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

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

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181 pointsdanso223 comments

'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.

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.

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

skynet won't even need a war, it will defeat our mindpower beforehand.

Not with a bang, but with a whimper, huh?

Rage against the dying of the light, my friend.

Unless... we were already defeated and live in a simulation. There was a movie about it not so long ago... :)

My employees weren’t born when Matrix was in theaters…

skynet never needed a war. Why wouldn't a superhuman AI be capable of outsmarting and manipulating humans?

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.

> Making what irrelevant?

why try to make your body into a super-efficient machine if robots are out of your league, can one exist if he's doomed to be beaten ? maybe it will cause a healthy shift in focus and appreciation about what we try to do (people may still try to reach their full potential even if it will stop being best absolute performance, but only best 'human' performance').

Computers beat humans at chess, but players are still trying to become good at chess.

Cars can travel faster than humans and horses, yet we still have running competitions and horse races.

> Cars can travel faster than humans and horses, yet we still have running competitions and horse races.

I don't know why we still have (or broadcast) running competitions.

how do toi build a robot that executes Kung fu if you have no data points about how the body should move and behave? You'd still need to record an actual human performing them if you want to build a robot that could emulate that.

That's not a great joy and is what jet mi complained about, you're used to be beaten and replaced. It's a poor prognosis.

> why try to make your body into a super-efficient machine if robots are out of your league, can one exist if he's doomed to be beaten ?

Any couch potato can shoot even the best martial art master dead with widely available cheap tools and a few weeks worth of training. And this is not even a new phenomenay. All practicioners alive today were born into this. Doesn’t seem to have stopped them from practicing.

Practicing martial arts leads to much more than being able to perform cool moves. I practice tai chi and I can tell you that my teacher do things you can hardly believe without moving his body much. Using a combination of breathing, accurate movements, he can push you meters away. Really cool. Takes at least dozens of years of intensive training to reach that level. He compares that to training playing piano for international level competitions (such as Concours Reine Elizabeth).

> Any couch potato can shoot even the best martial art master dead with widely available cheap tools

Gun, it's zero effort maximum damage

I second this but it's not even about being the best of humans. At least 90% of amateur cyclists are out of my league and yet I insist to go cycling, because I like it.

Cycling is a very interesting example. Cycling was crazy huge for a while when it was the fastest form of individual travel (only trains were faster) and many people moved on when the internal combustion engine became practical. But the subset of the appeal that remained despite engines has been rather stable ever since.

I think the lack of a stable is part of the appeal, most people don't have anywhere to put a horse.

Many apartment dwellers find even storing a bicycle to be at best a hassle, at worst almost impossible.

Horses must be fed even when you don't ride them. Cars and bicycles stay where you left them and don't ask for anything. But I won't leave a bicycle parked on a street for a week.

Horses outrun moderately trained cyclists only for a very short distance, on longer distances they fall behind runners. The main benefit of a horse is that you can carry more stuff with you.

In some places it's faster than a car, due to 1) the sheer volume of cars meaning that any driver will be stuck in traffic and 2) it being way easier to find parking for a bicycle than a car. I live in a city where this is often true.

That said, maybe the appeal that's remained since has been relatively stable overall, but locally it varies a lot depending on the cycling infrastructure that's available. More people ride when they feel safe doing so.

When I used to ride my bike to work, I literally turned a 45-minute drive into a 10-minute ride. Unfortunately, the weather in Illinois sucks so I couldn't do it year-round.

That's not what made people love bikes in that one short time window in the 19th century. It was the fastest thing, period. Bugatti Veyron fastest if you like. Hence the collapse when that ceased to be true. Even horses will outrun a trained cyclist only for very short distances (on longer distances it's roughly a tie even for runners)

>It was the fastest thing, period

A steam locomotive was claimed to go 112 mph in 1893, during the craze for "safety bicycles".

Even as early as 1829, a steam locomotive went almost 30 mph.

That's why I wrote "individual travel" in my original post. The core of what I was getting at is that for many of those fascinated with the bicycle at that time the human powered aspect simply wasn't part of why they loved it. They moved on to e.g. motorcycles as if it was just the next stage of the same thing. Or directly to aviation, as a certain pair of brothers who ran a bike shop did, not before contributing a design tweak to bicycle technology that's still present, unchanged, in almost every bike available today including for example those that were used to win this year's Tour de France (and most likely every iteration before).

