The wisdom of Jet Li
Action icon Jet Li has bounced back from a decade of battling hyperthyroidism, and he’s sharing his new perspective with the world at a time when people are even more tense, depressed, defeated and short-fused. The Hong Kong star recently released a book titled Beyond Life and Death: The True Way to Freedom. Additionally, his daughters, Jada Li and Jane Li, have helped him adapt to the modern era of social media with a YouTube channel and a new podcast called So Be It with Jada and Jet.
Fist of Legend becomes legendary
On Jet and Jada’s official Instagram, you can check out a clip from the latest episode of the So Be It podcast in which Jet reveals that he shut down his production company after his film, Fist of Legend, flopped in Hong Kong.
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In the video clip above, you can see Li recount how he put a lot of himself into Fist of Legend as a dream project. The film would flop at the Hong Kong box office upon release in 1994 and Li decided to shut down his production company. However, only three years later, Fist of Legend found a new life on international shores. He explained that it caught the eye of Quentin Tarantino and that the movie was taught in film schools. The Wachowskis would hire martial arts choreographer Yuen Woo-Ping and his stunt team for The Matrix and the rest became history.
Li concludes the clip by saying that he now sees how rash he was in closing his company. His new view is that he shouldn’t have let his emotion of an initial project failure impact his decision-making. He says that no matter the outcome after trying so hard, you don’t have to give up if it fails. You keep trying.
Nowadays, Fist of Legend is seen as Li’s magnum opus with the spectacular fight sequences. Li says that he’s made a ton of period martial arts films that incorporate wirework, so in Fist of Legend, he wanted the action to be a lot more grounded and Woo-Ping’s fight designs are still celebrated to this day.
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