Daniel Wu

“I was a hyperactive kid, and it took awhile for me to find the right teacher. My master was a Shaolin kung fu teacher, but he also taught tai chi, Chinese medicine, brush painting - he was adept at all facets of Chinese culture.”

“For most normal people, deadlifts stretch your hamstrings, but in my case, it tightened them, because I was already very flexible.”

“If you're down to 6% body fat, which I've done before, you burn out really quickly. Like, in a couple hours, you're pretty much done, and then you're useless.”

“It's not at all my objective to become an Asian-American star.”

“I've been lucky enough to build a career outside of America, where I got 18 years and over 60 films of experience.”

“I worked with Jackie Chan for a long time, and seeing how much pain he's in, I realized that that might not be a sustainable career for me. So I started to develop my career as a dramatic actor rather than as an action actor.”

“Because my master was this renaissance man, I wasn't just learning a fighting style, I was learning how kung fu permeates all aspects of life, from eating to healthy living to mental state.”

“In 'The Matrix,' you see the fight between Keanu Reeves and Lawrence Fishburne. It's an amazing fight. But I know that they've rehearsed it for months beforehand. Because in some of the moves you can see them anticipating blocks before they actually happen.”

“I went to Hong Kong in '97 to witness the handover after graduating university, and then I was gonna backpack around Asia and then come back here and look for a job.”

“I wanted to try every style available to me - large productions, small productions, studio films, low-budget. You just can't sit around and wait for every big-budget film to come along.”

“For us as Asian-Americans, I think the bane of our existence is one stereotype - 'Sixteen Candles,' the Long Duk Dong character.”

“Part of the Hong Kong style is the fact that a lot of the performers can perform the moves, and we don't over-rehearse this stuff.”

“My sister Gloria asked me to try modeling.”

“Asian Americans haven't had as many opportunities as other people to build their careers in Hollywood, just because there hasn't been that much of an interest, especially in Asian American males.”

“I miss the Bay Area - the kind of laid-back lifestyle. Because in Hong Kong, you're going, like, 90 miles an hour, which is fun when you're young.”

“In my 20s, it was easy. In your 40s, it's a lot more challenging. You have to look at it like you're an actor, but you're also a professional athlete. You have to train.”

“At Diversion, we want to do genres that people are not doing - or, if we're doing genres that people are doing, to do them in a fresh way.”

“I came from doing Wushu and other martial arts, and then I got into movies, and I had to learn that as well - the language of martial arts movie fighting. It's a different thing; it's a different kind of logic.”

“To do eleven fights in four months is pretty crazy. In some shows that we do in Asia, there are three or four fights over a six-month period, so you have time to recover and gain your stamina.”

“I ended up falling in love with the whole movie-making experience.”