as part of programming around the 19th Asian Film Awards. In conversation with the audience, Zhang walked through the arc of her screen career, from a teenage debut in front of Zhang Yimou’s camera to the punishing physical disciplines demanded by Wong Kar-wai. The session took place shortly before she received the Excellence in Asian Cinema Award at the evening’s ceremony.

Key Facts from the Masterclass

• Zhang Ziyi was honored with the Excellence in Asian Cinema Award at the 19th Asian Film Awards in Hong Kong.
• She held a masterclass at the Xiqu Centre, West Kowloon, covering her career from “The Road Home” to “She’s Got No Name.”
• She described the physical and emotional extremes of roles in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” “The Grandmaster,” and “Love for Life.”
• She encouraged Asian filmmakers and actors to embrace their own cultural roots rather than imitate the West.

From Dance School to Zhang Yimou’s Lens

Zhang was 19 when she made “The Road Home.” At the time, she was a second-year student at the Central Academy of Drama, having graduated from dance school two years earlier. Facing a camera for the first time, she recalled feeling equal parts raw nerves and instinct. The foundational acting principle drilled into her at drama school was simple: truly listen, truly watch, truly feel. Director Zhang Yimou sent the cast to the countryside to live among the people they were portraying. That immersive experience established what she described as her bedrock habit of observing and inhabiting life.

“The performance relied on instinct,” she said. “At that point there was no real technique to speak of – what the role needed was a kind of purity and sincerity.” The film became a landmark in Chinese cinema and introduced Zhang as a striking new presence, a performer who could hold stillness and emotion in equal measure. That early encounter with Zhang Yimou’s rigorous methods set a standard she would carry through every subsequent production, no matter the scale or genre.

Ang Lee and the Ordeal of ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’

From there the conversation moved to “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and the physical ordeal of working with Ang Lee. Zhang said her dance training was what allowed her to survive the demands of the production, combined with what she described as a relentless, grinding determination to meet the director’s vision for the character. The pressure manifested in a recurring phenomenon – crying in her sleep – that she said has returned at other extreme moments in her life.

Her understanding of her character, she noted, has deepened considerably over time. At the time of filming she saw her as little more than a rebellious, disobedient girl. Now she recognizes something more complex within her: a fiercely suppressed inner wildness born of ritual propriety, family expectation and the constraints of the jianghu world. The film, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, remains a touchstone of martial arts cinema and introduced Zhang to international audiences. Yet for Zhang, its legacy is personal as much as cinematic, a proof that endurance and emotional openness can coexist in physically punishing roles.

Playing Three Generations in ‘Jasmine Women’

“Jasmine Women” presented a different order of challenge: three roles across three generations of the same bloodline, each woman shaped by her era yet connected by a shared obsessive devotion to love. The director was Hou Yong, who had been the cinematographer on “The Road Home,” and Zhang said her trust in him was immediate and total. She described mapping each character through posture, gait and eye quality – the first generation a light-footed, wide-eyed girl from a prosperous family who dreams of becoming a movie star; the second emotionally armored and combative, shaped by an unloving mother and a turbulent marriage; the third assured and direct, her movements unhurried and relaxed.

The film’s birth scene, which took three rain-soaked nights to shoot, required total physical and emotional immersion. With no peers who had yet given birth, she drew on conversations with older women, including her own mother, about what it truly felt like to bring a child into the world. “There was no room for any technique,” she said. “You had to feel the pain. You had to feel all of it.” She added, with laughter, that looking back at the scene she suspects the prosthetic pregnancy belly may have been somewhat oversized. The role demonstrated her ability to move between radically different psychological registers within a single production, and it strengthened her reputation as an actor willing to disappear into fragile, complicated women.

‘Love for Life’ and the Power of Unvarnished Performance

In “Love for Life,” Zhang starred opposite Aaron Kwok under the direction of Gu Changwei – a cinematographer-turned-director whose instinct, she said, is to strip away artifice and capture actors in their most unguarded states. The film centers on HIV-positive villagers cast out by their community. In one scene in which her character and Kwok’s hold up a marriage certificate and attempt to share the news with neighbors who recoil from their touch, Zhang said she found herself repeating words from the marriage certificate over and over in her emotional state – not as a design but as an involuntary expression of what the official recognition of their marriage meant to a woman whose life had been defined by rejection.

“After we shot that scene I could only stand to the side and weep,” she said. “The heartbreak was for how little was enough for them – and how much it still meant.” She recalled Kwok arriving on set as a glamorous Hong Kong star and transforming himself completely into a grounded village man, and described watching him in character as a daily confirmation that the director’s casting instinct had been precisely right. The film drew attention to the stigma surrounding HIV and AIDS in China, and Zhang’s performance was praised for its rawness and refusal to sentimentalize suffering.

Three Years with Wong Kar-wai on ‘The Grandmaster’

The longest stretch of the conversation was devoted to “The Grandmaster” and the three years she spent working with Wong Kar-wai. Training in the martial art Ba Gua Zhang under three instructors, she described the practice as going far beyond the choreography of the film – it reshaped her from the inside out. One foundational exercise involved walking what is called the Tang Mi Bu, a mode of movement demanding that the practitioner hold complete stillness in the lower body while carrying full internal pressure, as though moving through mud without disturbing the surface.

“Fifty minutes,” she said of the drill, still apparently vivid in memory. The discipline and containment demanded by the practice, she said, gradually burned away a restlessness within her and brought her to an understanding of her character’s absolute commitment and refusal to compromise. “Ba Gua Zhang let me touch the marrow of the character,” she said. The film itself, a visually sumptuous meditation on martial arts, memory and honor, was a landmark in Wong’s career, and Zhang’s performance as Gong Er is widely regarded as one of her finest. The training, she suggested, was not merely preparation for a role but a form of psychological transformation that changed how she approached stillness and concentration in all her later work.

Finding the Physical Root of Memory in ‘She’s Got No Name’

Zhang spoke about Peter Chan Ho-sun’s “She’s Got No Name,” in which she plays a woman who carries a birthmark on her face, her hair grown long on one side to conceal it. Zhang said she suggested the detail to the director as a way of grounding the character’s psychology in something physical – a wound that had shaped her sense of self since childhood. The character’s opening scene, shot in the damp cold of a Shanghai November, finds her hiding and exhausted after an act of violence, her body trembling.

Zhang arrived early on set, changed into costume and crouched in position while the crew lit the scene, willing herself to get cold. “A sensation imagined at home and a sensation arrived at on a real location in costume are entirely different things,” she said. The approach was characteristic of her broader method: external conditions, physical details and bodily memory serve as pathways into internal truth. For Zhang, a character is not built through dialogue alone but through the way a body carries history, tension and desire.

Asian Cinema, International Ambition

Closing the session with an audience question about how Asian cinema and Asian actors can gain genuine international footing rather than simply being reduced to symbols, Zhang was direct. The East, she said, is not the periphery but an endlessly rich foundation. “Actors are not symbols – we are bridges,” she said. The ambition to reach a global stage has never been about accommodation or imitation but about making the world see the power of Asian stories and the spirit of Asian women.

“Our cultural depth is the unique path to the international,” she said. “This generation of Asian filmmakers needs to face the world with stubbornness and with backbone – to hold to our own roots. True international strength has never come from worshipping someone else’s culture.”

Source: Yahoo Entertainment News