The project "Chasing the Shadow" has gone through a long brewing process. Wei Junzi and his two friends watched too many movies and wrote too many film reviews. They always have the impulse to create a script. The theme of the script is of course martial arts, and the content comes from the most familiar plots, characters and scenes, so they came up with a shadow chase. Unfortunately, after the completion of the breakthrough outline, no one cared for it for a long time, and the three of them felt dejected and almost gave up. By chance, Wei Junzi showed the script to Wu Zhenyu, who has a good personal relationship. As a result, he was greatly appreciated and they hit it off. Wei Junzi revealed: Wu Zhenyu is a person with a clear theme. If he wants to say one thing, he must say it to the extreme. He is creative, he just needs a script to express his ideas.
Salute to the classics
Hong Kong is the birthplace of martial arts films and has the best behind-the-scenes team. At the same time, Wu Zhenyu loves Kitano Takeshi very much, so such a film with distinctive Hong Kong-style martial arts style and paying tribute to it aroused his interest. Wu Zhenyu has his own unique views on the visual sense, characterization, audience psychology and fashion trends of the script. He and Wei Junzi learn from each other's strong points, and finally "Chasing the Shadow" was released.
Wu Zhenyu revealed the idea of "paying tribute" for a long time, first because he was chatting with a foreigner. He thinks that the western films that pay tribute to Shaw Film Company only confuse some classic scenes in a clumsy way, which is extremely disrespectful to Hong Kong martial arts films. No matter whether the west despises or really doesn't understand China's martial arts movies, Wu Zhenyu feels obligated to make a real martial arts movie to pay tribute to his predecessors, such as Quentin's Kill Bill, Sanchilong's Xi Shou Burning the West, and the Korean box office miracle "Goodfellas, Bad Guys, Weirdo", so as to arouse young audiences' yearning for the golden age of Hong Kong's martial arts and let them re-understand the martial arts movies that originated in Hong Kong. Wu Zhenyu recommended the script "Chasing the Shadow" to Marco Mak and Ma Yucheng, and Marco Mak was known as the "King of Hong Kong Film Editing", which witnessed the glorious period of martial arts films. Marco Mak also co-directed The Lion Awakening with Wu Zhenyu, and their cooperation was very tacit. Ma Yucheng is a cutting-edge Hong Kong-made martial arts director who participated in the creation of almost all classic works in the heyday of martial arts films. He and Marco Mak are old partners in Ghost Story, the legendary swordsman series and Huang Feihong series. Chasing the shadow brings the three together to form a new golden iron triangle.
Huayi Brothers, who has been committed to training and training young directors and creating a new type of China films, immediately discovered the topicality and market value of this project and decided to invest soon. After the filming was completed, Huayi Brothers also invited the top Korean team producing special effects such as old boys, Boy, Bad Guy and Weird Man to join the post-production of Chasing the Shadow.