Adapting a novel for the big screen is always a challenge. This is especially true of books by martial arts novelist Louis Cha Leung-yung, better known as Jin Yong.
Chaโs multifaceted, multi-volume works, first serialised in newspapers including Ming Pao, are not only extremely long but have complicated plots involving many characters, scenarios and locations.
This is why his books have often been considered more suitable for television adaptations โ of which there are numerous examples in Hong Kong and mainland China โ as they can be long enough to represent the entire arc of a story.
When Chaโs works have been successfully adapted for film, these have generally taken a single storyline from a book.
The story in Tsui Hark and Tony Ching Siu-tungโs classic Swordsman II, for instance, is taken from the novel The Smiling, Proud Wanderer โ but the tale that Tsui tells is based on just 12 pages of the book.