Jet Li rejected The Matrix as he didn’t want his kung fu moves recorded (2018)

https://www.scmp.com/abacus/culture/article/3028904/jet-li-says-he-rejected-matrix-because-he-didnt-want-his-kung-fu

by danso • 5 years ago

181 206 5 years ago

Imagine they if they told Keanu Reeves to records all the words of the dictionary and all his facial expressions and body postures and keep it as IP forever.

BigBubbleButt• 5 years ago

https://youtu.be/ouxYTQ_UuIw

pankajdoharey2• 5 years ago

OR NFT ?

unishark• 5 years ago

In return for the 100+ million dollars he got out of it?

Li's role would only have been in the sequels anyway, not the one good movie...

Seriously though, for such a deal if one gets a percentage as royalties perpetually too, then it may be a good arrangement. I think Li's objections could have al been addressed as terms in the deal. Apparently what Li is saying is the terms offered were one-sided and he didn't like them.

dmos622• 5 years ago

the one good movie

It's the opposite for me, I liked them all, but the first one was just a good old rehash of Socrate's cave allegory. It offered hardly anything new, but was pretentious with various references to Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation, which is precisely a critique of the cave allegory. The first one was accessible, simple, fun. The sequels were no less fun, but you had to think. While the first ones referenced Christian mythology a lot, the sequels jumped into Eastern metaphysics.

atatatat• 5 years ago

He didn't want his art to be cheapened by having random clowns being shown as if they had those skills.

forgotmypw172• 5 years ago

Sequels?

?:-^

worker767424• 5 years ago

Didn't they do something close to that with Hugh Weaving to make a lot of CG Agent Smiths?

testplzignore• 5 years ago

No. They actually created real physical clones of him. It's no coincidence that production on the film started shortly after the creation of Dolly the sheep.

royjacobs• 5 years ago

To be fair, the technology and storage available in the early 2000s would have been quite sufficient to store all of Reeves' facial expressions.

albertopv• 5 years ago

I saw over 14 millions of possible futures. And how many Reeves' facials expressions? Just one.

BiteCode_dev2• 5 years ago

The problem is such model would also randomly produce ryan goslin facial expressions, leading to copyright issues.

agumonkey5• 5 years ago

that's about 1M Pattinsons

boca_honey• 5 years ago

A warning for fellow so called fun-haters: this comment started the first comment thread on HN I've seen that degraded into a reddit-level pun/joke thread without some one immediately stopping it. I really hope this isn't a trend.

(Nothing personal with OP. It was actually a very clever joke. Just had to do this to keep HN standards. I really don't want to lose this place to memes and hot takes as it happened in virtualy every other aggregator).

0j• 5 years ago

Reminds me of this masterpiece: Neo takes the blue pill https://youtu.be/aau8qa3xgFs

justinclift• 5 years ago

There's also the classic xkcd: https://xkcd.com/566/

nsonha• 5 years ago

Keanu Reeves has like 4 facial expressions and none of them is original, no one would be interested in that. This guy becoming an action/movie star seems like dumb luck.

darkerside• 5 years ago

Yeah, must be pure luck

paulryanrogers• 5 years ago

This is explored in "The Congress" quite thoroughly

laurent924• 5 years ago

The Congress is my absolute nightmare movie, despite the beauty of it. I find it depresses me because we all live some part of our lives as an illusion, and it’s tempting to go even further; In fact, are we so far into an illusion that we don’t notice our life is destructed?

pankajdoharey2• 5 years ago

Good For Matrix, Jet Li isnt much for acting. Keanu really did a good job, i cant imagine it any other way.

unfunco• 5 years ago

Jet Li wasn't in the running for the role of Neo.

effingwewt5• 5 years ago

Yea he was up for Seraph. The actor who ended up playing him was spectacular though.

I love Keanu Reeves as much as the next person byt there's a reason he's described as 'wooden' in his acting.

Until John Wick I honestly would have bet money he couldn't act with real emotions.

I remember there being a word for it when an actor just lools like they always do but due to music score and your own expectations you assume they are acting how you would expect. I think Keanu has mastered that =)

RedComet6• 5 years ago

How would have been any different than any other movie he's been in? Are they not digitally recorded indefinitely as well?

pan69• 5 years ago

I think they are talking about digitally recording as in motion capture. That probably doesn't happen for a lot of movies he's in.

effingwewt5• 5 years ago

This is mentioned in the article. They wanted essentially to own the IP to every martial arts move Li would have recorded for them, allowing them to essentially have him or even just his moves with someone else's face superimposed, so what would they need the actors for at that point?

And of you are just going to digitally do the fight scenes then why not just use moves already recorded without any IP?

Seems to me like he was smart to Nope TF out.

RedComet6• 5 years ago

It actually is not mentioned in the article, how this movie would be different with respect to other movies he was in at the time.

akudha• 5 years ago

Good on him.

