Original subtitles

Martial art has a very, very deep meaning

as far as my life is concerned because, uh... as an actor,

as a martial artist, as a human being,

all these I have learned from martial art.

♪ (WESTERN MUSIC PLAYS) ♪

(SWORD RINGS)

You know, when we first started talking about this show,

it was ahead of its time, I think,

when Bruce Lee was typing it up and coming up with the idea,

but it felt like we kinda brought that to life

exactly as written, we're not doing it justice

because so much time has lapsed, and the medium has also evolved.

We felt like it was important to build this world.

It takes place in 1800s San Francisco.

At the same time, it's very contemporary.

We really wanted to create three very specific worlds.

We wanted the world of Chinatown,

which is our primary world.

We also wanted a world of the working-class Irish

to see how they're living and they're sparring

with the Chinese,

and we wanted the aristocrats and the politicians

because it was really important to me to convey

how the decisions were happening really,

at the top of the government chain

that were affecting the laborers in Chinatown.

The San Francisco of our show is a seething cauldron

of intolerance and tension.

Chinese labor is just flowing in rapidly.

A lot of the Irishmen who have been the workers

of the area are being pushed out for Chinese laborers

who would work for pennies but what happened was

Chinatown kinda grew and became its own world.

San Francisco's sort of a microcosm

for the United States at this point.

It's sort of a powder keg moment and a tipping point

in racial relations for the Chinese community

as we start to climb towards the legislation in 1882

of the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Many people never even heard of the Chinese Exclusion Act.

It's a period of history that's been glossed over,

and it was a very harsh immigration policy

that targeted one race of people.

Chinese people could not own property.

Chinatowns, a lot of them, became sort of the boundaries

within which they were allowed to be.

I think back to when I was in high school,

and you know, you take history class,

US history class,

and there's literally, you know, a four-sentence paragraph

about the Chinese-American experience,

and they helped build our country.

And for me, personally, I think it was important to tell a story

of a character that's going through that journey,

that American immigrant story we can all relate to.

JONATHAN TROPPER: We wanted to take this time in history and take the racism

and take the immigrant experience

but move it into, you know,

a more elaborate and heightened world,

a world where we could also have fun

and generate a level of pulp and action.

My father did that in his films.

He had amazing, entertaining action.

He had humor, and then you also got to sprinkle in

some of the philosophy, some of the seriousness,

some of the deeper messages,

and this show is exactly the same.

It's very Bruce Lee.

BRUCE LEE:

When I set out making the show,

you know, because Shannon's involved,

and I knew that the fans of Bruce Lee

were gonna scrutinize this, I wanted to give them

-a lot of to sort of grab onto. -(GRUNTING)

There are moments where I slip in

some of his famous phrases into the dialogue.

There's other times where certain fight moves

we steal right out of Bruce Lee movies,

and it's all done really to pay respect to the master.

It was really, how do we pay homage to Bruce Lee,

and at the same time, create our own show?

Bruce Lee has this idea that our warrior, Ah Sahm,

would form some kind of relationship

with a cop named Big Bill, so I definitely wanted

to take that name and take that idea that Bruce had

-and build on it. -The character of Ah Sahm

was a character who came from China

and came over to America, you know, searching for someone,

and then Big Bill was sort of his adversary/friend

who sometimes was described as a drunk,

sometimes as just sort of a loud Irishman,

but those two characters really stood out on the page.

In this world, Ah Sahm is like the draft version of Bruce Lee.

We really wanted to get away from the tropes

of the 70s and 80s Hong Kong action movies,

where the martial arts hero

is this sort of pure soul on a quest.

We took Ah Sahm and wanted to make him really human,

with flaws, and you know, he's very reckless,

he's impulsive. He doesn't always think things through,

and he's very much the antithesis

of what Bruce Lee would've been.

The goal was not to make Ah Sahm a clone of Bruce Lee,

so what we do instead is we find ways of inserting

some of the Bruce Lee philosophy into all of our characters.

BRUCE:

When people see this show,

I think they're going to be surprised.

There's a lot of preconceived notions.

When people hear Bruce Lee, they hear martial arts.

Of course, there's great action

but I think they're gonna be surprised

how emotionally involved they're gonna be,

and we have the ability to able to take the audience

into different points of view.

These are compelling characters,

not just Ah Sahm, not just Big Bill.

When you watch the show, you're gonna see that

we care about every frame, every second of this story.

DANIELLE WOODROW: We honored Bruce Lee's legacy

and what his real hope for the show was.

I hope that the picture I am in...

would either explain why the violence was done,

whether right or wrong or whatnot.

(SWORD RINGS)

♪ (WESTERN MUSIC PLAYS) ♪

-(CROWD YELLING) -(SWORD RINGS)