The Big Picture - ‘Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings’ and the 10 Movies to See Before It

Episode Date: September 3, 2021

This weekend sees the release of a hugely important movie for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, ‘Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.’ Sean breaks down the character’s place in Marvel mythology, the films that influenced the new movie, and whether it all worked with The Ringer’s Daniel Chin (1:00). Then, Sean is joined by the film’s screenwriter, Dave Callaham, to talk about writing blockbusters in the 21st century, the challenges and rewards of the work, and how 'Shang Chi' came together (46:00). Hosts: Sean Fennessey Guests: Daniel Chin and Dave Callaham Producer: Bobby Wagner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Bill Simmons. I wanted to tell you about a new podcast on the Ringer Podcast Network. It's going to be on the Ringer Reality Podcast. What's it called, Johnny Bananas? Death, Taxes, and Bananas. We're going to be breaking down this season of The Challenge, Hall of Fame episodes, and I'm going to be taking you behind the curtain of America's fifth major sport. Are we getting special guests? We're going to have special guests. We're going to have special effects. The show's just going to be special. I can't wait. Check it out. Death, Taxes, and Bananas on the Ringer Podcast Network. I'm Sean Fennessey, and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about Shang-Chi, the future of the MCU,

and a brief history of Asian cinema and its complicated relationship to Western movies. This weekend sees the release of a hugely important movie for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Shang-Chi is the first MCU movie to feature an Asian lead played in the film by Simu Liu. It's also directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, a guest on this show in 2019,

and co-written with Cretton by one of our guests later in this episode, the screenwriter Dave Callaham, who has writing credits on films in the MCU, the DCEU, Godzilla, and Mortal Kombat franchises. I talked to Dave about writing blockbusters in the 21st century, the challenges and rewards of the work, and how Shang-Chi came together. But first, let's talk about Shang-Chi. Joining me to do so is the newly minted Ringer staff writer, Daniel Chin. DC has been a fact checker at the Ringer for a few years and Moonlit as an expert nerd culture correspondent for us, recapping shows like Loki and WandaVision and writing frequently about the space.

Daniel, congrats on your promotion and welcome to the big picture. Thanks so much, Sean. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm very glad you're here. We're going to talk about a few things today. One of the things I want to talk about is who Shang-Chi is and what him having his own movie means to the MCU and in general. I also want to know what you thought of the film, of course, and I want to put it in context. I want to talk about really a century of Asian and Asian-American cinema from Kurosawa to John Woo, Jackie Chan, Wong Kar-wai, and everything in between. So let's start here. Who is Shang-Chi and why should we care about him? So Shang-Chi has like pretty unique origins as it goes for Marvel characters. He was created by Steve Englehart and Jim Starlin in 1973.

Jim Starlin is the same guy that created Thanos, who we're all very familiar with. Absolutely. I am inevitable he really came this character really came at the height of the the kung fu phenomenon as it's sweeping across america after the success of uh david carradine's kung fu series on abc which actually was the inspiration for this character and uh really like after bruce lee's enter the dragon comes in like that really just skyrockets his his popularity and shang chi capitalizes off of that but at least for for the character's origins as well like it was really a unique character because he was built around

his father and his father was a character that was licensed property off of sax roamer's fu manchu who is as you likely know very very uh problematic figure and one of the most prolific uh really pulp villains of the 20th century so this character really grows from that origin and from that kind of lens of being for a white audience at a time when they're just trying to go off of this really craze of Kung Fu. You know, I was not a Shang-Chi reader. You know, obviously his run as a character is primarily in the 70s, like you said, capitalizing on that period of time. For you, when you were growing up, is it a character that you were interested in? Did you like dive, dig into the crates

to kind of discover the origins? Because as you say, like many Marvel superheroes over the years, their origins are complex and seen in 2021, they don't necessarily seem as thoughtful, as carefully rendered, as modern as we want them to be. Did you have any relationship to this character? Were you pining for a movie about this character? Yeah, it's interesting. It's an interesting question because he really just wasn't really

around when I was growing up and reading comics because his run of Master of Kung Fu really went from 1974 until 1983. So by the time I started reading comic books, he was already mostly irrelevant. And he kind of pops up in the occasional Marvel team up as all these heroes do, all these crossovers. He trains Spider-Man in the way of the spider at some point. But for the most part, he just wasn't really somebody that was on my radar.

And he really just was kind of a hollow cliche to a certain extent, because he didn't really have much of a backstory the way that most of these characters that were so familiar and so ingrained in popular culture are. Yeah, his his road to the screen, too, is kind of a fascinating one. It seems like it's been decades now that there has been discussion about bringing the character to the big screen, despite the fact that, like you say, he wasn't really like a meaningful part of the broader Marvel Comics universe. But Stan Lee talked to Brandon Lee, Bruce Lee's son in the 1980s, about potentially developing a film around Shang-Chi.

There was discussion in the early 2000s around bringing the character to the screen, including originally Stephen Norrington was signed a deal to do the film. But in 2003, it was rumored that Yun Wu Ping, who is a pretty important figure, I would say to this actual movie, was theoretically going to direct a movie about Shang-Chi.

And then in 2005, we hear that Avi Arad is developing a Shang-Chi. And then in 2005, we hear that Avi Arad is developing a Shang-Chi film potentially to be made largely because of his roots and the origin of his story being quote unquote, very Disney. And, you know, we're 13 plus years into the MCU story. And finally, we get a story, which of course is important insofar as Asian representation in the MCU, but also because this is a character who there's been a lot of talk about for many years, despite not really having the legacy or the notoriety of Iron Man or Thor or the Hulk or Spider-Man. On the other hand, we've talked about this before, and I'm sure you've written about this in the past.

A character like Iron Man was not necessarily considered the centrifugal force of Marvel before 2008, and they somehow used that character to kind of springboard into this massive story that they've been telling for a decade plus. What do you think

that the arrival of this movie signifies for the MCU at this point? For Shang-Chi, it definitely feels like he was just the most logical choice because in part, to your point, he was somebody where it could really be like a blank slate. And he is actually having a meaningful reintroduction in the comics right now with writer Gene Luen Yang, who's written a lot of really acclaimed graphic novels and stories like american-born chinese and for dc superman smashes the clan uh and for really just the greater scope of marvel

characters there's really aren't too many other choices that they really could have had there there are in the last decade or so there's been a greater push for diversity in the comics that they could potentially do something down the line. But this is somebody where, especially starting this new phase of movies for Marvel with Phase 4. I mean, this is going to be the first present day film of Phase 4 after since Black Widow was kind of jostled in between earlier phases of movies. It's really a chance to start a new beginning with this character and really just make it his own. Was there anything that's been happening in the comics over the last year that we should know or is meaningful to reintroducing him to audiences?

It's interesting because they're taking very similar attacks in the comics and with this new movie where they're really focusing on just this family dynamic that was always important with Shang-Chi from the very beginning. And they're doing it in a way where they're reclaiming it with Asian-American creators behind it. And flipping that kind of relationship with this Fu Manchu character and making it more of just the very deep Asian-American family construct of the father-son story. And doing it in a way where it's actually adding depth and nuance to all the characters

involved but just like even beyond this father-son relationship just the family around them that's that's really what's happening in the comic side is really focusing on Shang-Chi's family around him too with with his like brothers and sisters being a part of of this this like looming shadow of their their evil father hearing you say that, minus the evil father part, it does remind me that this movie and this story and the way that they're positioning this moment, it does feel very similar to Black Panther, to the way that Black Panther was put into the world,

to the relationship between brother and sister, the relationship between son and father and sons and fathers in general in black panther and then wakanda which also i think resembles some of the storytelling in shang chi but you're right that fathers and sons and families is a huge part of this story i thought it was interesting that marvel tapped uh destin daniel cretin to make this movie i talked to him after he had made just mercy on the pod a couple of years ago. Bobby Wagner, our producer, may remember this, but he was just about to leave for, I want to say, Australia to begin production on this movie right after he finished our interview.

And he seemed pretty stressed out. And I thought that that was interesting. He didn't really know what to expect. You know, Cretton is best known for movies like Short Term 12 and The Glass House and Just Mercy. These are really humane dramas. They're fairly small films. They are films that are about families or found families.

Short Term 12 in particular is about like building a community inside of this small and complex place. So on the one hand, he seems like an inspired choice. On the other hand, certainly never made a martial arts movie. Certainly never made a CGI fest, which is an aspect of the Shang-Chi movie. So he was interesting. I would say the best parts of the film are where you can see him applying his talents.