The bearings as described in the UPGRADES section at https://wright-brothers.org/Information_Desk/Just_the_Facts/... ?

Actually I was referring to the pedal thread thing that's an amazing improvement over the hassle pedals would be if they were both right-handed. And those pedal threads are still in use with far less change than their bearing innovations. There have been competing thread standards since then (all using that improvement), but much less than in any other place on the bike. Chances are that you could install the latest clipless carbon powermeter pedals (featuring 64MHz Cortex-M4s) on many pre-war bikes, from back when world wars didn't have an episode number. And they'd just work.

why run when you can drive… you’ll never outrun a car

unless you run into a forest, a beach, a building, between buildings, jump down from a bridge onto an embankment...

Now that walking robots are a reality, I'm anticipating when someone produces a set of bolt on legs for a Jeep, for real all terrain capability.

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.

This seems to be true for any endeavor worth putting time into. I like that programming has a big built-in filter; if you don't get enjoyment from solving hard problems, the frustration and technical difficulty of it will force you out pretty quickly. So most of the people that have been doing it for a few years really love it and are always looking to improve their craft.

Some people do get into programming for the money, but you can spot them a mile away.

I respect that you didn't get into programming for money, but many of us do, including myself. Programming for me was a way to escape growing up in poverty, it was a way to gain financial independence and start a business of my own in an area that has almost no barriers to entry. I started an HFT firm and in order to compete I have to hire some of the most technically sophisticated people I can find. I am fairly confident that many of them are highly motivated by money just as I am and that being able to put to use their skill to provide for themselves an incredibly high standard of living motivates them a lot more than if their skill had little to no means of providing them with a great paycheck.

Certainly there are interesting aspects to programming, but there are interesting aspects to a variety of different subjects and I don't know that programming is intrinsically more fascinating than music, or psychology, or history. What makes programming stand out at this particular moment is the massive amount of economic potential it has.

I think what makes programming stand out and have economic potential is how much of an amplifying effect it can have on all the other fields you listed.

I wanted to use programming as an example because it is what I am familiar with. I am not trying to say that if you are in for the money you will have a bad time, that money is evil and all of that. What I am trying to illustrate is that monetary gain in itself is not enough to sustain any sort of artistic expression, and this is why pure artificial emulation of the activity is not enough to kill it, in my opinion.

This is not to say that art has no value in escaping reality, poverty being one facet of reality. In a sense, art is the only valid escape from reality, the only form of expression that can truly shape and transform what we know.

For whatever reason other than money we got into programming, it's likely not the reason we are still in the field. Jobs suck the joy out of it. The money hasn't been very good for me either.

> 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.

No offense: but spoken like someone who has made enough money from something they enjoy to imply they'd do it without money. If you were working 12 hours a day in multiple minimum wage jobs I think you'd find your desire to program in your spare time quickly vanishing.

> No offense: but spoken like someone who has made enough money from something they enjoy to imply they'd do it without money.

You'd have a point if he said he loved working minimum wage jobs that weren't programming, but he didn't - so you don't.

This is very relevant. I believe we have to evolve as society and start talking about universal minimum income before we can move to talk about true dedication to art.

If I had to grind away for hours maybe I wouldn't have the energy to evolve in creative areas. This speaks more against big capital and normalized poverty than my comment though.

Edit: I wanted to go and say that I am aware of my privileges. I had time in my childhood to study, did minimal work with my parents, went to a military school and then, with the better education, I got to go to college, which in Brazil is free if you pass the tests. I have some merit in this, but mostly it was due to circumstance. I have to believe, however, that true art transcends all these social barriers.

So someone else has to sacrifice their hard work to provide you with a means to indulge your creativity without monetary concerns. This apparently is an 'evolution' of society, and not just another variation of an economic model thats existed for centuries.

Firstly, exercising creativity is not an indulgement, it is a necessity. Just like you are not indulging yourself by drinking water or going to the toilet.

Secondly, lower class already sacrifices their hard work to indulge big corporations without societal concerns. Just like those workers in Fritto Lays that work for 12 hours a day, 7 days a week.

