For many Americans, bruce Lee's appearance changed the image of Asians in movies, and kung fu movies became the golden sign of Hong Kong movies.
In 1973, Bruce Lee died suddenly at the age of 32. After his death, his daughter Li Xiangning found a large number of manuscripts while sorting out the relics, a project that Bruce Lee studied for many years during his lifetime.
Eventually, the concept was coined by Cinemax into the American drama Warrior. The series focuses on San Francisco's Chinatown in the late 19th century, where martial arts genius Ah Sahm immigrated from China to San Francisco and became the most powerful killer of the major gangs in Chinatown.
Li Xiangning, Lin Yibin ("Fast and Furious") and Jonathan M. Tripple ("Black Eats Black") co-producer as executive producer. The latter two were also involved in the creation of the series, with Tripple adapting the script based on Bruce Lee's conceptual material, and Lin Yibin as the director of the series.
In an interview in 2017, Lin Yibin said: "A lot of times, the martial arts genre has been relegated to b-level action movies, but that's not what we want to do. In addition to Bruce Lee's original material, we wanted to create a character-driven series. The series has very important themes and is a rarely talked about part of American history. To me, it's going to be something you've never seen before. ”
In the newly released trailer, you can see that the series is full of violent scenes, street provocations, ring competitions, and even burning marks on the arm to show loyalty. In addition to individual struggles, there were also gang struggles, and the Chinese community competed with local forces in Britain. Of course, in addition to the simple martial arts kung fu, guns also appeared.
From the trailer, it is speculated that the little-talked about part of American history that Lin yibin refers to may be the plight of immigrants at that time, and some people clamored that Chinese must get out. In the final shot, the gang boss asks Ah Sahm, "What do you think of America now?" ”
Stills from "The Warrior" from Olivia Cheng (from IMDb)
There are a lot of Asian faces in Warrior. The main character, Ah Sahm, is played by Japanese-British actor Andrew Koji ("Mistaken Collision", "Fast and Furious 6"), and other stars include Canadian Chinese actor Olivia Cheng, who plays Ah Toy, the most powerful prostitute in Chinesetown, and Jason Tobin (Du Junwei) plays an elder son Yang Jun.
Warrior will be released on April 5 with 10 episodes.
The title picture is a still of "Warrior", from IMDb