What do you make of someone like Cretton being a filmmaker for a film like this? Yeah, I mean, I thought it was a great choice just because of really just how much you can see he focuses on the humanity of his characters and bringing out just these important relationships between them, like in Short Term 12 and in Just Mercy. And I had the chance to speak to him as well for for the piece that I've written for the ringer this week and just asked I asked him this question of just like how he like

landed to this you know completely different movie than he's made before how do you go from from all this to making a blockbuster for for Marvel and for him, he was telling me it was just really the opportunity to bring this character into the forefront of this new Marvel cinematic universe. And really just for a lot of Asian Americans like him and myself, we just didn't really have these types of superheroes growing up. And this was the

opportunity to tell that story and bring nuance and meaning and just a more authentic touch to it as well. Did he talk at all about what was challenging about making a movie this big? I mean, it was one of these press junkets where things move very quickly. It was also the first one that I had. So we didn't get to linger too long on this part of the conversation. But it did seem to me, at least, that it was, to your point of him being nervous just as he's embarking on this journey,

just I think the scale of what comes with these Marvel movies and just really how big of an affair it is compared to, to the other films that he's worked on. Yeah. He's done something interesting here too, where he's cast a relatively unseasoned, very talented,

gifted former stunt man and martial artist and Canadian TV star, uh, Simu Liu as, as Shang-Chi. And he's surrounding him with these legends of asian cinema and with this comic relief and some familiar figures both from kind of out the outside world and also the mcu to kind of keep us grounded what would you would before we get into the movie itself and also some of the influences what did you just think of this cast particularly its star i mean

i thought simu did a great job. And I think I was already a fan too because I had watched a lot of Kim's Convenience, the really beloved Canadian comedy series that just wrapped up its last season. But yeah, I think really just surrounding him with these legends like Tony Leung and Michelle Yeoh. Um, but also just a lot of, uh, familiar faces too, that are coming out of like crazy rich

Asians as well. Like it really just, it felt like such a celebration of, of, of Asian culture and really just a big moment for, for, for representation with, with, uh, you know, just on the heels of the success of Crazy Rich Asians a few years ago. I mean, before that, it had been 25 years since there had been an all Asian cast coming out of like a Hollywood produced movie with the Joy Luck Club in 1993. like when you when you have because i mean with with simo too like he still was you know relatively unknown at least when it comes to to hollywood like he he had his first break in hollywood with uh fresh off the boat even before uh he was was on uh you know before he really came into this this spotlight with this movie um but i think because of that too it's it's it's great that he wasn't somebody that you could immediately recognize and

he's somebody that can really make this character his own and like like move forward behind this like really really incredible supporting cast behind him as well yeah it's an interesting point it feels like on the one hand, kind of a risk. And on the other hand, a foolproof way to let people fully invest in him. I had never seen Kim's convenience. I haven't seen him on Fresh Off the Boat.

So I have no relationship to him as an actor whatsoever. So to me, he now is Shang-Chi. Like he is that character. And it's a tricky part, right? Because in addition to the burden of representation that he has to deal with

here the it's very familiar balance in the mcu but not necessarily a familiar balance um for all of these actors which is it's a very comedic film but it's also a very sort of serious minded historically minded and also magical and also comic booky kind of a movie so you've got all these colliding tones and having somebody at the center of it who can manage it, somebody who can play off of Awkwafina and also somebody who can play off of Tony Leung who are just totally different performers. And to your point too, in terms of the comedic element,

I think he's really able to bring what he really was able to hone on Kim's convenience and just the chemistry between him and Awkwafina, especially in the early part of this film when it's building up their whole relationship and just who he is right now as an Asian American in San Francisco. Let's talk very quickly about the MCU and what you need to know about it to watch this movie, if anything at all, because I want to spend a lot of time talking about some of my favorite movies that this movie is clearly cribbing from or inspired by, or at least connected to in some way. But before we get into those movies,

is there anything you have to watch in the MCU to get into this movie? Because it is a pure origin story. And while there is connectivity, what would be helpful ahead of time? Yeah. I mean, I think that's really just the beauty of having these origin films still, especially just 24 movies into this. Because at a certain point, I mean, even just like looking at the Spider-Man trailer, like it's pulling it from so many different directions, like so many different franchises, even beyond the MCU. And with this, it really,

it goes back to that. It's been, it's been a while since, since it's been, you know, just a real origin story. And it's like, you really don't, I think, need to have to know too much about it. Like it's always the same thing. Well, you'll be able to appreciate it better with, with little nods and all the cameo appearances that come. But I think really if there's anything that you have to see, just like Iron Man and Iron Man 3 introduce the Ten Rings organization that is finally being put at the forefront rather than just being kind of a faceless organization, like a terrorist organization

in the very beginning of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And to set up even further, Disney Plus just re-released a short film that they did after Iron Man 3 in 2014 called All Hail the King. It's just Ben Kingsley just having a little fun

for like 15 minutes or so. But it really, I think, it's, it's very purposeful that they're just releasing it like a week before this movie is out on Disney plus. So definitely check that out. Yeah. I revisited it recently.

It's pretty fun. It's pretty funny. It definitely pays off in the movie. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that Ben Kingsley, the ex somewhat Mandarin figure from Iron Man three makes a return appearance. He's very very very funny in shang chi um he got some of the biggest laughs at the screening that you and i actually both attended

um let's talk about some of the influences stuff i think people will hear me talking about this and then they will go see this movie and they'll be like sean was really reaching and making some of these comparisons nevertheless i want to use this as a forum to kind of talk about some of the stuff that i really love the first and foremost though i think the Wuxia films are by far the most influential on this story. I think the opening sequence in particular, where we see how Tony Leung and Fala Chen came to meet and fall in love and have a family that then unfurls throughout this story in particular i think if you're a fan of crouching tiger hidden dragon or the films of zhang yimou you know like

hero or house of flying daggers this movie will be very familiar to you i feel like that there's huge inspirations there even something as simple as the uh fluttering wind controlled leaves that are themed through visual theme throughout this movie feels very bound by that stuff are you a fan of the wuxia films like is this a a subgenre that you're interested in yeah i mean it's it had been a while since since i'd really seen them like i remember i i grew up like definitely getting into some of these like actually i revisited uh house of flying daggers um ahead of this pod and like it's that one i feel like you very directly can can see some of that homage being paid like down down to just some of the the costume design for for the the

characters that are coming out of that of kun lun and like kind of this just this whole mythical city that they're introducing in this film and i really just love how distinctive and purposeful they are in just the the various fighting styles that these characters have so with with with scenes like this that you're that you're referring to that that opening fight scene you you very much kind of feel like you're stepping into that movie for a little bit like that's that style of filmmaking probably will come as no surprise that i wish the movie more closely resembled a movie like that i think the parts of the movie that did not work as much for me were the ones where the fighting became a little bit more cgi oriented you know for those who don't know obviously the sort of balletic and often wire work style of fighting yen wu pang uh you know helped develop

some of those styles. And obviously Ang Lee deployed them and Yamo has deployed them too. Those movies are really beautiful. Also really beautiful are the movies of Wong Kar-Wai. Wong Kar-Wai really only made one Wuxia film, Ashes of Time.

But of course, he is probably most closely associated with Tony Leung, who is sort of the leading man of many of his movies, including, you know, Chungking Express and Famous Sequence and Days of Being Wild. Are you a big Tony Leung, who was sort of the leading man of many of his movies, including, you know, Chungking Express and Famous Sequence and Days of Being Wild. Are you a big Tony Leung fan? And can you talk about him a little bit and kind of what he brings to the table? So it had been a while since I had actually seen a Tony Leung movie. But I mean, it's just he's such a legendary actor when it comes to hong kong cinema the fact

that he was brought into the mcu like this was was easily one of my favorite parts of this this film as well like it's it was wild to me seeing seeing him because like i i did like grow up like watching some of these movies too and he still just brings just like such a presence to this film and like still manages to to really fit into just kind of the the weirdness that comes with with being in a project like this you know and it was really cool just seeing like like actors like like simu lu like really just like kind of be a little starstruck too whenever whenever he's like talking about it in interviews like it's it's it's very endearing to to watch but it's just like it's he's he's like a legend being brought into this movie i think like simu like describes him as being like a combination

of like brad pitt like george clooney and like all just like the biggest actors like just like wrapped up in one so it's just like yeah it's kind of great because it also plays well in the movie because he has this outsized presence to his son, you know, as his father. He obviously holds this frustration and this anger towards him based on a story that unfolds in the movie. But, you know, as all sons have complex relationships to their father, he really looks up to him and he's kind of in awe of him, especially when he is operating as this sort of like powerful criminal mastermind using the rings to, you know, get what he wants. It's an interesting use of Tony Leung because he also, as a performer, can be very vulnerable and sensitive, but he can also have this incredible gravitas and be very powerful and mysterious. And also he has this extraordinary physical presence, too. You know, he is such a strong

martial artist for an actor we're not used to seeing that like brad pitt is a pretty good fighter and once upon a time in hollywood but he never does anything like he like tony leung is being asked to do in a film like this so it's really really cool to see someone like this i mean michelle yo as well although michelle yo has been in i think significantly more hollywood productions it's not as surprising to see her, though it is really cool to see her training Simu Liu at the end of the movie.