I am not talking about taking an even larger cut from their labor and give it to someone else to sit idly. I am talking about creating the means so that people can improve themselves if they want to without worrying about not eating or feeding their families the next day.

Or you think it is ok to lock people into those inhumane conditions? If people had the possibility to leave work and seek better conditions, big corps would think twice before overworking and underpaying their employees.

See the problem with your entire argument is you have bolted on socialism to the current capitalist environment. It doesn't work like that, socialism doesn't afford the opportunity for big corps to exist and the money you wish to take for merely performing a creative task will be from your fellow workers. Likewise, there is no incentive to nurture creativity in an environment that does not reward it.

Could you please refer to where I talk about socialism? I don't seem to recall ever referencing it. On a similar note, do you need socialism to begin talking about tending to the wellbeing of the population?

> We all do it for the sake of doing it, because it feels good to do it, to learn, to overcome, to achieve.

Speak for yourself - but I do it because I’m on the spectrum and nothing else interests or motivates me.

> 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.

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.

We're already there.

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.

The 6th grade robotic team I coach built from that example this year.

Note that this just comes up with coordinates in the 2D image for body parts. And that there's a lot of error and noise, so it's a long way from those list of points to a 3D kinematics model. But a tracking filter and linear algebra would get you a fair bit of the way there.

> Not only are we already there

We're not.

There are basic experiment that demonstrate it's feasible, but there isn't such a system in production today.

That being said, you are probably correct in that it's likely around the corner and my estimate was overly generous.

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

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

"Intellectual property" means corporations owning the products of human minds, often to the detriment of the humans themselves. That's actually a perfect analogy for the plot of The Matrix.

Neo learns martial arts in seconds from digitalized records. Not discussing intellectual property, but introducing a scenario that justifies Li’s worries.

I bet that they told him: you’re a computer freak on the movie, but once you left the Matrix you became a martial artist by… and then Li though: WOW! An all my training??

For all we know he is learning public domain material that is freely available to anyone.

In the first movie we see very little of how real world society works but in the sequels other than the threat of the Machines things don't look particularly dystopian. In reality we'd probably end up with something much more oppressive under those circumstances.

Jet Li isn’t in the movie, I’m not discussing Matrix Universe. Just guessing how Li’s reaction might sprout from the movie plot.

But, even though, can’t see how we can relate Neo’s learning to public domain material. Recordings of public activities it’s not necessarily public domain stuff.

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

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

Because he might be one of those people where life didn’t hand him shit. In other words, he fought against competition at every step of the game, so he seriously considers the nature of competition and the implications.

It’s like a rich person that grew up poor, they are constantly saving money. Of course they don’t really have to at this point, but that was their experience. All Jet Li might know is competition (just off the top of my head, he is under the shadow of Bruce Lee, similar to Jackie Chan, and the whole Hong Kong scene is second to America).

He respects his experience.

> It’s like a rich person that grew up poor, they are constantly saving money. Of course they don’t really have to at this point, but that was their experience.

Is the implication that people don't learn new things from new situations/environments and are forever stuck modeling the world the way they did when they were young teenagers/adults?

People certainly learn new things, but habits are a real thing. It's a natural tendency to keep doing what you are already doing, sometimes even if there are terrible consequences. See cigarette addicts for an example.

> but habits are a real thing

I wouldn’t disagree, but I would question how widely applicable this is across cultures and socio-economic strata.

In particular it would be interesting to compare the commonly accepted folk wisdom (e.g. “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks”) with a more objective analysis (if such a thing exists).

Depends on how strong the systemic models were from the past. Thorough experience dealing with, say, people and how they interact competitively, will have a outsized reverberation later in life. You never ever want to be wrong about people.

A soda drinking habit you can’t kick? You’ll mostly kick it once you get serious. The other stuff is probably going to take life changing events to alter.

There are a ton of stories about incredibly successful people in the entertainment industry who end up bankrupt. Sure, that comes along with stories of wasting money. But it seems like the ones who make the most money are both lucky and really care about IP. I don't think Jet Li should ignore concerns about IP just because he's rich.

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.

I don't see how that is a problem. If a computer can do an equal or better job then it makes little sense to keep such a heap of actors around. "real" actors in movies should then just become a curiosity just like still see horse carriages around as curiosity.

