And having those mystical elements you see in Asian cinema and certainly Asian martial arts cinema, it's something that we wanted to begin to introduce - the idea of spirituality and the idea of there being something else out in the world besides people who are great fighters.
Alfred GoughWe liked the idea that it was a low-tech future. But everything always repeats the past. If you look today and look at something in the middle east where you got people getting beheaded it's like the crusades with Twitter. It's crazy, human nature does the same thing. In a way, even though you're in the future people wanted order so this sort of system rose up.
Alfred GoughWe now live in a world both in film and television where everything is based on something. You point out, "Star Wars" was an original screenplay, "Raiders of the Lost Ark," an original screenplay, "Ghostbusters" an original screenplay, "Back to the Future." All these things that people love were original ideas many years ago.
Alfred GoughTo AMC's credit, I think what they saw was the show doesn't exist in the marketplace. They knew that there was a hunger for a martial arts show. They also knew that you have this strong tradition of martial arts cinema, so even though it's not branded by a novel or a comic book or an old movie or something, we do have the genre itself, which people love.
Alfred GoughMiles and I had been looking to do a martial arts show for some time. Our first two movies that we wrote were "Lethal Weapon 4" and "Shanghai Noon" with Jackie Chan. Then we sort of got pulled into the superhero world, but then you look around at what's not on television and there wasn't really a martial arts shows. There are shows that do martial arts to a degree, but there's not a martial arts show.
Alfred Gough