There's just like a kinetic jolt you get when you see someone like him, if you have any relationship to seeing him in movies before. So I love that. Bruce Lee is a pretty massive... His specter, I think, looms over the movie in a big way it looms over Hollywood in in many ways you know you wrote about him I thought really well a couple of years ago

when Matthew Polly's book came out um what you know what does Bruce Lee mean to this movie if anything yeah I mean that's it's a great question because it was something that just kind of naturally came up in in all the interviews that I was doing for the piece that I wrote for The Ringer with Shang-Chi, just because especially when it comes to Asian American icons, there just really haven't been too many since he first came up with Enter the Dragon in the early 70s. And especially just being in this this this space being in the space that he really helped popularize and really helped globalize it's it's hard not to at least like think of that when you come into it because it's just like for so many Asian Americans like myself like this was this was the guy that we we had growing up this This was like our superhero. And unfortunately, before he really had the chance

to get his full break in Hollywood, he passed away. So especially just like the fact that this is like now like 50 years after his death. Like it is like, it's incredible to see it happening, but it's also kind of wild that it's like, it's taken this long for there really to be another film with, I mean, Simu is Chinese-Canadian, but to the same effect. It's just seeing this sort of representation for Asian-Americans in this way. Yeah, I don't feel like the movie is like a Bruce Lee movie in any way.

There's been an interesting revival of his stuff after the Polly book that you wrote about and then Criterion last year released this really great collection of his films and collected Fist of Fury and Game of Death and The Big Boss and a handful of the other movies. And those movies are really important and they're very kind of foundational, I think, for Americanized martial

arts movies they don't necessarily resemble say the shaw brothers movies or the king who movies or anything like that but they there's something like a little grittier about those movies and a little bit more handmade and shang chi is much more elegantly designed and much more kind of like it's much more composed and it there are some aspects of it that convey that physical power that lee has you know where he's just so his stance is so powerful and so captivating there we get a little bit of it in the movie i actually wish that the movie more a little bit more closely monitored that because anytime shang chi is in a hand-to-hand combat sequence i feel like it's riveting and when it moves in a hand-to-hand combat sequence, I feel like it's riveting. And when it moves away from hand-to-hand into more CGI bound,

that's kind of where I started tripping up. But of course, I agree. I think he kind of looms over the movie. The other person who looms over the movie is Jackie Chan in a big way. I think Jackie Chan obviously has been much more visible to American audiences over the last two decades at the movies. He's much more closely associated with a kind of like slapsticky, you know, Buster Keaton,

Charlie Chaplin style of martial arts films. But I really liked going back and looking back at like drunken master and wheels on meals and some of his early Hong Kong movies, which if people have not seen those, I would encourage folks try to track them down. Somehow you might have to buy an imported blu-ray to get your eyes on it. But, um, you know he i think when you see a like a martial arts movie or a movie about um this sort of like uh martial arts related history in asian cinema and also a movie that has aquafina

in it like jackie chan was very ahead of the curve in terms of fusing those two disciplines very clearly into one person um i really really love his movies and i feel like he has gone through this interesting arc of fame where he was this kind of like somewhat caricaturish sidekick to chris tucker in a movie but also this indisputable physical genius you know this like performative and and structural genius and then over the last 10 years in particular i feel like he really has gotten his due as a choreographer as a filmmaker as somebody who has like total control over the medium you know there's a really great piece by alex papademos and gq a few years back that i would recommend people check out did you grow up watching jackie chan movies does he mean anything to you and and to this movie yeah i mean i think probably bruce

lee and jackie chan were the two people that i that i really grew up the most on like watching their their kind of martial arts movies and especially with with jackie chan i feel like you can feel a lot of that kind of style of fighting like to your point with like the comedic style of fighting that that he really popularized so much um because like the the fight coordination was was led by somebody like really close in his camp the late uh brad allen who unfortunately just passed away just recently um but i think because of that you can see a lot of like almost direct kind of uh homages to rumble in the bronx for example um i feel like that a lot of fans were picking this up right away from from one of the trailers. There's a very prominent and also just the full scene is incredible that that bus scene towards the beginning where he's kind of like using his his jacket to fight off these these these people that are attacking him on the bus and that's something that like Jackie was so great at just like using his his body in this this unique way and like using the objects around him in this in this

way to kind of fight people off um so I feel like you can see a lot of that in this movie yeah I think you can see like some strains of some other significant figures you know there's a little bit of uh Kurosawa a little bit of Kurosawa, especially the Kurosawa military movies near the end of the film as you start to see this massive battle sequence. You can see a little bit of John Woo in that sequence where they go into the fight club

and there's this neon grave intensity. The filmmaker who I feel like might have the biggest thumbprint on this movie, and there's a direct reference to him because we see a poster in Shang-Chi's apartment before he leaves to go find his father, is Stephen Chow's Kung Fu Hustle. And I feel like Kung Fu Hustle and Shaolin Soccer, the tone of those movies, the fight styles that you see in those movies, the kind of blending of styles and the like, you know, adoption of various kinds of martial arts movies over the previous decades. I feel like the movie owes a big burden to them. I thought it was cool or a big debt. I should say,

I thought it was cool that they nodded at it in that poster. I also, you know, not unmistakable poster of the warriors. One of my favorite Walter Hill movies also up on Shang-Chi's wall there, which was pretty cool to see as well as outcast. This is a real, I guess, late millennial or young Gen X kind of a series of nods from Destin Daniel Cretton, no doubt. Did Steven Chow pop into your mind at all too as you were watching? Not as much for me, at least, compared to some of the other

films and filmmakers that we we're we're we're talking about i think i think i think in part because it's like again it's been and it's been a while for me i think seeing some of his movies as well um but also i mean great eye like spotting those in in the room like i don't i feel like i usually look out for these things too i totally miss some of these references but that's pretty awesome thank you man i'm a master of movie posters that's one of my key obsessions in life. I definitely own north of 50 movie posters. So as soon as I saw the Warriors, I had to be on it. It's also pretty notable that Bill Pope was hired to be the cinematographer for this movie. I feel like the work that he's

done over the years with Sam Raimi and with the Wachowskis and Edgar Wright, you can really feel that Americanized version of martial arts influence in a lot of this stuff the spider-man movies and scott pilgrim and um obviously the matrix like these movies also feel like a pretty big part of this stuff would you agree yeah yeah definitely i mean i think you can just see so many just of these american martial arts movies in general, like the ones that you're naming, just really pulling from,

from all of these, these other movies coming out of like, so especially Quentin Tarantino owes so much. I feel like to Hong Kong cinema. And I think he'd be the first to tell you how much he, he like respects that, that genre and that space to, so to see like them pull from so many different directions in

this movie and to have somebody like like bill pope that has been a part of doing that already for these americanized martial arts films is also really interesting to see it's really funny to think about this kind of circular relationship that all of these artists have on each other and the way you know and it goes back obviously decades because you've got Kurosawa making Seven Samurai and then U.S. filmmakers like Sturgis making The Magnificent Seven and then creating this kind of loop. And obviously, people have been inspiring each other. And in the same way that Quentin has inspired filmmakers from Hong Kong, but obviously, there is no Kill Bill without him adopting and reimagining so many Japanese and Hong Kong and Chinese films over the years. It's pretty interesting to watch it all get sucked up into the MCU machine. Now, when we came out of this movie, I think you were a little bit more

fired up about it than I was in general. There's a lot I liked about it. And then I felt like the movie got into a similar problem that I struggle with at most of the MCU movies so like let's just talk about it a little bit more broadly you mentioned the bus sequence which they teased in the trailers and I thought was just downright amazing I thought it was like I was really hoping that this was going to be the

movie was that it was going to be a series of sequences like this in which the choreography the staging there can be CGI but as much hand to hand to show us Shang-Chi's power as possible. I was excited about seeing the words 10 rings in the title made it clear that that wasn't going to be the case. But what other sequences did you really like from the movie? I mean, I loved the action throughout. I think just what I, what I was saying too, with, with how much they're really kind of using so many different types of fighting styles for each one of these characters and,

and drawing them out in ways that makes each character feel unique in general. I think they do a really good job of just adding nuances and adding personality to, to each and every one of their characters that to, you know, a lot of these, these martial arts movies, it's really the focus is on the action. So the fact that I think they're able to really have this family drama being woven into all this incredible action really, really makes it a more memorable and strong movie in the MCU.

