Jet Li

A little bit. This movie already showed in Asia and Europe three years ago, I’ve already forgotten the movie and now I have to promote the movie again in the US.

I remember. This was a very good movie and I’m proud to have made it.

Everybody knows about this King, he unified China and the languages and everything. But this story is totally different.

I think the director based the story on history, but it’s not a true story. The emperor is more idealized.

Yeah, usually after you make the movie, you’ll sit in the theaters, hiding somewhere, trying to see the audience’s reaction. When they’re yelling, I understand why they’re yelling, I’m happy. At some point, they won’t like it, and I’ll feel like I should have done something better but I didn’t feel that way. I trusted the director because he’s the most famous director in Mainland China.

Yes, we’ve known each other for a long time, for about 10 years. When we first met I asked if we could work together one day on an action film and he said, "No." He said I had a baby face. He said I need to wait until one day he could see I was a man and that there was a lot of pain on my face, then I could make a movie with you. Six years later he sent me the script for Hero and said, "I could see you’re very painful right now" [laughs].

Maybe learning English [laughs].

Originally another actor was to play his role and I got him fired. I told the director to fire him because I wanted to invite Donnie Yen. A lot of audience, through my website, said they wanted to see me fight Donnie Yen again because we hadn’t done it since Once Upon A Time in China, so I invited Donnie Yen to do the movie.

Of course. I know lots of people, Chinese people, Asian people and American people who love Asian movies and have already seen the DVD. A Hong Kong company already calculated that they’ll lose 20 million dollars because of DVD sales.

I think it’s because, in America, they have different unions and they have a lot of different rules. Also the studio has many people involved, producer, associate producer and executive producer. But in mainland China, a lot of people work seven days a week for lower cost, no trailers, only the cute actors have trailers and even the director doesn’t have a trailer.

I don’t think Hero is a normal action film. There was no bad guy in the entire film, just different characters and different points of view and a different type of ending. In the last 30 minutes of the movie, there isn’t any fighting; we just talk, between my character and the king. It’s the biggest budgeted Chinese movie ever made in Asia. It took $20 million US dollars to make and then it made $100 Million dollars in Asia.

It’s much easier because it’s my mother language, but when you work with this kind of director, there’s a lot of pressure because he is very successful and I never know what he needs. But after awhile I know he’s a very serious director. Sometimes we only take two or three shots a day. He only does the men’s shots in the morning and the girl’s in the afternoon. He says, girls, when they wake up in the morning, their faces are a little swollen and in the afternoon they look pretty. He never feels time is important. If he wants to see some shots in the sunshine, he’ll wait all day, that’s it.

It really depends on the character. For this character, I learned how to walk, for seven days, it looks easy, but it’s not. The director would ask me to think about how a man, 2,000 years ago, would walk. You spend a lot of time learning the details of the character.

I think more about the stories, not the fighting styles. Last year, I finished Unleashed, which will be released next spring, is a totally different kind of action film, like a drama-action film.

I always work with three choreographers, one is Woo Ping, who did The Matrix, the other is Corey Yuen who did Romeo Must Die, and the other one is Cheung-Yan Yuen.

I think it’s just the way I move. I’ve been learning martial arts since I was eight years old so I’ve been doing it for more than 30 years. If people just learn how to fight, for a few months, just to play that character, it’s quite difficult to for them so I believe that if you tell Jet Li to become a tennis player I wouldn’t be very good at it.

You can slow it down, but you can’t show the power and the energy inside your body.

At that time, in the 1970’s, when it’s summertime, normal schools all send their students to sports school. There, the coach will do some tests and tell you what sport you’re good at. They chose me to learn martial arts. I didn’t know anything about martial arts so I just learned.

I want to try, but it’s difficult. I think it’s also difficult for the studio. Even for a movie like Hero, if I showed the script to the studios and said I want to make this kind of film they might not want to make it. That’s why we went to China to make this movie. If I want to make a movie where I’m not the hero, where I’m the bad man, no studio would want to make it.

I don’t know. Miramax decides how to promote the film. An Asian reporter already mentioned that this isn’t a martial arts film, but a lot the way they’re showing it in the States makes it look like a martial arts film.

I want to make one film where I’m a monk in New York. I paid money for the studio to write it and when they saw the script, they didn’t want to make it because there wasn’t a lot of fighting in it. I bought the script back, and hopefully I will get to make it.

Spring 2005 from Focus Features.

I turned down The Matrix, because if I made that movie, I couldn’t make Hero. They wanted me for 18 months to do those two movies, but in 18 months I needed to make Hero and The One.

As for Crouching Tiger, I promised my wife that if she were pregnant, I would stop working until the baby was delivered. I talked to Ang Lee, said sorry and told him the reason.

10 years ago, we tried to make it work but then a few years ago they tried to find a writer and for some reason it didn’t work.

Four kids.

I give them a lot of freedoms, not like myself. I couldn’t screw up or make decisions because then only the government or teachers made the decisions. I gave them choice and freedom. We’ll try to give them a good education in China and then when they’re 14, come back to the States to study American culture and English. It’ll be better for them in the future.

I need to find a way to balance between commercial action films and making something I really want to make. You need to find a balance.

I think it’s difficult right now. After a big box office hit, the studio will give you more of a chance. I think that’s a good way to do it.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck