Destin Daniel Cretton never wanted to make a Marvel movie. The 42-year-old director has built his career on silent, introspective dramas such as Short term 12, The Glass Castle, and Not mercy – not exactly your typical superhero spectacle. He recalls telling friends that he had no desire to join the world of hoods and comic book heroes – until he read a 2018 news release that Marvel was evolving. Shang-Chi and the legend of the ten rings, his first film with an Asian protagonist.
“When the announcement came out, I just immediately went back to my childhood,” Cretton explains. “[Growing up] all I had was Spider-Man. Because he was wearing the mask, I was able to dress like Spider-Man for Halloween. I had a handful of other characters that looked like me on screen, but there were maybe two or three I could choose from, and superheroes were not a part of it. ‘
Cretton – who was born in Hawaii and is of Japanese descent – constantly thought about how his younger self would react to a superhero movie with a predominantly Asian cast. So he arranged a meeting with Marvel. “It’s usually not the way directors’ meetings start, saying, ‘You know, I was never interested in doing any of these things,'” laughs Kevin Feige, president of Marvel Studios. That Marvel event turned into another, then another, until Cretton stood in front of thousands of fans at San Diego Comic-Con in 2019 and introduced the world to the kind of hero his childhood had only dreamed of.
The result is Shang-Chi (in theaters September 3), a comprehensive superhero epic that combines emotional family drama with gravity-challenging martial arts action. Chinese-Canadian actor Simu Liu plays the lead role as the young hero, who spent the first part of his life training to become an assassin under the strict supervision of his father. He has since run away trying to build a somewhat normal life in America, only to suck himself back into his father’s sinister domain.
“The most exciting thing about joining this character was that his history had never been told before,” says Liu. “We know so many different versions of Batman’s origin story, how his parents were killed when he was very young. We know Peter Parker, who was bitten by a radioactive spider, and he lost his uncle. The story of Shang-Chi is very unknown. for most of the world, so we had a lot of freedom and creative freedom to do it the way we wanted. ‘
He may not yet be a household name like his fellow heroes Iron Man or Captain America, but the idea of a Shang-Chi the film is older than the Marvel Cinematic Universe itself. The kung fu master, created by Steve Englehart and Jim Starlin, made his cartoon in 1973 as a way for Marvel to capitalize on the popularity of martial arts stories among American audiences. It is understood that Stan Lee tried to develop a Shang-Chi film starring Brandon Lee back in the 1980s, but the project never materialized. In the early 2000s, the then-emerging Marvel Studios began compiling a notebook of comic characters who could possibly write their own movies – a notebook containing Shang-Chi.
Now, after a history of false beginnings, the martial artist is finally getting his turn in the spotlight.
“The core of Shang-Chi’s arc in the comics is really a family drama,” says producer Jonathan Schwartz. “It was something that Destin used very early in our conversations, the idea of taking this broken family and this very dark, even abusive family background and seeing what it does to a child over time.”
Bring Shang-Chi in the MCU also means he has to update some of his dated origins. The character’s comic history has shifted over the years, and Cretton and writer Dave Callaham were eager to dispense with the race-insensitive clichés of earlier issues.
“If you look at the character of Shang-Chi through the comics that go back to the ’70s and’ 80s, the fact that he existed and the fact that he was an Asian character was incredible,” says Liu . “But at the same time, there are aspects of the portrayal of him that might feel a little stereotypical. When we first started to map out who this character is and what his journey is going to be in the course of this film, we were everyone is very sensitive not to let it go to the stereotypical realm. ‘
Cretton says he wanted to tell a story about the Asian identity that felt as empathetic and authentic as possible, and part of it was to make sure Shang-Chi Asian voices had front and back of the camera.
“Remember, Asian culture is so diverse,” he says. “I grew up in Hawaii, [and] Hawaiian food is like Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hawaiian, Filipino, all mixed. This is kind of what our crew was: it’s like this great mix of Asian cultures coming together and responding to the scripture and [saying things] like, ‘Oh, it does not feel quite right.’ All of which has contributed to the fact that I am really a beautiful update of what started in the comics a few decades ago. ‘
“It was a measure of Asian representation that I had not seen before, and I thought it was cool to look like an Asian American,” he adds. Crazy Rich Asians star Awkwafina, who plays close friend Katy from Shang-Chi. “It definitely explores different levels of identity.”
