A Quote by Rza

When I was eight or nine years old, my older cousin took me to the St. George Theatre on Staten Island to see a Bruce Lee movie and a Jim Kelly movie. Those were my first martial-arts films, and I fell in love with the genre back then.
I was about 10 years old. I just remember the film Enter the Dragon with Bruce Lee blowing my mind on the screen and I thought to myself, "That's what I want to do for a living when I'm older." Bruce Lee was so magnetic and charismatic and held the screen so well. It's just a very powerful performance in that film. That's the first memory I have - him in that movie.
My father was a big Bruce Lee fan. He's Chinese-Hawaiian, and my mother is Chinese. He used to take us to all these really fantastical films with martial arts in them. And Bruce Lee was amazing.
Bruce Lee brought the martial arts movie to the attention of the world - and without him, I don't think that anyone would have ever heard of Jackie Chan.
To AMC's credit, I think what they saw was the show doesn't exist in the marketplace. They knew that there was a hunger for a martial arts show. They also knew that you have this strong tradition of martial arts cinema, so even though it's not branded by a novel or a comic book or an old movie or something, we do have the genre itself, which people love.
Back in the Bruce Lee era, and in my era, Kung-Fu stirred up a kind of frenzy, and many people were learning martial arts from us. But about a decade ago, Hollywood began bringing in a number of our action choreographers, including two from my own stunt crew, where they became martial arts directors. Now, a decade later, Hollywood has learned it all, so when you look at the action films they're making now, they all use our action, our martial arts, and then add to that their own technology which is ten times better than ours, and it has to leave us dumbfounded: how did they film that?
When I was a child, I had a ViewMaster, those red box glasses with little discs, so that you can see 3D images. They were my first steps in cinema. I was eight years old, I would cut and change the order of the images and that's how I created films that subsequently I recorded and projected and showed my friends. So I already took my first steps in 3D when I was eight years old.
Being Bruce Lee's kid, everyone wants you to be an action-film star. I took martial arts, and it's fun to do those types of movies, but I wanted to act, not fight.
The first martial arts movie I ever watched was this old Chinese film called 'Five Deadly Venoms.' I was seven years old. My dad and I were sitting in front of the TV on the floor in our living room.
I've always been a fan of martial arts actor Bruce Lee. His films made me want to go to China one day.
Bruce Lee loved all different styles of martial arts. He believed that you shouldn't limit yourself to one style, because martial arts is just another form of human expression.
Well I was eight years old, and I have an older cousin who is three years older than me and she was doing acting, commercials, and modeling at the time and... to see my cousin doing that was really inspiring and I wanted to do it. So I went to my mom and I asked her if I could do it, and for the acting part of it, she made me study for a year.
There was a thing in the Andy Kaufman movie that Jim Carrey [Man On The Moon] about how he would do it. I didn't even see the movie. I read the script. But someone asked me, "Do you know what the best part of the Jim Carrey/Andy Kaufman movie is?" And I said, "me lee see ree bee." I just knew that would be the best part.
I did martial arts since I was 10 years old, and I've got as much love for the movies as I have for martial arts, so when I was 18 years old, I started studying performing arts with the eye of getting into the film industry and went to drama school after that.
I was a pretty fit and physical kid, and my first interest was in martial arts and kung fu with all the Bruce Lee movies.
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.
Miles and I had been looking to do a martial arts show for some time. Our first two movies that we wrote were "Lethal Weapon 4" and "Shanghai Noon" with Jackie Chan. Then we sort of got pulled into the superhero world, but then you look around at what's not on television and there wasn't really a martial arts shows. There are shows that do martial arts to a degree, but there's not a martial arts show.
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