When I met Daniel Wu in mid-April, he showed me his legendary Tanto. It's not a the Japanese dagger, it's a restored Datsun 510. When he's not adding to his kill-count tattoos, Daniel restores vintage cars as a hobby. He showed me his latest project – a vintage Honda. Car restoration is a passion and a form of meditation for him.

It's been a rough ride for Daniel since the cancellation of his groundbreaking show, INTO THE BADLANDS. In March, he suffered a burst appendix on a skiing trip, an incident that nearly killed him. Undaunted, he was headed to the Hong Kong Film Awards right after our interview. There he rejoined his cast mates from the cult classic actioner Gen-X Cops (1999) to present an award and announce an upcoming third installment of the series for the 20th anniversary.

INTO THE BADLANDS has been an incredible journey. After covering it so extensively on KungFuMagazine.com and in Kung Fu Tai Chi, Daniel was quite candid for this interview.

GC: What will you miss the most from the Badlands?

DW: I miss a lot. I mean, it was a wild crazy ride. And if you think about it, it’s a crazy show, like it’s this mash-up of all these different things that you think may not work – or it just has to work perfectly to make it work. And I think over the three seasons, we figured this thing out. The second season was great. The third season was even better. It felt so good to get this thing rolling – get the machine going – and do a fourth season. So getting cancelled was a big bummer because I was looking forward to this new horizon of what we could do.

It was a very unique situation. They were filming in Ireland with Irish crews, British crews, American people, Italian people, Spanish people, Hong Kong people, Chinese people. Usually when you put all those people together and they have to work together, it doesn’t work because everyone’s just so different, right? But because it was so compartmentalized – like the Hong Kong Chinese guys did all the martial arts – it somehow worked together anyway. And it worked beautifully. And as a producer, looking out over the Kingdom, that production facility that you were at, seeing all the people – it was beautiful. I felt like a mayor of a town that I really liked living it, you know what I mean? In 20-something years of filmmaking, I’ve never seen that before. I worked on a movie in Japan with a Hong Kong crew and it was like Hong Kong and Japanese crews are fighting each other the whole time. It never worked. And to be able to do this in Ireland and have it work so well on screen and off screen, it’s very rare that that happens. I was just so proud of that. So I’m going to miss that the most.

I’m going to miss working with all those people – really talented people – nobody knew what the fuck they were getting into when they started this thing [laughs] but then they all figured it out and it was great. It was so beautiful. The cast and crew and everything – watching Ally [Ionnides] and Aramis [Knight] grow over five years of time, that was amazing. Looking back on pictures from Season 1, I can’t believe Aramis was that little. I mean he was a little kid. And so being there to mentor this group – it was all these things I never experienced because I did movies. You work on a movie for 3 to 6 months and then you’re done. It’s like summer camp – you don’t see those people again. Maybe once in a while you’d run into them on other projects, but you never get the band back together, right? Where this was like you kept getting the band back together again each season. And we just kept getting better and better as a band. That’s what I’m going to miss – this really great efficiency, this really great love that everyone had for each other on the set and just how it worked. It worked well. The writing team was in LA but we’d get the writing and we’d send back comments. Post production was in Toronto. So Al [Gough] and Miles [Millar] had to go to Toronto every couple of weeks – every episode we finished, Miles had to go down there and watch the editing. It was crazy to do it that way but it all worked. I’m going to miss how well this machine was working by the time we finished last season.

I’m going to miss all the actors. I’m not going to miss any of the politics that went on with the studio and I’m kind of glad we’re done with that because it was just horrible. I was dismayed about how they didn’t market the show. Merchandise – like there’s all this stuff they could’ve done. There were so many things that the fans wanted. And then the fact that we never went to a Comic-con. We went to Comic-con once before the show started when we were finishing filming it so no one knew what it was. But once it was aired, there were fans who wanted to go see us, but the only Comic things we’ve done were just this year – we went to C2E2 and Anaheim Wondercon. And it’s just like too little, too late. It was cool to see the fans; that’s why I went. But what were they thinking, especially since they spent $100 million dollars last season to do these 16 episodes – why wouldn’t you go the extra mile and market it so people see it. I get it now that it’s cancelled, but I find it weird that they’re having us do any promotion right now because it’s like dead in the water. And you still want us to promote it? Like why? You killed it. So all that, I have no idea what was in their minds the whole time. It was like that from Season 1 to now. So I’m glad we’re out of those waters, but I’ll really miss making the show.

