Daniel Wu

“We'll see what I do after 'Badlands' to show audiences that I have more in my repertoire besides martial arts.”

“I really want to take time and be in the moment with my kid for at least the first year. I know she's not going to remember that, but it's really for the family chemistry.”

“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 really feel that Hong Kong is my home, and Hong Kong is my identity as an actor.”

“I definitely don't think I'm going to have a mid-life crisis.”

“I really dislike the fact that Asian males are constantly emasculated, whether it's American TV or films. You see it all the time, and it's so weird that they don't see sexuality in Asian men.”

“After working on 'Europa,' I found it incredibly freeing to speak English in a film, so it kind of sparked an interest in me as an artist to improve my acting.”

“I think filmmaking is a gamble anyway, right? You never know the results from the start.”

“I think growing up in the States and Australia, we were exposed to a lot of different types of things. I used to go to Gilman to watch punk shows, and it's a complete different environment - you were inspired by so many different things, whereas in Hong Kong, there is nothing for anybody.”

“You've gotta understand camera angles, camera movement - a kick that may not be very powerful may look very powerful from a certain angle.”

“For Cantonese - because there's no standardized pinyin system - I have to have someone read it to me, and then I rewrite the whole script in my own Cantonese pinyin.”

“In my 20s, I could just power through stuff and be fine, but now, in your 40s? It's kind of like Kobe Bryant. He plays basketball a little bit differently than he did when he first started out.”

“I turned 40, got married, got a kid, and my mother passed away. I experienced life and death, with the enjoyment of creating life and the loss, within one year.”

“The two don't necessarily translate, especially if you're a prize fighter: you've fought all your life, you've fought all these fights, and now you're trying to do a movie. You see that happen a lot - a lot of professional fighters don't necessarily make it so well into the movie world.”

“I've built a career in Asia for 18 years, playing roles that had nothing to do with my race because everybody's Chinese in the films.”

“For Mandarin scripts, there's software now where you can just insert the Chinese script, and it comes out all in pinyin.”

“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.”

“I graduated from university with a degree in architecture and then ended up doing a series of internships with different firms. And once I was in an office environment, I realized that at school what I was doing was 98 percent creative, 2 percent makework, but in the real world, it was the other way around.”

“Bruce Lee was the first star I idolized. Growing up as a Chinese American, there weren't many people like me on the big screen.”

“There's a huge interest in the Chinese market, and Hollywood has a huge interest in the Chinese market with films like 'Transformers' making more money over there than here.”