I do agree. I think my one issue with it was it does run into that problem with the CGI, huge Marvel spectacle in the end. It kind of felt separate from the rest of the movie for me because it's falling into that pattern that a lot of the MCU movies fall into but I think even even for me with with just the the end part of this this movie kind of coming into that that whole space of of Conlon like they I really just appreciated so much how much like Chinese folklore they're pulling from with like the nine-tailed foxes these like you know the the guardian lions and anded foxes these like you know the guardian lions and and just the presence of like you know like a water dragon and all this stuff like they're really just doing such a good job of pulling so much chinese tradition and so many just so much

of asian culture in a way that i felt was was very very meaningful and and and well done i feel like it was too i it's weird because you know i don't think i'm spoiling anything to say that this movie effectively ends with two cgi dragons like five like fighting each other and that feels very in contrast not just to this story not just to this family story between a father and a son trying to reckon with each other and figure out basically who has the better idea about how to live their life with dignity and power. But also the incredible production design that goes into creating that world at the end of the film, and the costuming, and the sense of scope, but also the intimacy that the movie has most of the time, which I think probably Cretton gets credit for.

And the thing that rattles in the back of my mind is this persistent concept of pre-visualization, where we know that some of these sequences are essentially like baked into the story and that you have to end with this big cgi bomb i thought of this a lot even watching wandavision for example which i thought was good and certainly inventive and an interesting experiment in tv making and still also ended with a weird CGI fight between two witches. And even when that fight was happening, I was like, how did this very peculiar television show

still find a way to circle back to the same MCU CGI fight at the end? And, you know, as someone who really understands these films and who is closely chronicling them over the last couple of years, do you think we should just say like, well, this is just what they're going to do every time and it's like a shootout happening at the end of every western or is there a way to kind of get out of this structure where all of these movies and shows end with the same kind of you know messy denouement

yeah i mean wandavision is is a fantastic example of that because that really was the first piece of action throughout the entire series. I love the show throughout, but just all of a sudden you have two witches and two androids fighting each other out of nowhere when everything was just before then just kind of really pulling from all these sitcoms over just years and years decades of of tv um i thought like one of the first like real exceptions to this was in loki i thought loki's finale was one of the the strongest really ends to to just not even there's only been a few tv shows but really just all of of mcu projects and like that was because it was just, you know, it was just dialogue. You know, it was just people talking.

Like you have, you have Kane the Conqueror being introduced and you have this fantastic performance by Jonathan Major. It's just like, just having a series

of monologues in a way that was still like, obviously that's not like groundbreaking by any means, but for the MCU, it kind of felt like it you know so like yeah i agree with you i will say that the episode that preceded that conversation with kang was about fighting a giant cloud a giant cgi cloud so i guess they managed to fit

that in still we didn't totally avoid the cgi fest nevertheless um Shang-Chi is really interesting. It is a true origin film and there's only a handful of MCU related characters that we see throughout the film. You know, we do see Wong, of course, we do see Abomination, which is kind of a funny callback at a certain point.

Where do you think this story goes from here? And I'll just say like, let's just have a very short spoiler conversation here. So if you don't want to hear this part of our conversation, just fast forward five minutes to my conversation with Dave Callahan. But, you know, between the way that the film wraps up and then what we see in some of the bumpers, you know, what happens and what did you think about them? And where do you think we go from here? the ending of the movie with Wong just kind of coming back and pulling

Shang-Chi and Katie with him to basically bring them to the greater Marvel cinematic universe and just like with if we're getting into the spoilers that like first after credits where they are basically like this it feels like a

soft like invitation to being in like whatever this new iteration of the end vendors is going to be with like like captain marvel and with um bruce banner like talking with them around like the origins of of the ten rings and with with him being the first hero of of phase four films really it's it's going to be interesting seeing how it kind of builds around him in particular but even as they kind of set this up and trying to figure out whether it's like alien origins for for the ten rings or where it could possibly be it seems like it's kind of pointing towards another dimension which of course like is is everything

that they're doing with MCU right now, where everything has to do with the multiverse. So, I mean, I love the fact that you don't feel any of that with the movie itself,

but with this first after credits, it feels like it's starting to go in that direction. Whatever this next big crossover is going to be, it's going towards that. Can you just map out for me? Let's just geek out, all right?

Who better to geek out with than you? What should be the lineup for the new Avengers as we figure? And is it going to be the Avengers? You know, is it even, will it be X-Men or Fantastic Four? Like, what is going to be the core team as we get into 2023, 2024? Wow, that's a very fun question. Well, do your best be creative yeah because we know some of the figures that are coming right like we know like blade is coming down the line but blade is not historically an avenger per se so like who do you think will be

a part of that aside from shang chi and and you know probably captain marvel and probably bruce banner based on what we saw at the end of the movie. Yeah. I mean, I think since because these first three phases of films really were built up and ended around this whole Avengers team. And because I feel like just Steve Rogers and Iron Man are such an integral part of that team in general. I kind of feel like they're at least going to move away from doing like just directly, like the next thing is just going to be another Avengers. I think it's going to be like a series of, of teams most likely just because like, I think they definitely could have some,

some sort of iteration of the Avengers with especially Anthony Mackie's like Falcon stepping into this, this role as, as the new captain America, like he could be a part of this team for sure with Shang-Chi and like these characters like Captain Marvel, the people that are still around.

But I mean, I think we're all still waiting to see how they do invite the X-Men and the Fantastic Four. It seems like the multiverse is a pretty seamless way to do so. But because those are already teams in themselves especially with with the x-men they could go so many different directions with with whatever makeup of a team they want to do uh there could just be so many different factions of of the

marvel universe being built up at the same time so i don don't know. There, there, there are a lot of different possibilities, especially just with, with like a character like the Scarlet Witch, like who knows if she's going to be a hero in, in the next movie. Like I, that was one of my, my favorite parts of the series itself is that she's not really a good guy in this,

you know, she's not really the hero in any sense of it. She doesn't mean she's just terrorizing this this this town of of uh new jersey um you know just this this this like suburb um i'm getting i'm getting serious dark phoenix vibes from her and for her role in in dr strange in the multiverse of madness right i think I think in order to really better assess this, I think we're going to have to wait and see multiverse of madness

when that comes out, the next Doctor Strange movie, because I think that's really going to push everything forward to have a better sense of where we're going to go with it, because Wanda's going to reappear in that.

It's going to be, it seems like at least, going to be going off of the ending of of loki and the way it kind of broke open the multiverse for everything moving forward i i just as an aside i was emailing with our colleague charles holmes yesterday because we were talking about who was the best spider-man and you know while i do think that tom holland is the ideal casting for a spider man or at least the spider-man that i grew up reading. The Tobey Maguire movies are

so good. And one of the reasons they're so good is because they're made by Sam Raimi, who I think is just one of the best, really one of the best filmmakers the last 40 years. And so it's pretty exciting that he's making the Doctor Strange movie. You know, he was not originally the filmmaker. Scott Derrickson was going to make it and then Raimi stepped in after

Derrickson walked away from the movie and Sam Raimi is one of the all time great pulp filmmakers. I mean, between horror and fantasy and, uh, even serious drama, like he could bring something really, really cool and could do something really,

really interesting with Stephen Strange. It was Scarlet Witch. And I'm, I'm just really excited for that movie in general. Yeah, totally. Me too. I mean, just the fact that he kind of really started this whole wave of Marvel movies too with Spider-Man. It's pretty awesome to see him being woven back into it in this way. And especially just after seeing this wild Spider-Man trailer where they're pulling back characters from his universe too. It's going to be cool to see

where this thread kind of goes moving forward. And again, it's just how interconnected these movies are. So I don't know. We'll see. We shall see. Thank you for connecting some of the dots here on The Big Picture, Daniel.

Congrats on the promotion and good to see you today. Thanks so much, Sean. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. Thanks to Daniel. Now let's go to our conversation with Dave Callahan. Delighted to be joined by Dave Callahan on on the show dave thanks for joining me today thank you for having me i'm a huge fan of the show this is exciting that's ridiculous and very sweet dave uh dave your cv is getting long you've been very busy as a screenwriter in hollywood especially the last couple of years i'm really excited to talk to you about shang chi but also how you got here how you became the person that you are now in the industry, and maybe as a human being.

So based on the internet, your first credit is 2005's Doom. Yes, starring The Rock. Starring The Rock. So since then, you've become a kind of a go-to guy for a certain kind of intellectual property screenwriting. How did you break in? How did you get involved in working on these kinds of movies? Wow, that's a lot. I have had a career that I'm a little bit unable to put my own finger on, so I'm not sure how well I can define how I got here. I have been writing professionally

as a screenwriter for 19 years now, so it's a pretty long run in terms of somebody my age. So I broke in pretty early when I was in my early 20s. I was very lucky. I wrote a thing, I wrote a script called Horseman, which was basically a seven ripoff. It was just a very dark, cynical, serial killer movie that I wrote because I had just gone through a breakup and I was in a really bad mood and I needed to express some very dark thoughts in what I thought was a healthy way at the time. And I wrote that and that ended up becoming the thing that sort of broke me into the industry. And then I was faced with this very long road of being thrilled to have broken in, but I wanted to write comedy and I had just gone and written the most cynical, nihilistic, emo bullshit possible.

And so I then spent 10 years sort of slow rolling out of that niche where I was, that was dark thriller and then it was action thriller and then it was straight action. And the thing that really benefited me was as this was happening in my career, that was kind of what was happening in Hollywood for theatrical releases, where, as you know, everything became action comedy eventually. And that's what I was attempting to do anyway. So my goal dovetailed with, I think, the rise of the MCU and the rise of these giant tent poles where everything has got jokes in it. And I just sort of finally arrived at the right time, I would say.

I didn't have any one big moment, which is, I think, better for me, but had been frustrating for a period of time. What kind of movies did you grow up loving? So I have my backstory in terms of movies and film is pretty much not what any film teacher ever wants me to talk about. But I was raised in a house that had a television, but no cable. I didn't have HBO. My mother now completely denies all of these allegations, by the way.

It takes quite a bit of credit for everything that's happened in my career. But the honest truth is, movies and media were not important in my household. And so I grew up in the 80s and was... My mom showed me stuff. I saw... She liked old Universal Monster movies. For some reason, I remember watching The Incredible Mr. Limpet a lot. Oh, sure. Just very hodgepodge. Don Knotts? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I didn't really understand what was happening out in terms of movies until I started going to friends' houses. And that is when I discovered Arnold Schwarzenegger and everything. I don't know how much changed, but my eyes were definitely opened. So I grew up watching that kind of stuff. So was your hope then to write a film for someone like Arnold? Did you feel like... Because Arnold, action comedy is one of Arnold's sweet spots. It is. No, I didn't understand for the majority of my young life that people actually wrote those movies. I like probably a lot of people you speak

to. When you're young, you understand a little bit about maybe what a director might do. Sometimes back in the day, there were Uber producers that maybe you were aware of. And then the actors. I didn't really get that there was people writing every little detail of what was being filmed. And so I didn't grow up wanting to do that. I was very undersized and nerdy growing up. And so I was academic and literate, but didn't know what to do with that. And then when I went to college is when I had to start paying attention to what I might do with my life. This is the part of my origin story everyone hates. I read an article in a magazine that was the gist of which was basically, if you are somewhat smart and know how to read,

you can move to Hollywood tomorrow and write for The Simpsons. And I was like, I can read. So I moved to Hollywood. What magazine did this appear in? Do you already know the answer to this? No. It was a magazine for gentlemen. I see. And there was a picture in the magazine. I should try to find this thing now because it is unfortunately like my urtext. There was a picture in the magazine of a nerd, a prototypical central casting nerd in a hot tub with a bunch of beautiful women. And he was presented as the screenwriter. And I was like, man,

that seems pretty good. I moved out here having never read a screenplay. So it's pretty mercenary when you get down to it. And I know it's not what everyone wants to hear, but that's my story. Well, i'm so fascinated by where someone like you operates in the ecosystem of hollywood especially now too and i feel like you hear a lot about you know i wrote my first script and i wanted to be a filmmaker and so i made it and i made an indie and then i you know made a studio drama and like we hear that arc all the time but you have had for i don't know almost 20 years now a defined role writing a certain kind of big budget tent pole kind of a movie. And did you feel yourself getting the reputation as a go-to person for that

kind of a movie? Did you fight for that reputation? How did it come together? Only in the last couple of years. Because if you look at my resume, it's pretty reflective. I mean, movies come out sometimes many years after they're made, or at least many years after you've written them, if they come out at all. And sometimes that portrays sort of a fake evolution in a way. You know, for example, you would look at my resume and see that I somehow wrote Mortal Kombat in between Wonder Woman 84 and Shang-Chi. That's not exactly how it went in terms of the writing and when I was choosing to do certain things. But sure, it's something I've always wanted to do. And I have,

you know, after Wonder Woman, after Patty brought me onto Wonder Woman 84, that was when I do think suddenly I felt that things were changing in a way where I wasn't chasing stuff quite as much and people were coming to me for material. And I did find it baffling because I had spent so long being the other guy. But I feel it now and I'm very appreciative for it. I want to hear as much as you can share about the upsides and the downsides of working on these kinds of scripts. Like, what do you like about writing these stories and contributing to these, especially the films that have all this inbound mythology that you have to be kind of respectful of?

I like it. I mean, for me, I know that there's writers and directors who have been very public about how much they don't appreciate what superhero movies represent or what they mean for the future, quote unquote, cinema. And maybe it's just because I grew up the way I did and because Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jean-Claude Van Damme

were all that I knew about film. The first time I saw a movie and realized that movies could be good in like an actual storytelling way was Heat. I saw Heat in the movie theater and I was like, what the fuck was that? It just blew my brains out. I was not aware that filmmaking in that way existed. And so that, I think, has, in a happenstance-y way, allowed me to not take things all that seriously in terms of the kinds of materials that I respond to. I respond to large-scale storytelling. I like very broad maximalist stuff. And so I like the MCU. I have been a huge fan of the MCU since it started.

I like Fast and the Furious. I can talk for hours about Fast and the Furious chronology. This is the stuff that I enjoy. It's fun for me. And so it's easy for me to write that. Honestly, it's easier for me to write that than when someone wants me to write something that is a little more specific. requirements to this sort of material. There are so many rules, and you usually don't know them when you start. On Shang-Chi, I got hired and was not told what was going to happen in Endgame until months after I got hired. And ultimately, I think you've seen the film, and this will probably be released afterwards. It's not that critical for me to have known what happened in Endgame. But at the same time, at the time that I was starting to write this movie, half of the population of the world was vanished. And I was asking questions like, hey, are they going to come back?

And if they do, do people know that they were gone? I was trying to wrap my head around, like, what is the sci-fi world that these people now live in, the characters that I'm trying to write? So you're playing with all this interconnected stuff, and it's all happening on a very need-to-know basis. That's much more present at Marvel than when I was writing Wonder Woman 84, the DCEU was still fairly nascent and not very well connected. And I guess it's now intentionally not connected, but that was less of a problem there can i ask you about godzilla i'm a little i'm curious about your experience on a movie like that um because that's a movie

that obviously does have a ton of history behind it and how how much fealty you have to the history and like what part you play as a writer on a film like that especially because all these films you're not the only credited writer so there's this expectation that whatever you put down on paper may not be what is shot or may not be wholly what is shot or maybe redefined. So like, how did you get to be a part of that project? And what happens when you have to just let go of something that you've worked hard on? I basically, the way I think of it is I get fired for a living. It's sort of the sooner that a screenwriter can wrap their head around that. I think the healthier they might end up being.

Now I recognize that I'm probably numb and dead inside and that's why I can say things like that, I can still relate to you. That's amazing. We share that. Yeah, it's super helpful. You know what I mean? It happens a lot. On Godzilla, going backwards, that was a project that, I've never told this story. I had an idea for a monster movie, a big Kaiju movie that I wanted to do. I, I, I grew up definitely being appreciative of those movies. My mom was very into Godzilla. So I had seen a lot of the original Godzillas. I saw some of the weird middle, middle era Godzilla movies like, um, that one with Raymond Burr that

they kind of poured it over to America yeah yeah um and I just have always been fascinated by the romantic notion of these like I'm a big foot in Loch Ness Monster guy like I like the mysteries of the world around us and so Godzilla has always been something really interesting to me um and I had wanted to do a kaiju movie and I pitched it to a friend and it was multiple kaiju. So I wanted to do a fighting movie because Cloverfield had just happened. And my friend said, yeah, but I said, it's like that video game Rampage. And he goes, okay, here's the thing. Don't say it's like that video game Rampage, make it the video game Rampage and attach IP to it. And then you'll be able to sell it.

And I was like, smart, who has the rights to Rampage? The rights to Rampage at the time were at Warner's. I asked what producers have deals at Warner's. I sat down in a room with Dan Lin, who you probably know, who's gone on to a tremendous producing career on the Lego movies and many other things. And I pitched him my whole thing. I was like, it's Rampage. And he goes, okay, Dave, here's the thing. I like what you said a lot. I'm not going to do Rampage. What I am going to do is Godzilla. And I'm already in the process of securing the rights and working with Legendary on it. Would you be interested in coming into Legendary and pitching what you just told me to them? You are already behind the eight ball. There's been much bigger writers already in the room. You would have to work your ass off,

but I think it's worth you trying. And he gave me a shot and I went in and I did the derby for months and months and months and pitched what I had. And I ended up getting that job and writing a lot of the early drafts of Godzilla. I'm actually a really big fan of that Godzilla movie. I think it's really cool and a little bit underrated, given where that whole franchise has gone. Isn't that fascinating, though, by the way? I texted Dan Lin after I watched Kong vs. Godzilla, and I was like, man, if I had known when I was killing myself to do research on how fast a creature of that size would walk across land that where we were headed was there was a throne in the middle of the earth with like a person-sized hole in it. Like I maybe wouldn't have killed myself, but I think it's pretty weird and fascinating.

It is interesting the way that that stuff evolves and for you to be a part of it in the early stages and then maybe not a part of it as it evolves is really interesting. And of course, they did ultimately make a Rampage movie movie too what was that like seeing that campaign well that was weird because i knew a lot of the people involved in working on that i had done round tables on that so i got to sort of see what they were up to and you know that's also a duane movie so that's right it's a very different thing well can you just talk about the round table thing a little bit like what is that as a creative person that is working like how does that work you get a phone call from someone who says we're just having a brainstorming session about how to unpack the ip that exists yeah this can happen at like

every possible level of a project in terms of at what point in development this happens but what happens is i get a call either from my agents if i don't actually know the people making the movie but they're interested in my voice or what I bring to the table for whatever reason. Or if it is a filmmaker I already know or writers I already know, they'll sometimes contact me directly. And what they'll say is, listen, we have this script and we're a couple of weeks out from prepping or shooting, and we just want to punch it up.

Usually it's just real surgical. How do we fix things? How do we add jokes? Is there any logic problems we can fix quickly, et cetera, et cetera. And you go in and sometimes it's three people and sometimes it's 10 people. And I've had every version of this experience. It's really fun because as a feature writer, I don't get to be around other people very much and it drives me a little nuts. So you go into a room and they feed you and you, you basically just, you start very polite and then you just tear the script apart.

Even if it's good, what happens is everybody kind of starts jockeying for attention and you throw out all this stuff and most of it doesn't get used. I have been, I was in one of those though, one time that I really won't even say anything about what studio it was at, but we walked in and we told them that the movie that they were planning to make was completely incorrect and that they needed to just make a completely different movie. And to his credit, the writer director was like, well, what would that look like? And he took out a whiteboard and he wrote down everything we said and they made the other movie. They made the movie

that we pitched them in the room. Really? Yeah. A lot of weird stuff can happen in those rooms. That's so interesting. Do you like the solitary writing experience? Would you prefer to be on more of a team setting? I don't like it, no. I don't know why I chose this lifestyle. I do like writing and I like the freedom that it affords in terms of I don't... I have deadlines, but as long as the thing shows up on the desk when it's supposed to, they don't care about how the sausage is made. So that allows me a lot of time to do my own thing, to hang out with my family and my daughter right now, which I value very, very much.

I am a pretty gregarious person, I'd like to think. Historically, I have been. I was literally going to say that. You're such a gregarious guy. I can't believe you work solitarily. It took me a long time to wrap my head around what I was doing and why I had done it to myself. And I had to find ways to make friends outside of this and to go out and do things and find clubs and groups to be a part of. Yeah, I find it really challenging. I made one TV show a couple years ago, and the experience of working in a writer's room was like heaven shining on me. I just thought it was the greatest thing I had ever done. Apparently not great enough because I never did it again.

Well, I wanted to ask you about that because you do have a period where you work on in television and then you return to features and especially in the last two years you've now stacked credit on credit on credit on credit and like you said you've got mortal kombat and wonder woman 84 and shang chi now kind of all and zombie land double tap too all in that little period so like what happened why and this thing too and america the motion picture so you've got five movies in 22 months so how'd that happen uh it was like i said you know america the motion picture i wrote 10 years ago and it's animated that's an animated movie i wrote for netflix i don't think a lot of people ended up watching it but that's a movie that was animated by the guys who make archer and it was a lord miller production and so that took a long time because it's an animated movie. Those things I've now learned, and we may talk about down the

line. I'm on another Lord and Miller animated movie now, and those things are just this long tale, right? Mortal Kombat, I wrote seven years ago. And then I went and made the TV show with Van Damme, which was, again, just awesome. And then I came out of that experience. And that is when Patty Jenkins decided to toss me the golden lasso, brought me onto Wonder Woman 84. And once that happened, things really took off. Zombieland happened in between some of those things. Mortal Kombat was obviously a more serious movie. And I just had my daughter, and I was just not wanting to be in the tearing people's spines out headspace very much anymore. Zombieland came down the pike and said, this seems like a pretty good transition from

super, super violence to super violence with jokes. And so yeah, they all just slotted in at different times in terms of the writing. And then accidentally, they all just got released kind of at the same time. And that is largely in part due to COVID because Mortal Kombat, Wonder Woman 84, and Shang-Chi were all pushed multiple times because of the pandemic. And what ended up happening is they got pushed together. The release date period got condensed. So I ended up in this very exciting, but also somewhat frustrating period of about nine months where all of the things I had been working on for five years came out on streaming services with a lot of tension and anxiety around how it was going to work. Yeah, we can talk about that a little bit.

I've been asking people on the show about that a lot in the last 12 months or so. Mortal Kombat is interesting, and it reminds me of something very specific that I wanted to ask you, which is how do you write action? Because so many of your films are defined by these big set pieces, but a movie like Mortal Kombat is very much about fight sequences, and that's even different too. Tell me about the level of detail that you're including. Tell me about how much that is actually adopted in the filmmaking and what goes into making those sequences real. Yeah, it can go a lot of different ways. It's usually the same on my end in that I know that I'm not supposed to do this generally, but I do write very specific detailed action scenes. And I know that there are writers out there that do that. I know a lot would

prefer not to because they understand that eventually what usually happens is no matter what I've written, a stunt director or a stunt viz or somebody will come in, a team of very talented, much more talented than me, people will come in and sort of rebuild it around the story idea of the fight sequence. Right. But I can't help myself from wanting to write sort of a blow by blow of how the action happens and something like a fight sequence. I like writing that stuff.

I, as I mentioned, you know, I grew up watching pretty much only action movies. So it feels very natural to me. I feel like I know how to do it. And I also think that if you can do it, it makes the read way better. If you can't do it, it makes the read fucking terrible. But I generally feel pretty confident.

So how do you do it though? Is it like mechanical engineering to know how to write that down? Everyone's different, right? Like at Marvel, there are, there's just this infrastructure that just, I write what I write and they take it and they do what they do. And then they, they sort of give it back to you and say, transcribe this, um, which is cool and, and very helpful to know how to do. Um, you know, an example in the other direction would be on Wonder Woman 84. which is cool and very helpful to know how to do. An example in the other direction would be on Wonder Woman 84.

I wrote in the very first draft of that script, the opening sequence of that movie, the Amazon Olympics. That was in the first draft, and Patty basically shot it verbatim from what I wrote, which I don't think is that common on some of the larger scale stuff, but I appreciated that she trusted the material and she was into it. You know, it can go all different ways.

That's horses and archery and swimming. That's that flow is a little bit easier on something like mortal combat. When you're just talking about two people pummeling the shit out of each other, it can get a little repetitive. So I try to make it poetic. I have a pretty strong mental thesaurus for different ways to describe blood and guts and things like that. And I just try to make it interesting. Is there one particular sequence that you wrote that made it into a

movie that you're proud of? I do love that Amazon Olympic sequence quite a bit. And of the feedback I heard on Wonder Woman woman that was a sequence that i think a lot of people responded to um there is a brief verbal gag in shang chi that i wrote that i'm incredibly proud of because it's so stupid and it's delivered by sir ben kingsley so not a thing i ever thought would happen in my life, but I just find it. I'm a person who's like, I don't... Seeing my name on screen, I've been incredibly lucky to have had that experience. And I have now learned over the course of a career that sometimes that's a good thing. And sometimes it's not quite what you hoped it would be. So that can go a lot of different

ways. I don't derive a huge amount of satisfaction from that. What I get off on is when I have a strange idea one night, my computer drinking a whiskey, or I'm out with a friend and I say this silly idea. And then years later, some incredibly talented artisans have to waste all of their time making the thing, you know, like that to me is the pinch me stuff. Um, you know, on the TV show, I made this TV show at your streaming show, or I don't know what it is. I made a thing at Amazon called Jean-Claude Van Johnson, which was a six episode streaming television show of some kind. And we made a guy make like this 20 foot statue of Jean-Claude doing the splits. And every day i would go into the stage

and just watch this incredible sculptor make this thing and i just thought this is so fucking wild i love that stuff that's that's exciting for me so um yeah and that i'm sorry i'm i'm diverged but watching ben kingsley deliver jokes about the planet of the apes is sort of on that list. I thought he was absolutely delightful in Shang-Chi. Let's talk about Shang-Chi, okay? Sure, yeah. I really liked it. I will be 1 million percent honest with you. The only thing I didn't like about the movie was the absolutely crazy CGI finale. Everything else in the movie, I was like, this is pretty fucking great.

This is a martial arts movie. It's a comedy. It's a family drama. It has a kind of mystical story. It feels very indebted to some of the best Asian cinema the last hundred years. Seems like a hard movie to write. In retrospect.

Yeah. Can you just walk me through when you become a part of the film and then what it is that you are helping to bring to the movie. Sure. And thank you. I'm glad that you liked it. That means a lot. You know, the response so far has been really overwhelming. I will say, I don't typically read reviews or for example, I don't listen to you talk about movies I wrote because I'm not prepared for what you might say. But both as a Marvel movie and as

a movie that is important to the Asian American community, I've heard a lot of great things. So that's exciting to me. And so people listening know, my last name is Callahan, but I'm Chinese American, which is relevant to the Shang-Chi experience, I think. I had had a couple of cups of coffee at Marvel over the years. I had done a little bit of work there, had pitched on a number of things. I knew the team hadn't quite gotten there for whatever reason. And then they called me one day and they said, we want you to come in. We want to tell you about a project we want to do, an Asian American-led project or an

Asian-led project, depending on how it turned out. I was excited, obviously, and I went in and they said, okay, it's called Shang-Chi. And I said, I've never heard of that. And they said, he is the master of Kung Fu. And I said, oh, fuck. Oh, no. At first blush, that is not what you want to hear as an Asian filmmaker, because you just immediately get flooded with just all these stereotypical images and it's tricky because Kung Fu is an honored art in the culture but we're also all very aware that it is a thing we get so associated with that it has become a stereotype um and so you know I I thought about it briefly. And then I said,

yeah, I still want to try this because the opportunity to be a part of something that puts Asian faces on screen at that level, where kids get to see an Asian superhero in the same place they first saw Captain America in the same place that they first saw Spider-Man. I just thought that was so incredibly valuable because my experience growing up was, I was not seeing a lot of that, you know, and I would love for my nephew and my daughter and my, you know, kids growing up to see that. So ultimately it was an easy decision. And then, and then it was, you know, being paired with Destin, Destin Daniel Crettonton the director who you may have spoken to I'm not sure in the past he comes from a very different background than I do and both in terms of life background culturally he's from Hawaii which is super interesting because typically Asian people in Hawaii have a different experience or lack of experience with racism than

Asian people growing up on the mainland. So we just kind of put our heads together. He also has historically made really insightful, empathetic, character-driven dramas that are budgetarily much smaller than Marvel movies. And I had just come off of Wonder Woman. So I'm like thinking about cranes and he's thinking about how do I make this as small as I can? And, you know, it was just a process of talking and asking ourselves, what kind of story do we want to tell here? And to Marvel's credit, they very much got out of our way. They understood that it was going to be more of our story to tell as the two Asian men in the room. They trusted us. And so a lot of what you saw and seems like you liked about the movie

was stuff that we were pretty geeked up on early on. Just all the different influences and Crouching Tiger and Kung Fu Hustle and Old Boy. A lot of Asian soap opera stuff. I don't know if there's that vibe in some of the family scenes. Yeah. I mean,

it does feel in many ways like a 50, 50 blend of your filmography and Destin's. It's kind of crazy the way that it worked out that way. Did you guys screen those movies? Did you talk about them? Like, because the first half of this conversation on this episode is me talking to a colleague of mine about all these movies that I feel like i see in chung chi and it was some of

the movies you just mentioned so like how did you guys decide to blend and what did you choose to blend into the storytelling and also let me just say really quickly even though he was the master of kung fu this doesn't really feel like a kung fu movie there's lots of martial arts and i love the martial arts in the film but that's not really what the you guys have redefined the character in a big way we had to redefine the character. I mean, to Marvel's credit, they also understood implicitly that a lot of the publication history of the character is pretty problematic. So, you know, we were in a pretty unusual position at Marvel in that we weren't saddled with this backstory that everyone was

expecting. We weren't going to get trashed on for reinventing the Shang-Chi backstory. At the same time, that becomes a little paralyzing because there's just open field in front of you and you can go in any direction. And it can be hard to sort of hone in on what you want to do with it. For me and Destin, it was about identifying what the core story that we wanted to tell was, and then looking at material that seemed to speak to that kind of idea. So that is why Crouching Tiger shows up a lot because once you're talking about fights that are intended to be more of a dance, then that becomes an easy go-to. And it was also just about sharing influences because Destin and I came up

on very different types of movies. I have, as I've mentioned, a pretty good facility with every action movie that's made in the last 40 years and basically nothing before that. And Destin knows a lot more about indie filmmaking and about character work, I suppose. And so I shared with

him things that I had grown up on. Kung Fu Hustle was the one I think that we both really responded to early because we knew that we were trying to make a movie that would be really fun and funny. That was an Asian stereotype that we were trying to dispel that Asians are typically more stoic. And even in some of the great martial arts movies that you're talking about, they are a little more serious, right? And so you see something like Kung Fu Hustle and you just go, oh, this is, I didn't know you could be this wild

and freewheeling and fun. Yeah, I feel like it felt like Stephen Chow and Jackie Chan were huge influences on the movie, which, and those were my favorite parts. Any hand-to-hand moment, too, I was like, this is just such in my sweet spot, personally, as a movie fan, and the fact that you guys were able to retain the humor

in those was really great. I spotted the Kung Fu Hustle poster and the Warriors poster in Shang-Chi's apartment. What's hard about making a movie like this? What's challenging about writing a screenplay inside of this big universe in addition to not necessarily knowing who's going to survive Endgame?

Again, I didn't find it particular. I think Destin probably found it more challenging at the outset. When we were just getting started, he was still editing Just Mercy, which is, as you may know, a very different kind of movie than this. And so he was coming out

of a totally different headspace. And again, I'm coming off of just like shooting Maxwell, Lord of the Moon or whatever. So, you know, I'm ready to roll. And I have seen all of the Marvel movies. I don't have to do the homework. So for me, it was pretty natural. I think for Dustin, it took a minute to recalibrate to the scale of the thing. But then once we got going, for me personally, the biggest challenge was actually just the internal and slightly external pressure of writing this movie that I knew was going to be incredibly important to the Asian diaspora. So I spent the first 18 years of my career not even thinking about what my Asian-ness meant as a writer. And I spent the first 20 years previous to that basically hiding from my Asian-ness, trying as hard as I could to just not be Asian because I had been taught by American media that it was not cool and not sexy, not strong, not fun, all of the stereotypes. And so to suddenly be in a position to write something that I knew was going to be meaningful, I don't want to say my material isn't meaningful, but I didn't get the impression there was going to be like Zombieland fans that were just hinging on what was going to happen in

Zombieland 2, right? But still, no one has raised a zombie. You know, if you're, if you're raised Asian or Asian American, the movie is just going to have such a profound impact. Exactly. Exactly. So, you know, and I heard about it from my mom right out of the gate. My mom is the one in my family who's Chinese. She was born in China. Her whole family is from China. Some of them still live in China. And the minute I got hired, I started hearing about what I better not fuck up. And so that pressure, I found really challenging. And the further into announcements start happening where it's being announced that I'm writing it and that Destin's directing it.

And then we have a Comic-Con announcement. Every one of those things that happens, you start hearing about it more and more from the outside world. And I found that challenging. I found that very, very anxiety provoking. On Wonder Woman, that was always going to be Patty's movie. I knew I wasn't going to be dealing with a lot of the blowback if that is what happened. And so there's a freedom there. This one I knew I was going to have more ownership over. And so, yeah, I just wanted to make it right. I wanted to do the best job we could. What was the number one thing your relatives warned you not to fuck up? They're not specific.

I mean, that's the thing is they were just like, don't embarrass us. And I'm like, well, I feel like I've already probably done that over the course of my career. I don't know what that means necessarily in this context, but I knew that I wasn't going to embarrass them. I knew that we were writing it from a heartfelt place and that what we were doing was meaningful to us and that would show up on screen in some capacity. So I feel like we did the best we could. How many unproduced screenplays do you have in your drawer? Maybe five or six. Not that many. Do you want them to be made? No, I don't. When you start, the goal is break in. Sell a screenplay. Make a million dollar

Joe Astor house sale or some shit like that, but it doesn't happen anymore. And then, which is not what happened to me. I did not sell a big spec to break in. That script that I mentioned, Horseman, was optioned by Platinum Dunes, which was Michael Bay's production company. I didn't see the kinds of money I dreamt of making in Hollywood for quite some time. And ultimately, that turned out to be better because I had to work hard and I had to develop a voice. And then after you get paid to write, then the next goal is like, I want to see my name on screen. I want to see something produced.

And that was a goal for a long time. And then things started to get produced and I felt great about that. And you do at one point start to think about wanting to stack a lot of stuff up so that you can have sort of a breadth of, of, um, a resume that shows that you can do a lot of things. Uh, but I did realize a couple of years ago that maybe the best place for those things that didn't get made was to stay where they were because some of them, a lot of them are very bad is the truth. They didn't get made for a reason. I've got one script in my drawer that I think is pretty good. And it's the thing that kind of built the second half of my career. And I'm just so nervous that it would get made badly now and no longer be a special piece of

material that I'd rather it just be in plexiglass in my head, if that makes sense. Yeah, that's so interesting. You mentioned Joe Esterhaus and the myth of the superstar screenwriter is something that has really fallen by the wayside, I feel like, in the last 10 years. It's not as much of an archetype in the Hollywood hierarchy these days. There's no Shane Blacks. Is it a great job? Is it the job you thought it would be? Is it lucrative? Is it all the things that you dreamed given that you've worked on really, frankly, as big a projects as there are in Hollywood? Yeah. I don't want to say anything that's going to lead anybody down a path that...

Because the thing that's so weird about writing that I suppose I knew inherently when I started but didn't understand completely was that it's different for everybody and that there is no, there's no playbook. When I broke in in the early aughts, it was very different than it is now. I don't want to presume to know how hard it must be right now, especially if you want to write movies. When I was breaking in, people were still making quite a number of movies. And now I don't know how you're supposed to break in and just get a $250 million tentpole because that seems like your only option. If you want to write in TV, I believe there are more opportunities there right now. I would say it's a good job for me. It's lucrative for me. I've been very fortunate and I've managed to time a lot of things accidentally very well in my career, but I suspect that it maybe is not that good of a job or very lucrative or helpful to a lot of people right now. I have this strong suspicion that if I feel the anxiety that I feel around where we're headed and what's going to happen soon, I wouldn't want to be making one-tenth of what I'm making and still have that anxiety, if that makes sense.

MCU, DCEU, Godzilla, Mortal Kombat, you've kind of wrapped your arms around a lot of the big intellectual property projects. Is there one out there that is a dream that you would like to get a crack at? Yeah, there's a couple still out there that I would love to take a crack at soon. Are you not going to answer that? If I guess, will you blink if I've nailed one? I feel like it's going to be so obvious from the audience. I mean, I grew up in the 80s. I love a lot of the same giant franchises that a lot of us love. Other than the obvious ones... Just for the record,

over your shoulder, I'm looking at an AT-ST. That's one thing I'm going to say. That's all I'm going to say. You are looking at an AT-ST. What else do you want to do do you want to direct I don't know I used to say no pretty adamantly because I felt and I continue to feel despite you know what's what's interesting for me is not interesting I'm sorry in advance um

I didn't I didn't know what a director did, really. I mean, the presentation of what a director does to the outside world didn't tell me much. And when I got on set and started seeing what directors do, every time I did it, the director was doing something completely different. I've worked with directors that are only shooters. And I've worked with directors that are way more interested in working with the actors than they are about. And then they have a DP that does all of that stuff. And I've worked with directors who do both i found that very confusing for a while and that to me meant i didn't know what i would want to do as a director i didn't have an i didn't have a like an inclination that i should be doing any one of those things and

therefore i thought well that means i shouldn't be doing it at all. Also, directors work really hard. And I didn't want to do that either. I don't have the patience to work on one thing for two straight years and not see my family for a lot of that time. That's just not something I'm capable of doing right now. I think it's possible in the deeper future if there's still movies to be made and the kinds of things that I'm interested in when my daughter is older, I think I might be interested in trying it for the experience, but I don't, I don't have this feeling that a lot of screenwriters have where they've had their material taken away so many times and finally they just can't take it anymore.

And I have to show the world what the inside of my head looks like. Like, I don't think, I don't think the world needs to know what the inside of my head looks like. Like, I don't think, I don't think the world needs to know what the inside of my head looks like. Dave, this has been very fun. We end every episode of the show by asking filmmakers and you are a filmmaker. What's the last great thing they've seen? Well, I knew this was coming,

obviously, uh, in terms of single season arcs of television, I would like to say that the humiliation of Fessy on last season's challenge was one of the greatest demonstrations of reality TV storytelling and editing I've ever seen in my life. Oh, so good, wasn't it? Oh, my God. But I know that's a different podcast. A thing I would like to mention is this is not as recent. I think this

was not recent. It was a thing I watched with my family at the beginning of the pandemic. But because time is now a flat circle, that seems like it should be fine. We watched a streaming show on Netflix called She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, which I don't know how familiar a lot of the listeners might be. When I started into it, I didn't know a lot. It is obviously a pretty massive reboot of the Shira mythology that we might remember from the 80s. It is created by Noelle Stevenson, who also co-created the Lumberjanes graphic novel series, which is also spectacular. And I don't really know how to say this without getting too gushy,

but I was just so blown away by the storytelling capacity of this show. And the most important thing I thought was, this is effortlessly inclusive storytelling in a way that I had never seen anywhere else. We are living in a world where these giant media companies are like, hey, you're about to see our first gay character on screen, give us a trophy. And then you see the thing and it's like a third tier character who never mentions that they're gay. And okay, great. This is not that. This is inclusive storytelling without a spotlight made by people who care about inclusive storytelling. It watches like a show from 2050 to me. It is so far ahead of what the rest of everyone is doing. It's beautifully made. I watched it with my daughter. And so that

was meaningful to me, especially if you're the kind of parent who's struggling with some of the weird gender bullshit that we put on kids and that our culture is historically built out of princess stories. It is just none of that stuff. And it is awesome. And so even if you don't think you're into kids stuff or cartoons, I recommend it. That gets me excited to show that to my daughter one day. Great recommendation. Dave, thanks so much for doing the show. Really fun talking to you, man. And congrats on Shang-Chi. Thanks so much. Appreciate it, guys.