GC: Attending a Comic-con was a first for you, right?

DW: Yea, C2E2 and Anaheim were great. I confronted a bunch of fans with a panel, talking about what they wanted to hear about, answering their questions. Also C2E2 was the first time I watched the show with a crowd. So we watched Episode 9 with the audience and to hear where they were laughing – you know for me, I see the rough edits on the computer and that’s by myself, you know? Then I watch the final episode when it’s on air with my wife. That’s not really an audience. We’re not laughing, whatever. But they’re laughing at everything Bajie says, so it’s great. And then the fights – the oohing and awwwing – it just pumped you up. All that work was worth it because this is what people are doing when they are watching the show. They’re having these crazy reactions and it was cool to see that. So I really liked it. I was sad that we didn’t have more interaction with the fans, like I tried to sign posters and stuff and the guy like screamed at me. "There will be NO autographs!" Because they wanted the next panel to come in so I saw some fans crying and it was sad.

GC: Since the show was cancelled, the fans have rallied with a #SaveIntoTheBadlands campaign. How do you feel about that?

DW: It’s amazing. I’m super touched by it. It might work. It may not. I don’t know what channel would want to take it on. I know for a fact that we’ve shopped it to a couple other places like Netflix and Hulu and all that stuff, and we’ve been politely turned down just because they have their own content now. Netflix has Wu Assassins coming up with Lewis [Tan]. And it’s ironic because we started this trend and now were getting rejected because everyone else is doing something.

GC: Right? In the wake of Badlands, there’s Wu Assassins on Netflix, Warrior on Cinemax and the Kung Fu reboot on Fox, and they’re all kind of set in San Francisco Chinatown. Being a Bay Area native, what do you think about that?

DW: I like it but I feel that everyone’s just scratching at "What kind of Chinese material can we find? Oh yeah, San Francisco Chinatown!" That’s the easiest. It’s like low-hanging fruit. It’s not creative enough. When we were asked to do Badlands, the original idea was to do a remake of Kung Fu. And I was like, "Nah, let’s not do that." That show was cool because it introduced America to Shaolin and that philosophy but the fighting was terrible. Watching David Carradine fight in slow motion when it was shot in regular speed was weird to me.

The old west thing is played out to me. We’ve done that already, Shanghai Knights, Shanghai Noon, and I was like "Nah, I’m not really into it." I mean, I think it’s important to tell that history because I think a lot of Americans don’t understand Chinese-American history. But that’s not what Warrior is about. It’s not about Chinese-American history. It’s a cool gangster show set in San Francisco Chinatown.

It’s ironic that they’re filming it in South Africa though, where there’s no Chinese people. When I was doing Tomb Raider, they had to ship in Asian extras from Johannesburg because there’s none in Cape Town. And there weren’t any "real" Chinese people so they got the Cape Malays which are descendants of the Malaysian sailors, so they kind of like that Malay look which is Asian and Indian mix. So we had those guys faking to be Japanese and Chinese.

My good friend Jason Tobin is on Warrior. And from what I’ve heard, it’s a great show, so I’m happy for them. But I think all this is happening because there was no martial arts on TV before we started and now there’s like three others. It’s cool that we started this trend and in some ways I’m secretly proud that we’re going to be that cult hit that no one ever saw but will eventually see at some point, like Firefly or those kind of shows.

 

GC: I was thinking about how Firefly got closure after being cancelled with Serenity. Could you see something like that for Badlands?

DW: I would prefer doing a movie because it’s much more handle-able in terms of scale. You know, there would only be like four or five fights, right? We could handle that. You know the period is like three-four-five months that we’re shooting and that’s it. Whereas a show – like nine months in Ireland in the winter, that was rough. That was like one of the hardest experiences of my life. And I’ve done over sixty-something movies. That was one of the toughest experiences. I don’t even know how everyone got through it. The whole time I was like, "This is bad." Nine months – people are going to start breaking down, and did. January and February comes around and people are starting to have emotional breakdowns – actors and crew members. I see it happening and then finally it happened to me. Not an emotional breakdown but I got sick near the end. I’m glad not to have to do nine months again. Actually when we finished the season, all the executive producers agreed that it was a mistake and that we’d never do it that way again. It’s just too much to handle at once. But a movie, you can deal with it much more easily. It’s much more contained. So I think a movie can be possible. It’s just that AMC owns the rights to this whole thing so any move we do has to have their permission. We’ll see if they want to do something like that.