It's a problem if you are an actor.

Then they have to find something else to do. Just like the myriad of other jobs that are redundant because of innovation.

horse carriages are seldom the protagonist of any movie, you realize...

I don't understand what you are getting at. If you mean horse carriages are not people. You are right. But the "drivers" of horse carriages were.

It the computer can do a better job, but can only do that by exploiting your work as training data, then it’s not the same thing.

Why? The actors were paid for that training data.

I would negotiate a different contract, depending on how my work would be used. Being paid is only half the story. Like software licenses: you can use this for free if you release your own code as GPL, but we’ll come to a different agreement if you want to use it differently. Different terms for different use cases.

I agree. But afaik most contracts in the acting industry make the footage of the actor completely owned by the employer.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see that change at some point. There was no reason to exclude impossible uses in the contracts, but as those uses become possible, people will probably want to have provisions that they share in the fruits of their own labor.

Since a lot of these new uses seem to be ‘fair use,’ it might require changes to IP law.

You need physical actors because you need someone relatable for the audience. Despite experiments like Tamagoshi, showing that computers can provide occupation of mind, I believe love can still only be provided by humans, no matter how faulty they are.

Pixar doesn’t show physical actors.

Whether they show their faces or not is by the by. The parts are played by actors (and animators).

Do you know the animator or animators of, say, Frozen? Would you even notice if they switched that to another animator?

Compare this to an actor. People often decide to view or not view a movie based on the actors on it.

Sofia and Hatsune Miku have shown that you can have a relatable, non-human persona. Combined with the K-pop model/marketing machinery and performance capture by replaceable gig-work session actors/contractors, I can easily see a host of virtual performers who are celebrities in their own right, but with Jet Li's martial art prowess as part of their library, and fully owned by corporations.

What's not to like, no ever-increasing salary demands, multiple scenes with the same "actors" can be filmed simultaneously, the celebrity never ages, and the non-celebrity human performers behind the scenes are easily replaceable cogs: there will be huge cost savings.

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.

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.

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.

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.

https://youtu.be/ouxYTQ_UuIw

OR NFT ?

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.

> 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.

I appreciated the second 2 more on 2nd, maybe 3rd watch. They were much cleverer, but worse as entertainment.

Also the secret to happiness is low expectations, and I never walked into a movie theatre with higher expectations than I did for Matrix 2.

Same, on both points.

Matrix 2 was a cliffhanger leading to a letdown, but I loved the many little worldbuilding elements (like The Merovingian etc.)

The thing I struggled with on first watch was knowing how important events are. If this person dies or this person is caught, how good / bad is that?

In the first film every character motivation is crystal clear, every character change is obvious and massive and compelling.

I still get a tingle at the exact point where Neo wraps the rope around his arm and decides he’s going to catch a helicopter to save Trinity.

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

And yet he got to see that day anyway

Sequels?

?:-^

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

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.

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

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

I don't fear the person training 10,000 facial expressions. I fear the person training one expression 10,000 times.

Whoa!

Blue steel.

Bruce Lee ?

In zoolander, a model develops a facial expression so beautiful it can stop thrown weapons in midair. It's the only expression he ever does. He calls it blue steel. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=D519hT7-ytY

Wasn't that Ben Affleck?

Ryan Gosling.

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

As per github copilot that isn't an issue at all.

LLAAS: licence laundering as a service

that's about 1M Pattinsons

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).

It's up to others to downvote this drivel. I hate to see HN go down the toilet and become another reddit.

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

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

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.

Yeah, must be pure luck

This is explored in "The Congress" quite thoroughly

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?

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

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

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

They have great fight scenes though, and I would still enjoy a re-watch. I just think about them as fan fictions and not the real sequels of Matrix.

They were ambitious attempts to build a mythic world but fell short- but they also work as nice early 2000s time capsules the same way the original film is a time capsule of the year 1999.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Shame the sequel kills him offscreen.

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.”

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.

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.

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 :)

no, i've heard it said the other way... every N pounds is as if they had an additional belt

Both can be true. (I'm a purple belt and have experienced both sides.)

