I watch other wrestlers. I watch movies with Jackie Chan and Jet Li and Tony Jaa. Then there's breakdancing and Capoeira - just anything I see that looks awesome that I think I could adapt in the ring. Just your typical Kung Fu, breakdancing, Capoeira moves.
In acting you do a lot of research. Audience watch Jet Li because of the fight. They watch other actors because they are funny. If they want funny, they don't want to see Jet Li, they watch the other guy. That's the reality I face, until the one day I can prove I can make film without action that is a fun movie. Then everybody will say Jet Li, hmmm.
Jackie Chan, Jet Li and Bruce Lee are my masters; they're the inspiration for my work. Bruce Lee was a heavy fighter who threw hard punches. Jackie moves very fast and uses a lot of comedy, and Jet Li is very fluid. I've tried to combine all of their styles and added some things of my own.
It was 'Shaolin Temple,' Jet Li's first movie. That was the movie that got me to want to learn martial arts. Then I became a huge Jet Li/Jackie Chan fan after that.
Jackie Chan is a very good comedy/martial arts star. He does one kind of martial arts that Jet Li doesn't know how to do and Jet Li does a martial art that Jackie Chan doesn't know how to do. You can both go to two Chinese restaurants, but both can have different kinds of food.
Jackie Chan is a very good comedy/martial arts star. He does one kind of martial arts that Jet Li doesn't know how to do, and Jet Li does a martial art that Jackie Chan doesn't know how to do.
I have two sons in America, and all they care about in Chinese culture is Jackie Chan and Jet Li.
To make a kung fu film is like a dream come true, because I'm a big fan of kung fu movies and I'm learning kung fu for a long time.
I grew up loving Jackie Chan and Jet Li and certainly Bruce Lee. But as I got older, I started to question: Is that all we have?
Hurdling is like Kung-fu. Everyone comes from a different school. And everybody says 'my Kung-fu is better than your Kung-fu.' You have to find the technique that best fits your body size.
I grew up in a kung fu house. It wasn't until I got older that I discovered that most families didn't talk about the Shaolin Temple or Jackie Chan at the dinner table.
I lived right on the borderline of a black neighborhood. So I could go into the black area and then there'd be these ghetto theaters that you could actually see the new kung fu movie or the new blaxploitation movie or the new horror film or whatever. And then there was also, if you went just a little further away, there was actually a little art house cinema. So I could actually see, you know, French movies or Italian movies, when they came out.
When I was a kid, I loved watching kung fu movies - in San Francisco, we had 'Kung Fu Theater' on TV on Saturdays, and they'd air old Shaw Brothers movies with English dubbing, things like that.
I wanted to train jiu-jitsu instead of capoeira because the mat was soft. It was better than training capoeira on the hard floor. I started reading jiu-jitsu magazines, reading about the world champions, and becoming one of them became my goal.
We didn't grow up in any sort of meaningful representation in media apart from, you know, Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Bruce Lee. But, of course, that was different still, because it always played to this narrative of the foreigner from the East.
Then I see tweets saying it's a shame that they can't watch Marty on the WWE UK show tournament. Then I tell them that I am on ROH, so watch that. Watch me wrestle some of the best wrestlers in the world.
Oddly enough, I've always - I've never actually seen "The Alamo" itself, actually. So I don't really have the association of "Green Leaves of Summer" as being "The Alamo" theme. Oddly enough, I grew up watching kung fu movies. They would use the theme "Green Leaves of Summer" in a lot of needle drops in kung fu movies a lot. So I was actually more familiar with it in a Bruce Li movie than I was actually from the John Wayne film.