Tarantino produced Iron Monkey's US release — and changed the film's fate

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Quentin Tarantino , perhaps more than any other director of his generation, is incredibly transparent about the sources of his inspiration, publicly extolling the films that influence his own work. And even before the whole bloody Kill Bill affair , the director had been especially known for celebrating world cinema, particularly cinema from Asia. One of the most notable examples of this came with the 2001 U.S. release of Iron Monkey , an exhilarating 1993 Hong Kong martial arts film directed by the great Yuen Woo-ping and written and produced by genre legend Tsui Hark . Without Tarantino's endorsement (he served as a producer for its U.S. release), the film may have never gotten a stateside release — and become one of the highest-grossing foreign-language movies in American history at the time.