"Don't forget that your initiative is a hero by hook or by crook" comes from the movie "Taoist Down the Mountain".
In the movie, before the little Taoist went down the mountain, the old Taoist said to him, "You are not an unscrupulous hero, but if you don't change your mind, you are a real hero."
This sentence tells us the difference between a hero and a hero: a hero can do whatever it takes, but he should not change his original intention. In other words, he can only do what suits his original intention, not do whatever it takes.
In fact, this line has been modified by Chen Kaige. The original version was that "a man is a hero by hook or by crook, and a hero is one who does not change his original intention". This is not Xu Haofeng's original work, but from Gu Long's The Eagle of the Earth. Gu long's original intention is obviously to praise "unscrupulous"; Xu Haofeng's explanation, on the other hand, opposes "unscrupulous means" and "unchanged original intention", but it does not completely deny it, and still retains the praise of "outstanding figures". Chen Kaige went against it and directly rejected the "unscrupulous", so there was no tension between the two sentences, and Xu Haofeng's "hero-to-hero struggle" was not a problem.
Xu Haofeng quoted this sentence in the Preface of Taoist Descending the Mountain, saying that "Ying Bu has both heroic characteristics and heroic characteristics, and finally the heroic nature prevailed and his career was ruined", and said that "the struggle between heroes and heroes is a proposition that Gu Long thought about before his death"