Yuen Bun 元彬
Yuen Bun started out in Peking opera and came into film as a stuntman, like many graduates of Yu Jim-Yuen's school. In the 1990s he choreographed fights for Tsui Hark and directed Once Upon a Time in China IV. Later, two Hong Kong Film Awards came to him for very different work — the wire-flying in Flying Swords of Dragon Gate and the clashes in a modern city in Kung Fu Jungle.
Yuen Bun was born in 1954. His parents loved Peking opera and sent their son to the China Drama Academy run by Yu Jim-Yuen. By his own recollection, he began training in martial arts at around the age of seven. At the school he performed as one of the "Seven Little Fortunes." Sammo Hung, Jackie Chan and Yuen Biao came out of the same troupe. The students performed at the Lai Chi Kok amusement park and were also invited to appear in clubs. Over time the shows drew smaller audiences, while the movies offered work to people who could fight, take a fall properly and repeat the same movement precisely many times over.
Bun became a stuntman. He can be seen in The Golden Lion (1971) and Enter the Dragon (1973). As early as the 1970s he was helping to stage fight scenes. According to a biography published by the directors' guild, on The Evil Snake Girl (1974) he worked on the fights together with other graduates of the opera school. In the credits of The Duel of the Century (1981), Bun is listed both among the performers and among the fight choreographers. For many years he combined both jobs, even on a single film, though gradually fight choreography became his main occupation.
While his schoolmates were winning fame on screen, Bun, as he himself recalled, worked as an assistant to Tony Ching. The choreographer Ma Yuk-Sing also worked in his team. That team took part in Swordsman II (1992) and Dragon Inn (1992). In such films a fighter could lift off the ground, spin in midair and end up behind his opponent. Many years later Bun explained how a single leaping strike can be assembled from eight shots. In two of them the actor is helped by a wire. The rest are filmed so that the movement looks continuous at the cuts. A choreographer, Bun said, must among other things coordinate the work of the camera operators, the lighting crew, the special-effects artists and the editor — each has a task of their own even in one such strike.
Tsui Hark and the producer Ng See-Yuen entrusted Bun with the fight choreography on Once Upon a Time in China III (1993), and then invited him to direct Once Upon a Time in China IV (1993) himself. Now, as a director, he was responsible for making the fights part of the larger story of Wong Fei-Hung. In the middle of the decade Bun directed several more pictures, among them Tough Beauty and the Sloppy Slop (1995). These films fared more modestly at the box office, and he once again began working more often as a fight choreographer. In 1995 he worked with Tsui Hark on both The Blade and The Chinese Feast, where a cooking contest was filmed on the scale of an action movie.
In films set in the present day Bun had no less work. For Johnnie To he staged the shootouts between police and criminals in Breaking News (2004) and the clashes on the tatami and in the street in Throw Down (2004). To called on him again when he made Sparrow (2008), a story about pickpockets who need fast and precise fingers. After sword duels and wire-assisted flights, Bun was staging movements that the people around them on screen were not supposed to notice at all.
In 2017, Bun said that he had been living on the mainland for more than twenty years. In Dongguan he consulted on a film about a local martial artist and spoke about the kind of school for screen fight choreography he would like to see. He would set aside three years for the training. In his conception, students would master strikes and falls, working with the camera, editing, music and dubbing. He himself continued to do what he wanted to teach. During these years he was among the action choreographers on Sword Master (2016) and Journey to the West: The Demons Strike Back (2017), and in 2025 he again appeared before the camera for Tsui Hark, in The Legend of the Condor Heroes: The Great Hero.