That said, they will find some other young but starving martial artist and record all his moves. He may not be as famous as Li, but he will be cheaper and easier to manipulate.

I wonder how far are we from making movies completely with software, with no human actors at all

RedComet6• 5 years ago

After some looking around, it is suggested (but never started outright) that the concerns were specifically related to the terms that Warner Bros layed out, NOT to motion capture in general. In fact, he did motion capture for a video game that came out the next year. The game was developed by a Sony studio based out of California.

lbj• 5 years ago

In the words of Norm McDonald: What a genius, he’ll be sorely missed

devfromanatolia2• 5 years ago

'Li said back then, he was already worried that future technology would allow US filmmakers to digitally reproduce his moving body and superimpose the face of any actor onto it.

“I was thinking: I’ve been training my entire life. And we martial artists could only grow older. Yet they could own [my moves] as an intellectual property forever. So I said I couldn’t do that,” Li said.'

It is fascinating to see that at some point of any expertise, you start to respect the art itself more than any hard work you invest in it.

agumonkey5• 5 years ago

And we're hitting a point where tech is making this irrelevant. I'm somehow scared about the implications.. it kills a lot of deep human emotions (desire, ambition, skill, transmission).

Some people are already feeling this in music slightly.

fighterpilot• 5 years ago

That's the reason the Go champion Lee Sedol gave for quitting

ramblerman• 5 years ago

Making what irrelevant?

The 'implications' for 'human emotions' is vague enough to be analogous to simply 'fear of change'.

Focusing on the process and not the outcome has been common advice since the Tao Te Ching. It's not easy, but that's not due to tech.

gchamonlive5• 5 years ago

It might be true for anyone measuring success by how much money they make.

But I don't think people get into any form of art, and I count programming as a form of art, expecting huge sums of money. We all do it for the sake of doing it, because it feels good to do it, to learn, to overcome, to achieve.

Just think about the fact we are never indeed satisfied. I, for instance, am much more skilled as a programmer than I was 5 years ago. In a sense I made it, I have a job that pays well and I can do my work without much issue. Programming feels natural. However I am nowhere near being satisfied. I want to learn more, see and try new things. Explore different paradigms, languages and techniques. But not because it could render me a better paycheck, but because it feels amazing to learn and solve new problems.

sigg3• 5 years ago

it kills a lot of deep human emotions (desire, ambition, skill, transmission).

Of course it doesn't. It just changes parts of what we care about.

Auto tune didn't kill music, it just made evident what we already knew: a live performance might be the more authentic experience of a particular artist. Other, new breed artists, might never even perform live.

AI playing chess did not make chess players obsolete. It just shone a new light on the game from a different angle.

I can see AI becoming talking heads type of hosts, but they will still need human insights and skills (or "guidance") to function appropriately. This is what we'll use to assess the performance, then.

ur-whale2• 5 years ago

Just be patient, another decade and the tech will be at a point where his moves can be reverse-engineered back to 3D directly from his films.

iurysza• 5 years ago

We're already there.

luma• 5 years ago

Pose Estimation from a 2D source is one of the default examples provided by TensorFlow: https://www.tensorflow.org/lite/examples/pose_estimation/ove...

Not only are we already there, it's now a trivial exercise used to instruct new users on the technology.

hippari• 5 years ago

This is the technological dystopian that the Matrix was depicting. What an irony.

donio2• 5 years ago

The movie depicted an entirely different technological dystopia. Intellectual property was the least of their worries.

regularfry• 5 years ago

I'm not sure I'd count that as "respecting the art" more than "ensuring I have continued employment".

enraged_camel• 5 years ago

Why would Jet Li worry about something like “continued employment”, when he is already worth $250 million?

0des• 5 years ago

The day will come where movie actors and celebs become CGI intellectual property, without unions, dressing rooms, personal problems off-set, etc. He's right to have this concern, it's happening now.

slumdev• 5 years ago

Recreating Wushu using low-detail-ragdoll CGI is an offense against Wushu.

I think "respecting the art" is a fine way to describe his decision.

Pokepokalypse2• 5 years ago

As it turns out; he lacked imagination. They can digitally create new moves that are even physically impossible; for say - superhero movies, and utterly surpass anything from traditional martial arts, even in the mythology.

hazmazlaz• 5 years ago

And yet, now Jet Li is essentially irrelevant but if his moves had been digitized and licensed for use in media he could have lived on forever.

trashface• 5 years ago

Can't blame him, seems like a totally valid concern. He should have said, "That sounds like a really good deal. But I've got a better one. How about I give you the finger?"

devfromanatolia2• 5 years ago

'"Motion capture this!" said Li, artistically'

dnautics• 5 years ago

with future ML pose engines, joke's on him!

peakaboo• 5 years ago

From one of the best movies ever made.

