Year of the Dragon - Trivia, Questions and Fun Facts

[harry]

The role of Tracy was almost given to Joan Chen. "She would have been amazing, too. In a different way," Cimino says. "But Ariane just had something more American about her. And that's what I wanted. She had to be equally Chinese and American, whereas Joan was clearly Chinese-born. But we could have made it work if we had to."

[lena]

When it was released, most American critics gave the picture a negative review. Cimino notes in his commentary track, "Interestingly enough, one of the few positive reviews we got was from someone who generally hates all my work, Sheila Benson. Because she's married to a Chinese man. And she wrote a very interesting reaction to this, because she was stunned at seeing things that she knew were real. See the one thing Sheila Benson got was the exploitation of Asians, by Asians. Of Chinese by Chinese, and that, she said, was the first time she had seen something like this."

[nina]

At 25 mins.) The female singer was performing at a "really sleazy club" in Taiwan that Cimino, Stone, and some gangsters visited, and he hired her immediately for the film. "By the end of the movie she learned English and she enrolled at Barnard."

[chad]

The French film magazine 'Cahiers du cinéma' included _Year of the Dragon (1985) in their Top 10 list for 1985 as No.3.

[ivan]

Michael Cimino and Oliver Stone first met when Stone approached Cimino to direct Midnight Express. Cimino had to pass, as he was just about to start production on his passion project, The Deer Hunter (1978). Years later, while in pre-production on Year of the Dragon, Cimino remembered how much he loved the script for Midnight Express, and asked Stone to collaborate on the script.

[kim]

Bernardo Bertolucci asked Cimino about John Lone before hiring him for The Last Emperor, and Cimino told him there was no better choice.

[carl]

There's a nineteen-second scene consisting of sequences from three completely different geographic locations, and he recalls betting a script supervisor that it would cut together perfectly fine. Joey Tai (Lone) starts walking through a Bangkok sweatshop, crosses a small footbridge in NYC, and enters the North Carolina set.

[darrell]

A girl that Cimino was hitting on asked what he did for a living, and when he told her he's a director he had only made commercials at the time, she replied "What do you direct, traffic?" He hasn't referred to himself as a director ever since.

[bernice]

The exterior shots of New York City were actually sets built in North Carolina. Said sets proved realistic enough to fool even Stanley Kubrick, who attended the movie's premiere. Co-writer/director Michael Cimino actually had to convince the Bronx-born Kubrick this film's exteriors were shot at a sound-stage and not on location, 8. While set primarily in New York City, much of the film was shot in North Carolina including the sequences on the streets of Chinatown. They recreated streets with attention to detail up to and including the angled grade of their Mott Street -- the "main" street in NYC's Chinatown -- which is not actually flat. They took plaster casts of curbstones and recreated the grade for authenticity, something he says most NYC reproductions on film don't achieve. "If you look at Ragtime, it's flat, and that's why it doesn't look like New York [City]. It's a very rocky little island." He's proud of their accomplishment as it even fooled Stanley Kubrick. The legendary director was given a screening in London where he told Cimino that "Chinatown looks so great." Cimino told him the truth, and after a little bit of back and forth Kubrick realized he'd been duped. "If you can fool Kubrick, who had the best eye in the world, you can fool anyone." The sets have been reused in dozens of films in the years since.

[sandra]

The line, "You guys are starting to look like the Chicago Cubs. Like you already lost," was said to be "pure Oliver Stone" by Cimino. "I love it," he adds.