Fassbender brings video game to life with new sci-fi film

[Photo provided to China Daily]

As for how popular the game is in China, a forum named after the game on Baidu Tieba, one of the country's most popular communication platforms, has more than 320,000 followers.

For them, two scenes - the eagles' flight and "the leap of faith" - are sure to resonate.

The "leap" is an acrobatic move mastered by the assassins, who dive headfirst from a high building and perform a head-over-heels roll in mid-air and land on their feet.

Fassbender says the "leap" portrayed in the movie was done by a stuntman, who did the 38-meter dive.

The actor also says that despite the temptation to use computer-generated imagery for the shot, the filmmakers did real-set shooting as a tribute to old-school cinematography as well as to make the scene as realistic as possible.

"We tried to find realistic ways to do the action scenes," he says.

Fassbender, who was born in Germany and raised in Ireland, says he is also a fan of Chinese kung fu movies. He runs through a long list from Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Stephen Chow's Kung Fu Hustle to Yip Man, starring Donnie Yen.

Asked about his favorite role, Fassbender quickly responds with Hunger.

Hunger, which won him a British Independent Film Award in 2008, is a biopic of Irish nationalist Bobby Sands who died in a hunger strike.

"It was the first opportunity for me to play a close-to-history character. It is a very profound work," he says.

Fassbender first gained popularity with Quentin Tarantino's 2009 film Inglourious Basterds, and then shone in Shame, which won him the best actor award in 2011 at the Venice Film Festival. But it was 12 Years A Slave that earned him his first Oscar nomination in 2013.

Speaking about how he works, Fassbender says: "I think you need to be relaxed. To have an imagination, to allow yourself believe in the world that your character lives in."