When it came time to occupy the charming hero, Marvel began a worldwide search for an actor of Chinese descent. They found him in 31-year-old Liu, best known for his role as Jung Kim in the beloved Canadian sitcom Kim’s ease. The actor has long dreamed of adapting himself as a superhero – to the point where he was already in early 2014 on Marvel tweeted in the hope of seeing an Asian-American hero join the franchise. When Shang-Chi was actually announced, he followed up with another tweet: ‘OK Marvel, are we going to talk or what?“
“What is definitely not going through my head is, ‘Hey, I’m going to tweet Marvel and they’re going to come back to me, and I’m going to get this role,’ ‘he says with a laugh. To his surprise, he actually received an invitation to audition – and after the role officially landed in July 2019, he was only on a plane a few days later and was on his way to San Diego to join Cretton at Comic -Con connect.
When the film begins, Shang-Chi (pronounced like ‘song’, not ‘sung’) lives in San Francisco as a seemingly ordinary twentieth something. He is a bit directionless and he spends most of his time with friends, like Katy from Awkwafina. She is one of his closest confidants, but she does not know much about his history or why he is no longer in touch with his parents. And she is certainly not familiar with the action-packed world of murderers and kung fu masters.
“She does not do much of the hard work,” Awkwafina says. “But at the end of the day, she has a real heart, and she has a loyalty and dedication to her friendship with Shang-Chi. She is very brave.”
Shang-Chi’s current life may seem average, but his past is anything but: his father Wenwu is a powerful, old figure who trained his son to follow in his criminal footsteps. It’s been about ten years since Shang-Chi heard of his father’s misdeeds and walked away. “This is not a ‘Luke, I’m your father’ twist,” Feige adds. “He knows who his father is, and he has decided to leave the world behind before retiring.”
To play the master villain, the filmmakers tapped legendary Hong Kong actor Tony Leung, best known for films such as Wong Kar-wai In the mood for love and Chungking Express. “A character like Wenwu could easily have been a one-dimensional villain without a heart,” Cretton says. ‘Tony opened this character [so] it is an antagonist with a deep ability to love. “Wenwu and Shang-Chi’s relationship on screen is complicated, but from the outside camera, Leung and Liu quickly become friends with each other to snowball.” He’s a big adrenaline junkie, “Liu says of his film father.
Wenwu is a completely new character created for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He has ties to the Ten Rings, the mysterious terrorist organization that became known in 2008 Ysterman. As Schwartz and Feige put it, Wenwu has “mentioned many names” over the decades – and one of the titles is “The Mandarin”, one of the most infamous villains of Marvel Comics. The name appeared earlier in 2013 Ysterman 3, just for the version of the character (played by Ben Kingsley) to reveal as a cheater, an actor named Trevor Slattery who does not work. Leung’s Wenwu is something new – and much more dangerous.
“I think people hear ‘the Mandarin’ and expect a very specific kind of thing, and that may not be the thing they get,” teases Schwartz. “Hopefully they get the character more complicated and layered than what the name would lead you to.”
Of course, you can not make a movie about the most skilled fighter in the world without choreographing a fairly extensive fight. ‘I think this is the best action [Marvel has] ever done, “says Schwartz. Every battle is meaningful, every fighting style is meaningful and the story is told visually in such a wonderful way. “Because Shang-Chi is a master at different kinds of martial arts, Cretton drew inspiration from different sources, from the elegant, almost ethereal wushu style of Squatting tiger, hidden dragon to the more kinetic choreography of Jackie Chan’s action comedies. Supervising stunt coordinator Brad Allan was tapped to help unite Shang-Chi’s different styles and schools of expertise.
For Liu, it means throwing him into training: the actor jokes it differently than some of his Marvel cohorts, Shang-Chi’s face is never darkened by a mask, so he had to learn to do as much of his own tricks as possible. Almost as soon as he stepped off the stage at Comic-Con in 2019, he began practicing various forms of martial arts and trying to magnify them without losing the flexibility and agility of Shang-Chi. “I want to sit here and tell you that I used to be pretty good at martial arts,” Liu admits. “I may have worked as a stuntman in Toronto for a few days. But my martial arts experience was really like returning to my backyard when I was a teenager and doing parkour with my friends.”
But even with all the flying kung fu actions, Cretton always wanted to keep Shang-Chi grounded – and make a superhero movie that his younger I would have liked.
“We wanted to make sure Shang-Chi is just like the rest of us,” Cretton explains. “I want to watch this movie and say, ‘Yeah, that’s how I feel. Sometimes I feel out of place, and I cover it with humor.’ He is a child who is no longer in his element and a fish out of the water here in the USA, and he covers it with this charisma that I can find very related. ‘
This post has been updated to include Shang-Chi teaser trailer.