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As 'Warrior' comes together, I can't help but feel the pride of correcting a wrong and helping bring Bruce Lee's dream project to life.
Sports is one of those few things left in our society where, as soon as you step on the court, or get in the ring, you are who you are.
I feel like every time you get to make a sequel, it's a privilege. It means that people have embraced it and want the journey to continue.
I left 'Fast and Furious' because I just felt like, at a certain point, after number six, there wasn't another story that I wanted to tell.
The harder we push forward into the unknown the more it intensifies the reflection of humanity. That's what I really love about 'Star Trek.'
That's in the mission statement when you're part of 'Trek.' It's our job to try to be bold and push forward. You have to be conscious of that.
Film is similar to a basketball game. When that buzzer sounds, win or lose, the only thing you can control is how much effort you put into it.
You sometimes get the sense that when people make sequels, they get conservative. If something worked, they do it over and over and over again.
I kind of approach action/non-action very much similarly. It has to be character-based and it has to kind of come off the theme and the overall arc.
When I did my first student film, it was a ten minute film and it cost $U.S.4,000. I worked three jobs to pay for that and I haven't really slept since.
Definitely the hardest thing is to find time to be grounded with real life, but without it, I don't think I'd be able to continue to grow as a filmmaker.
I think one of the great things is that when I got started, no one would return my calls, and now I get a lot of phone calls, which is good. I have options.
For me, I always loved summer movies. I love indie movies, foreign films, but there's definitely a part of me that loves summer movies, ever since I was a kid.
Ang Lee and 'Hulk,' for instance - a movie about a guy with different-colored skin and a lot of repressed rage? Sounds like the perfect film for an Asian, to me!
When I was growing up, the honor role kids were picked on by the jocks. And those kids said, 'You know, 15 years from now, I'm going to be their boss and own them.'
I grew up in the working class suburbs in the 80s so I do love Hollywood movies but what I don't like is when they take something that's successful and they recycle it.
You want to have pressure and tell stories that you find a real reason to tell, aside from any business reason. If business is your only reason, that always goes badly.
Do what you love. I've seen so many people through the years calculate and speculate on what films to do in order 'to make it.' And every time those projects crash and burn.
Annapolis' is a very personal journey about this working-class kid trying to find out who he is, and every time he steps into the ring we get a sense of who he is as a person.
There's an anxiety of wanting to please the studios. You want to prove to them that you can do it and sometimes you might jump at a project that you're not totally passionate about.
If you put forth a really diverse cast and you fight for it and it doesn't do well - and it may fail for other reasons - you're gone because you stuck your neck out for that decision.
When I think of high school, stills are so important: it's all about the wallet with the kids - they define themselves with pictures, who they know, whose pictures they have. Yearbook pictures.
The great thing about a big studio movie is that you get to work with the best, the most talented craft people in the world. But you have to be able to communicate, trust, and empower everybody.
There was something so pure about 'Better Luck Tomorrow' because money wasn't the currency. It was passion. The fact we were trying to do something even though no one was asking us to. It meant a lot.
My Taiwanese parents came to America with no money and supported my brothers and me as small business owners in Orange County, which is close to L.A. but about as far away from Hollywood as you can be.
I think within the ideology of what 'Trek' is, that it actually makes the daunting task of making something new more manageable, because it's part of 'Trek's' very design to tackle new worlds and characters.
I'm so sick of independent films being co-opted by Hollywood. You're making a project that's small, really personal, and the first thing anyone asks in any meeting is, 'Who's in it?' I'm like, 'Are you kidding?'
I get that a lot of people love 'Star Wars' - and I could see that you can love both and they can coexist in our lives. But the DNA of 'Star Trek' is different in as far as it's human beings, it's us in the future.
We had a pretty good life, growing up in Taiwan, and I think my dad really made a concerted effort to say hey, we're going to take a chance and go halfway around the world so that my kids can have more opportunities.
My brothers and I would try to talk our dad into letting us stay up and watch 'Star Trek.' I remember watching it and feeling that a family is not just by blood, a family is a shared experience and that really stuck with me.
Growing up, I felt there was nothing my dad couldn't do, but didn't get the chance to do when we moved. I think he latched on to 'Trek' because of the sense of exploration and discovery, and hope. I think that's what he connected to.
Technology has grown so much that there's a whole idea of gluttony. Sometimes you get carried away because you can have a camera go through the window, but do I need a camera go through the window? Those choices are up to the director.
Cinema is actually very backward. When we see gay characters or people of color, they're always there for that reason. I'm personally kind of sick of that. I love to see characters who just live and breathe and are comfortable in that space.
Growing up, my parents had this little fish and chips restaurant in Anaheim in the shadows of Disneyland, and they didn't close until 9 P.M. As a family, we didn't eat dinner until 10 P.M., and we would watch the original Star Trek every night at 11.
I always found it interesting when you went off to college, people would talk about how you go and search for your own identity. A lot of suburban middle-class kids would be shopping for identities and they would co-opt identities from other cultures.
I remember when I was a kid, I'd watch 'Kung Fu Theater' on TV, and all the movies would star guys named things like 'Bruce Lai' - you'd never get the real Bruce Lee films. So when I finally saw 'Enter the Dragon,' I was like, 'Holy cow, who is this guy?'
After I made 'Better Luck Tomorrow' and started taking meetings in Hollywood, I quickly learned that Asian Americans weren't even in the conversation as a minority, since there wasn't even a significant enough audience, and especially an audience for Asian American content.
For the longest time, the Asian-American community would talk about representation, but I think it's also about the freedom to really shape, create, and explore issues that are important to us, regardless of whether it's positive or negative, as long as it's three dimensional.
As an Asian immigrant coming in, for the longest time I still had problems getting in the lot because they're just not used to seeing someone like me who's directing these films. I do think ultimately there's a point where we can kind of just shed that label and become filmmakers.
It's about supporting the many talented artists and filmmakers out there trying to create work from that marginalized point of view. Go out and buy tickets to their movies and plays, support their crowd sourcing campaigns, show the industry that there is a viable audience for this work.
I've sat in so many meetings where they talk about converting movies to 3D just for the China market and just to make more money. I saw that people in China work long, long hours and that it's expensive to go to the movies, and you want to rip them off for even more money? I don't think that's right.
I made a lot of mistakes along the way, but feel incredibly lucky to be in the position I am now and to be able to play a small part in trying to support talented, aspiring young filmmakers out there through a program like 'Interpretations' who, like me, had the desire and passion, but no connections to the industry.
When I was in film school I had this great professor, Jerzy Antczak, a Polish filmmaker, and Joe Russo of the Russo Brothers were in my class. It was this kind of Easter European philosophy of motivating camera only through character and motions, and just exploring with lenses. That was the best year of my education in my life.