HWR_144• 5 years ago

Or, alternatively, he could have forced the situation so he owned the mocap files and gave the Matrix producers perpetual rights (maybe fore the entire trilogy). Then, when he's old and cannot move his virtual moves can be earning for him.

Apocryphon2• 5 years ago

Jet Li rejected The Matrix Reloaded to star in DMX vehicle Cradle 2 the Grave.

gherkinnn• 5 years ago

That’s ok. Those two are forgotten, while the other is actively despised.

enkid• 5 years ago

The Matrix Reloaded was ok. It's Revolutions that was actively awful.

agency• 5 years ago

The article also says he was making Hero, which is a masterpiece IMO.

zentr1c• 5 years ago

true Hero is such a beautiful piece of artwork in so many dimensions. its the movie I watched the most often. 》5 times

amelius2• 5 years ago

At least he was asked to opt in.

With Co-pilot, programmers don't even have a way to opt out.

lordnacho• 5 years ago

Isn't this going to happen anyway? Someone will train a ML model with martial arts movies to generate new sequences, just like they do with all sorts of other media.

It's fair use to train it on existing movies, isn't it?

amelius2• 5 years ago

It's fair use to train it on existing movies, isn't it?

I don't think so, if the intent is to build a system that competes with the original actors.

HWR_144• 5 years ago

With Co-pilot, programmers don't even have a way to opt out.

I find not using GitHub lets me opt out. Am I wrong?

phaemon• 5 years ago

I'm afraid you are. If your project is open source, it's quite likely someone will put a copy up on GitHub while they're working on it.

flybrand• 5 years ago

This sounds a little bit like the people who didn’t fight in the UFC because they wanted to keep their art ‘secret’.

notoriousjpg• 5 years ago

Makes no sense. Jet Li has legitimate kung fu pedigree and has won multiple martial arts tournaments.

Delk• 5 years ago

I don't think it sounds like that at all, from what the article says. Rather it sounds like he didn't want the skills he had spent years practising and learning to be potentially subject to cheap replication by technology. That would turn something that used to be a skill learned through effort into a commodity, at least as far as film goes.

I can easily see how that would seem like a bad deal for the actor. It could also feel like it devalues the skills themselves.

That's orthogonal to the applicability of those skills in the UFC or whatever.

sadfasf122• 5 years ago

wat

aaron6952• 5 years ago

It's unlikely the Wachowskis would have asked for this, it's unethical and they are not bad people. They understand the value of art, both movies and martial arts.

It's still not possible to this day taking it at face value.

We still use motion capture on people just walking.

kevingadd• 5 years ago

I'm not sure why you think this. The films literally repurposed motion capture this way, by digitally replacing the faces of actors or rendering them in full CGI for stunts. Doing this would naturally require the studio to have the legal rights to reuse their captures in this way. The Matrix actors' mocap was also repurposed for use in an official tie-in video game.

aaron6952• 5 years ago

The Matrix actors' mocap was also repurposed for use in an official tie-in video game.

The motion capture was done specifically for the game.

"“The Wachowskis wrote an hour of new story and filmed it so we could have the video game really be a part of the Matrix story "

https://wireframe.raspberrypi.org/articles/the-unique-story-...

You can see Keanu Reeves in Cyberpunk 2077, he can't even scratch his head without looking stupid.

https://www.cinemablend.com/news/2559005/keanu-reeves-shares...

psychlops• 5 years ago

He could have simply done his non-super-secret moves for the movie. You know....acting.

ericls• 5 years ago

People believe that?

neonate• 5 years ago

https://archive.md/wVHwK

oblak• 5 years ago

Back then the story was he demanded 60 million for the role. Obscene, no doubt. But they did spent 10 million on a single rain drop that Smith or Neo punched. God, that movie sucked

tyingq• 5 years ago

The people making a movie about a dystopia where any value humans have is sucked out to power a digital replacement, did exactly that. Heh.

bitexploder4• 5 years ago

I have been doing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu for several years now. It is achingly hard as a sport earlier on. But for the most serious practitioners it becomes an expression of art. The movement of the human body in a lethal dance. The full expression of that art is something I aim for in the back of my head. Early on it was about the sport, exercise, etc. you realize the hard work is just the means required to expressing the art and that becomes primary for me. Not everyone views BJJ in this way, of course, but I do.

CodeAndCuffs• 5 years ago

I've trained on and off for the years. Probably only 100ish hours of mat time. I'd rolled with mainly white and blue belts, the occasional purple, and maybe 1 brown. Even with that, I understood that there are some serious levels to this.

Then last year I rolled with a black belt. It was like a different game. I'm a big dude, but I could not move this guy. It was like trying to move a car, it just rocked a little as he looked at me with amusement and pity. He did the same stuff I know, just better. And he knew what I was thinking before I knew it. He's got top half guard, and Im fighting for an underhook. As I think, "Ok, he cant choke me with 1 hand, he won't go for the brabo", he goes, "You know I can still sink this with 1 hand, right?".

