Comfortably sitting in a wooden chair, martial arts actor and film director Donnie Yen is snubbing Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. To him, the 2002 Oscar-winning kung fu flick is "a little bit boring."

Why?

"I think ... the pace is slow," he says.

It's a little cocky, but that's OK. Keep in mind that this critique is coming from the man who is arguably the most successful martial arts actor yet to blow up in America. But given his work over the past four years, that may be about to change.

In 2001, he co-starred in Iron Monkey. Two years later he drew more attention by appearing alongside Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson in Shanghai Knights. Working off-camera, he also choreographed the fights for Blade II.

Hero, his most recent work, opened in the United States last Thursday. The Hong Kong-produced film, initially released in 2002, is not only the highest-grossing motion picture in Chinese history, but is also a who's who of Eastern action cinema.

Opposite a Hero

In the film, Yen co-starred with Jet Li, Hollywood's most accomplished martial arts actor. The duo had worked together in 1992 in Once Upon a Time in China 2.

In Once Upon a Time, the pair's dynamic proved to be explosive. Yen testifies the film created a standard for all martial arts films - both Western and Asian.

When Hero came along about a decade later, Li and Yen had become well-seasoned action actors as well as personal friends.

"It's more of a collaboration than a competition [between us now,]" Yen says.

Yen only takes part in one of Hero's scenes, but he says he thought the opportunity was pure gold.

"The screen time doesn't matter, it's the importance of the role [that does,]" he says.

Yen makes it clear that in his scene he wasn't attempting to top everything they had done together in the past.

"We didn't want to just make a great martial arts scene," he says. "We wanted to make the greatest martial arts scene."

Surprisingly, traditional martial arts doesn't factor too heavily into Hero.

"If you look at the scene between Jet and I," Yen says, "It has the only martial arts elements in the film. If you look at the rest of the [fights] there's a lot of flying and not a lot of martial arts."

Recording time for the scene where they roughed it out against each other was 21 days. Yen says that during the shoot for his scene, they took their time. He says they would step back and go: "You know what? What can we do to make it better? No. To make it perfect?"

A Chinese in America

Yen and Li's collaboration was just part of Hero's list of big names. In order for the flick to be distributed in the United States two years after its initial release, Quentin Tarantino endorsed the film along with Miramax.

"It's better late than never, that's for sure," Yen says.

But a two-year wait for Hero was nothing for Yen. Iron Monkey took almost nine years to make it across the Pacific.

Still, the heavy presence of martial arts in American pop culture represents light years of progress since the glory days of Yen's idol, Bruce Lee.

"I Think Bruce Lee was an idol for most every one of us," he says talking about Asian-American superstars like himself, Li, or Chan.

Bruce Lee, the quintessential martial arts actor, was a rarity in America throughout the 1970s when police-drama shows dominated the airwaves and the silver screens. Naturally, he was a role model for Yen, who was born in China but spent his adolescence in Boston. "He's the only role model I had as a Chinese American," he says. "I needed sort of a figure ... a direction of where I wanted to be."

Yuen Wo Ping, winning choreographer of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and later on his mentor, had been looking for the next Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan when he discovered Yen in the early 1980s.

He would have had to have been rather articulate with his art in order to be considered a prodigy at such a young age - he was merely 19 when he played his first feature starring role in a film.

"As I was growing up, I found myself not only as a talented martial artist, but as one of the best," says Yen, whose mother became a prominent Tai Chi instructor when his family moved to America in 1974.

Now based out of New York and Los Angeles, Yen sees many possibilities for his career and those of other Asian-Americans.

"The world is shifting," he says. "I think if people come to see you, it's because they like you. Not because of your race."

"I chose my projects," he says. "[Hero] is the type of project that satisfies me. It's about satisfaction. I'm not looking for the perfect role ... I would never imagine something like this would happen so soon."

source : THE DIAMONDBACK