GC: During the two set visits AMC brought me out for, I fell in love with Dublin. I really enjoyed Season 3 Episode 13 because it showed off Dublin with the scenes in the Kilmainham Gaol (jail) and Trinity College Long Room Library.

DW: The Library – only two movies have been able to film in there so we’re the third crew to ever film in there. That was amazing. I was surprised they loaned us those places. And the Jail was very cool. We shot the shit out of Dublin for those two years we were there. I loved it. Dublin was amazing. Ireland was amazing. The people there are great. It’s a great place to film and I’d love to go back there again. And the tax credit obviously helps in a big way. It’s a great town. It’s safe. And the filming, the kind of looks you can get with just a half-hour drive anywhere is amazing. That really changed the show for us. You see Season 1 and Season 2 and it’s a completely different look. Just cinematic. We could really go for wide shots, like a movie instead of a TV show. With New Orleans, there was power lines and modernity everywhere, right? So you could really only shoot small. And also so many film crews have filmed in New Orleans that a lot of it is recognizable. The Django house, that was Quinn’s house.

 

GC: Any regrets?

DW: I think we could have explored about how the world got that way a little bit more. They didn’t want to talk about it but we hinted at so many things. Like there’s a wall. The socio-political aspect of post-apocalyptic and sci-fi could’ve been stronger – the subtext. But I think Al and Miles were a little bit scared to go there. But I think it would’ve been nice to see that. That’s why I like watching post-apocalyptic stuff because it’s a comment on society today. It’s a warning for today.

GC: I recall Al saying he wanted the world to be beautiful.

You want to look different than Mad Max. But it’s like explain why it’s that way. Explain why there’s no guns. Also the aesthetic choices we make about the cars. We had a manifesto which never got talked about in the show which was no car could be earlier than the '70s because everything post-that has computer chips and if you have no ability to work on a computer, anything with a computer chip is not going to run. Modern-day cars like 20 years from now are not going to run because the technology is going to be dated. So if you have no way to reprogram those chips, you can't use the car. So if you notice, all the cars are like war vehicles or like '70s muscle cars, anything like that – maybe a couple of other things that we snuck in there because we had no choice, but generally speaking, we kept to that rule. Anything that existed 200 years later has to be something you can work on and make parts for, so kind of like what has happened in Cuba. There's all 1950s Chevys driving around because they're not allowed to import cars. So what they've done is machined their own parts to keep these things going for 50 years, right? And that was kind of the inspiration for that part of the vehicle design. Cuba. They aren't allowed to import anything new so they have to make do with what they have. They just up-cycle recycle cars, right? That was the idea on Badlands, cars that were kept from so many years before.

There was a lot into it. There was a lot into all this stuff that we didn't get to talk about. I guess you don't need to, but the fans want to hear that shit, you know what I mean? When you're world-building, you have to think about all those things.

GC: I loved that the Badlands world was derived from Journey to the West and kept giving nods like Iron Fan in Season 3.

DW: I think we went too heavy in the beginning in saying that this is a Journey to the West thing, because it's not meant to be a direct translation. It was always meant to be our spiritual guide. In the Journey to the West, all those challenges, all those demons that they fight and all that stuff, is a pathway to spiritual awakening. Because by the end of that journey, Monkey King wakes up. He becomes enlightened. All these fights that Sunny's getting into, or M.K. or whatever, are challenging their spirit, their inner soul, so they come out of it changed. And that was the point of Journey to the West – these things meant to be there. All those adversities that they were encountering were part of that whole journey and so it was instilling change in Monkey King himself. That is what we were trying to keep in Badlands – none of the details of it but the spirit of it. We kept the Bajie name, and M.K. and me, Sunny, but it was not meant to be literal. It was metaphorical.

Stay tuned for the finale of INTO THE BADLANDS, as well as Part 2 of this interview, "Daniel Wu on the Fight to the End," next Monday when that episode airs.