He did, and he looked bored doing it.

bitexploder4• 5 years ago

Heh, I often put white belts and blue belts in unfamiliar dilemmas. There is a lot that goes into weight distribution. They say each belt adds 10 lbs. I am of course not very good relative to most black belts, but I’m starting to challenge them in some spots. I am also relatively large so I follow a catch and release philosophy. I don’t too pressure smaller guys and I often concede positions etc. it’s like, I know I can hit escapes at the right places, why not let everyone work and have fun instead of just smash. That’s a good lesson about strong guys though. I train with some MMA guys that are huge and you learn who you have to move around. Some guys you just can’t move. I don’t care about winning or losing anymore. Some times I give away too much and get tapped. And that’s fine :)

takinola• 5 years ago

There's nothing more humbling when you fight a guy and realize you literally have no chance of beating him and you are merely being toyed with. It's such a strange, frustrating place to be because in most other scraps you get into as a kid you are evenly matched but when you start out in martial arts and spar with top practitioners, you are completely outclassed.

laurent924• 5 years ago

My judo club was awesome: It’s about 70 people, all belts mixed during a good half of the session, but also all ages mixed, and you can invite anyone you want. Like in a dance club. Fighting a 12 years old who smashes me or a 70yo who also smashes me, truely made me alive. Along with, of course, the variety of people at my level.

borski3• 5 years ago

A shoulder dislocation, and shoulder surgery, immediately preceding the pandemic, plus the pandemic itself, took BJJ away from me and I am miserable without it.

I miss rolling. I miss the art. I miss getting destroyed by upper belts who could seemingly read my mind, and yet were doing everything I could, just way better.

I can’t wait to get back.

I still suck at inversions though

bitexploder4• 5 years ago

I feel you. I’ve only been back on the mats for a few months. Don’t discount drilling and instructionals. I felt really sorry for myself for a while and then just started hitting instructional with all my learning skills and creating drills for myself, doing other drills I found. After being back on the mats, it took a couple months, but all that work really paid off. It was like I was a different player of the game once my cardio got where it needed to be and I refined the smaller details of what I had been working on over the pandemic. But man was it hard, working that way for 6+ months with no clear indication of when there would be Jiu Jitsu again. I am 41… I only invert for very specific guard retention scenarios. I don’t think you have to ever be particularly good with inverting to play a full game that is your own :)

SamBam2• 5 years ago

I understand where you're coming from, having experienced nearly the exact same thing until returning about six weeks ago.

I will warn you, though: BJJ may not be a cure for the depression you may or may not be in right now. I realized I was putting BJJ up on a pedestal during the depression, thinking "If only I could do that again, things would be looking much brighter." It turns out returning was great, and I love being back, but it in and of itself is not life therapy.

mrjivraj• 5 years ago

It's a similar paradox that today's DTC brands face, especially those selling digital products or consulting services. They usually have to give away a lot of IP upfront...for free.

literallyaduck• 5 years ago

I want him as juror on the M$ copilot trials.

naasking2• 5 years ago

It's interesting, because I always thought Neo's fight scene with Agent Smith in the underground had some parallels/callbacks to Jet Li's Fist of Legend.

5cott02• 5 years ago

the matrix and fist of legend were both choreographed by the legendary Yuen Wo Ping. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuen_Woo-ping

5cott02• 5 years ago

Li also turned down the role of Li Mu Bai in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon which is arguably more of a loss to cinema but that was to support his wife during pregnancy.

imbnwa3• 5 years ago

TBF Chow Yun-Fat is 10x the actor that Jet Li is (and Li, 10x the martial artist especially alongside Michelle Yeoh) and that role required extreme subtlety to depict his unavowed, unrequited love for Yu Shu-Lien which is a big part of the movie.

If I'm Ang Lee I'm OK taking the acting over the athletic prowess.

baby2• 5 years ago

Yeah I can't imagine Jet Li in that role, he's not the best actor.

Razengan2• 5 years ago

Man, loved that movie, and the nostalgia of the era that its memory invokes. :)

Shame the sequel kills him offscreen.

lai• 5 years ago

I'm glad I'm not the only one that thinks that Keanu's fighting choreography performance needs work. He's stiff af.

(I'm referring to the commentary on the Seraph fight gif in the article)

rramadass• 5 years ago

Perfectly justified reason;

“I realized the Americans wanted me to film for three months but be with the crew for nine. And for six months, they wanted to record and copy all my moves into a digital library.” He added, “By the end of the recording, the right to these moves would go to them.”

bradgranath• 5 years ago

Jet Li has the weirdest publicist.

Jet Li rejected The Matrix as he didn’t want his kung fu moves recorded (2018)

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