Some actors get a trailer or a chauffeur-driven limo.

For Tony Leung, on The Grandmaster, the perks were health, discipline and spiritual well-being - the result of a remarkable five-year training spell to help play legendary martial arts practitioner Ip Man, the man who taught the legendary actor Bruce Lee.

"You have to be disciplined to practise kung fu," Leung smiles, serenely. "It's not just physical training or self-defence. It's a kind of mind training - a way of life."

It will come as no surprise to learn that The Grandmaster is the brainchild of Leung's fellow countryman, friend and long-time collaborator, Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai.

They've worked together since 1990's Days of Being Wild and their films include the achingly romantic In The Mood For Love, which won Leung the Best Actor award in Cannes back in 2000.

Wong is also known for his lengthy shoots - 2004's futuristic rambling 2046 was five years in the making.

First conceived of when both were making 1997's Happy Together, The Grandmaster had a similarly exacting gestation period.

Indeed, it was so slow, a rival production starring Donnie Yen managed two films in this time - Ip Man (2008) and Ip Man 2 (2010).

Delays were caused by bad weather but also bad luck.

In 2004, Leung suffered a ski- accident that postponed his training by six months.

"Everything was f****d up by me!" Leung groans. "I don't feel good making them [the crew] trouble. I've not come to make trouble. I've come to help!"

That was nothing compared to the injury he sustained in 2009, again during training, just before shooting was due to commence, when he fractured his arm.

"My doctor said I cannot practise anymore ... I had been practising for six months and reached a certain standard, and I was really frustrated and upset; because if I had to stop now, then I go back to zero."

After two weeks, he started practising again. "I put on a bandage and practise. Everybody thought I was healed."

Yet he wasn't - a fact that soon became apparent on set.

"The first shot - I was fighting with six or seven stuntmen and we've been doing that for three hours, and I could feel this trembling in my hand," he explains. "It was really tough - three hours, non-stop, of fighting.

"And after three hours, after a blow - I tried a block - and I can feel the pain again, and the pain is very different from this kind of pain; it's a pain that goes to the heart. I was in agony."

Rushed to hospital, Leung was told if he didn't stop fighting, the fracture might never heal. Not only did he have to stop shooting the action sequences, but even the dialogue-driven scenes.

"I couldn't even pick up a glass," he sighs. For an actor who cut his teeth on action - he's regularly worked with John Woo, from 1992's Hard Boiled to the recent epic Red Cliff - it was a demoralising moment.

Thankfully, however, he was able to return after several months. Given the blood, sweat and tears, the result is everything you might hope for: classy and captivating. And, yes, the martial arts sequences, choreographed by Yuen Woo-ping, who also worked on The Matrix, are jaw-dropping.

But what of the character of Ip Man? With the story beginning in 1936, when he turned 40, long before he met Bruce Lee, what were Leung's first impressions of the man that popularized the Wing Chun kung fu style?

"My first impression of him is from the picture he took when he was in Hong Kong," he replies.

"What I could see in the picture is that he doesn't look like a kung fu man! He's very slim, very short and very elegant, who used to be formal every time he showed up. What attracts me is that he's erudite and graceful, very refined … I cannot imagine that a kung fu man looks like this. He's a very humble old man."

While it might offend the purists, Leung admits he blended characteristics of Ip Man with those of his most famous pupil.

"I think that makes sense, because his earlier life should be like Bruce Lee: very confident, very talented, very charismatic."

Leung's own childhood was dominated by the work of Lee and others.

"I used to see a lot of kung-fu films when I was a kid," he says.

It was an escape he needed; his parents quarrelled a lot, and then when he was eight, his father - a chronic gambler - left home.

When he made Zhang Yimou's Hero, during an interview he called his mother a real heroine for raising him and his younger sister alone.

Quiet and reserved, he quit school early, worked in his uncle's grocery store and later in a Hong Kong shopping centre, before a chance encounter with actor-comedian Stephen Chow encouraged him to try acting.

A television star in the 1980s, a film star in the 1990s and even an on-off career as a pop singer - Leung, now 52, has come a long way since those early days.

It makes life difficult at times for he and his actress wife Carina Lau.

"I seldom go out," he says. "Once you're an actor, or a star, it's supposed to be like that. You have paparazzi everyday.

"But I love Hong Kong - my friends are there, my parents are there. I don't care."

At least if things get rough, Leung can handle himself after all this training. "In real life," he smiles, "I can protect myself."

The Grandmaster opens on December 5