Jennifer Yuh Nelson Quotes

I do find violence entertaining, but that doesn't make me a bad person. I grew up watching all these action films when I was a kid. My dad would bring back 'Rambo' and whatever, and we'd watch it together. It's not affected me in any way other than I just appreciate the entertainment value of violence on film.

In the film industry, we tend to pick up where others have left off, and I'd like to think the influences I picked up from Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Sylvester Stallone and Jean-Claude Van Damme are visible in my work.

There is also a strong following among the urbanites on the East Coast when it comes to martial arts films.

My father was a big Bruce Lee fan. He's Chinese-Hawaiian, and my mother is Chinese. He used to take us to all these really fantastical films with martial arts in them. And Bruce Lee was amazing.

I love 'Enter the Dragon,' and I love Japanese movies. I love Jackie Chan movies; they are my heroes.

It's something that I am going over in my head about the whole video game thing, and whether you support violence by being in a film like this. I mean, to me, it's incredibly unreal and it's all about the action, and just explosions.

I never wanted to be the next Bruce Lee. I just wanted to be the first Jackie Chan.

'Pulp Fiction' was probably one of the first films I ever saw that really kind of took effect on me. I was about four years old - obviously wasn't supposed to be seeing that film; my sister kind of sneaked it out and we got to see it. She's older than me. That was something I always used to watch.

I've always wanted to do action and action movies. I grew up on that.

To make a kung fu film is like a dream come true, because I'm a big fan of kung fu movies and I'm learning kung fu for a long time.

When I was a kid, I wasn't looking at the small-budget films myself. I was looking at 'James Bond' and all the major films, so I still have that energy. I still love those films.

I grew up with action movies in my head.

The first movie my dad ever showed me was 'Predator' - I was five. And I think the second one was 'Jaws.'

When I was growing up, I used to watch 'Power Rangers' and 'Ninja Turtles.' It seemed like every movie had someone doing martial arts in it, so I would go around punching and kicking trees.

I'm a great consumer of kung-fu movies - mid-'70s to late-'80s.

As a very small girl, I listened to Charlie Parker and loved him and Max Roach and people like that.

When I was eight or nine years old, my older cousin took me to the St. George Theatre on Staten Island to see a Bruce Lee movie and a Jim Kelly movie. Those were my first martial-arts films, and I fell in love with the genre back then.

I remember going to pre-school, you know, rolling out in the Suburban and my dad bumping all types of rap, so he introduced me to it and from there I just loved it ever since.

I used to love martial arts movies starring Bruce Lee and Jean Claude Van Damme. In one of Van Damme's movies, he would break a pine tree. I would kick banana trees because I used to live on a farm. My father would get mad at me because I would break all of the banana trees around.

I particularly relate to the films of Mikio Naruse and Shinichi Kamoshita, a person whose work I watched very much as a child, a director of family dramas for television.

I know that I loved music before I loved movies, simply because I didn't see movies as a kid.

I've begun to appreciate the generational patterns that ripple out from our lives like stones dropped in water, pulsing outward even after we are gone. Although we have but one childhood, we relive it first through our children's and then our grandchildren's eyes.

I think Sin City is a good example. Nobody would accuse Sin City of being historically inaccurate because it takes place in modern times.

The genre of '80s action movies, I think, changed really when The Matrix came out and Keanu Reeves was able to perform kung fu. Then you had Matt Damon in the Bourne films, doing a great job. So it's different now, they can train actors to do their own fights convincingly on screen, so those guys aren't needed anymore. But I think everything goes around in circles; people still do want to see the guys that can do stuff for real, that's why The Expendables is so popular. I think it will come back again.

I arrived on earth in 1928. Born into a milieu of painters, I acquired my taste for painting with my mother's milk.