"Cut to six years later, Miramax knows who Woo Ping is, telling me I was right, we were wrong and now we want to get into the Woo Ping business and want to release IRON MONKEY," Tarantino said. "I'm aboard the project as a director presenting another director's work hence the byline 'Quentin Tarantino Presents' where I see myself as a director by proxy. So instead of Woo Ping talking to you about the movie, I'm talking to you about him. It's a different thing I'm presenting. Martial art film fans will like it, but people not familiar with the genre may not be too sure, but if they like what I've done, I'm saying then they'll like this. So hopefully my name can get more people interested in at least checking it out."

Produced by Tsui Hark, IRON MONKEY is about an imagined, Robin Hood-like character called the Iron Monkey (Yu Rong-Guang) who with the help of the legendary Wong Kei-Ying (Donnie Yen), must rescue Wong's kidnapped son, Wong Fei-Hong, and battle the traitorous Shaolin Monk Hiu Hing. Of note, Wong Fei-Hong was a real-life martial arts folk hero who lived in Southern China up to the 1930's and in IRON MONKEY it's the only time in the character's more than 100 appearances in Chinese film that he was played by a female, Tsang Sze-Man.

Interestingly, a fight from CHARLIE'S ANGELS between four stuntmen and Drew Barrymore, shot for shot and gag for gag is similar to the fight between the IRON MONKEY'S Miss Orchid and four renegade Shaolin Priests. As it turns out, Woo Ping's brother Yuen Cheung Yan was the martial arts choreographer for MONKEY and the action director for ANGELS.

Unlike the 1977 version of the same name, IRON MONKEY looks like it was done yesterday. Tarantino noted, "It just shows you how far behind we are and not how old these movies are." In talking with Quentin, he is one of the few American directors I've spoken with that knows the genre, even the classic and not so classic Shaw Brothers films of yesteryear. "I was the right age when the kung-fu thing explosion started," he shared, "and I loved it to death. Went to all the films, that was back in 75-76. I lived in a half-black, half-white neighborhood in LA and I'd basically cross the train tracks all the time to watch them. The black movie theaters kept the kung-fu films alive theatrically.

"Then in the '80s there was an explosion in Hong Kong with new stuff, Jackie's POLICE STORY, and I said, 'Wow, this is a lot is a lot different than what I had been seeing.' So then I start going to Chinatown and watching all these new kind of films. It was great going to the Chinatown video stores and getting all the bootlegged stuff. It actually took me years to finally see a good version of PROJECT A, and I still loved it. And now, I can get great copies of old Shaw Brothers films, many dubbed in French and that's really cool."

I've always wanted to ask Tarantino that since he's such a big fan of these films and has been so heavily influenced by the old kung-fu films, the Hong Kong explosion and the Shaw brother classics, how come he's never tackled something like that? He looks at me with a big grin, "Well, it just so happens..."