Trailer
Plot summary
In southern China during the Beiyang years, the bandit leader Pocky Zhang and his men ambush a train carrying Ma Bangde, who is on his way to Goose Town to take up the post of county governor. When the train derails, Ma passes himself off as a counselor and talks Zhang into impersonating the governor so that they can drain the town's finances. Goose Town answers to Master Huang, a mobster who rules from a citadel and has split the taxes he levies with earlier governors. Zhang's arrival as the new governor threatens that arrangement, and Ma is caught in the middle.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Let the Bullets Fly (2010)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The film was shot mainly in Guangdong province, using the Kaiping Diaolou in Zili Village and Magang. These UNESCO World Heritage fortified towers stood in for the fictional Goose Town, so the production did not rely on studio-built sets.
- Director Jiang Wen and his writing team went through more than thirty drafts of the script, adapting Ma Shitu's satirical short story Ten Extraordinary Chinese Stories into an action-oriented narrative.
- Jiang Wen asked Joe Hisaishi, who had scored his earlier film The Sun Also Rises, to repurpose orchestral themes from that score for Let the Bullets Fly, keeping the music of his Beiyang trilogy thematically consistent.
- Let the Bullets Fly became the highest-grossing domestic film in China, a record it kept until Painted Skin: The Resurrection overtook it in 2012.