Right, it's just to point out that you learn how to better control your partner and apply leverage. How to use pins and wedges to block hips and such, etc. The net effect is someone that easily gives up 30 lbs on you that has really good technique can feel impossibly heavy. Then you can roll with a big white belt and move them around all day and feel safe doing it :)

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.

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.

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

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 :)

Yeah, tbh, the lack of anything was mostly depression through the pandemic, largely because I’m also an extrovert. Shit was hard.

I’m doing PT right now and then planning a return.

And yeah, the inversion thing was mostly a joke :) I prefer seeing things right-side up :)

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.

Yeah, that much I figured out - people are my solution to the depression. Seeing people regularly is what helps keep me happy; not even necessarily friends, though that helps significantly, but spontaneous interactions - the coffee shop, the grocery store, etc.

People are the most interesting things in the word.

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

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

The difference is they wanted to motion capture his moves in addition to the regular filing process.

Again, clearly I'm not tapped in to Hollywood like some here seem to be, but it wasn't clear to me how what he says there, "they wanted to record and copy all my moves into a digital library", was any different than what happened when he was in any other movie, say The One. Motion capture wasn't mentioned in the article at all, nor is it clear that other martial arts movies didn't/don't use it.

Motion Capture is about posture and body movement, captured as a 3d wireframe model. See here: https://study.com/academy/lesson/computer-animation-definiti...

That's completely different from capturing the image of an actor on a 2d video frame.

Thanks, but I understand what motion capture is.

Again, motion capture wasn't mentioned in the article, nor was it clear to me that even if that assumption is made that it isn't something commonly done in martial arts movies or limited to the Matrix movies.

It’s now basically done in every CGI enhanced movie - e.g. all Avenger movies, Maleficient and all modern Disney movies.

It wasn’t unheard of, but wasn’t yet common in the early 2000s when the Marrix sequels were made.

Also, Matrix has lots of Bullet Time rigs, which aren’t motion capture rigs, but we’re clearly usable even back then for some “transplanting” of recordings to another scene, much more so than regular shots.

Jet Li was extrapolating into the future, but not far into the future. It was already common and happening 10 years later.

Maybe not common, but The Fellowship Of The Ring (full motion capture and CGI for Gollum) was released in 2001, while The Matrix Reloaded was released in 2003.

I don't think Jet Li needed to extrapolate into the future at all.

Jet Li did motion capture for a video game within a year of the second Matrix release, so it wasn't the motion capture he was opposed to. Presumably it was Warner Bros' contract for him.

Giving up the IP in perpetuity is what would be different.

>He added, “By the end of the recording, the right to these moves would go to them.”

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.

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

I wonder what would-be actors are going to do at that point? Are they going to have to get normal jobs or what?

They’ll still use them for faces and maybe voices, do you need someone in the parade around.

It’ll be more like K-pop, with mall appearances.

Perhaps there's an interesting ML research project there. Get a voice actor to record a bunch of lines, with facial capture, and then see if the AI can produce the correct facial expressions for a line it hasn't heard before.

Then, take it a step further by trying to produce the voiced line from a sufficiently detailed narration and transcript. Obviously GPT-3 is close to being able to produce narrated stories, so that would give you a pipeline that turns a vague story idea into animated speaking faces.

Generating the movements of bodies and props might be harder, but I'm guessing that in some CGI movies for kids they don't have any human characters so they don't need to capture any actor's body movements or have any physical props or a stage at all.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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)

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?"

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

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

From one of the best movies ever made.

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.

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.

Jet Li has the weirdest publicist.

People believe that?

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

At least he was asked to opt in.

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

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?

> 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.

> 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?

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.

I could include an anti-GitHub clause in my open source project if I really wanted. But at any rate, if my project is open source, then haven't I said that using it a ML corpus is fine?

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

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

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.

wat

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

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

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

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 =)

The word for it when “acting” that way in real life is stoic.

If there is a term for a continual poker face in the theatre arts I would be interested to know it!

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

You haven't lived until you've seen Keanu take a shot at Shakespeare in Much Ado About Nothing

For me, it's Dracula.

I re-watched Dracula recently on Tubi, it was wonderfully bad. I remembered it being scary when I was a kid. I've yet to see Much Ado About Nothing, will check it out though.

Forgot all about that movie

Constantine

You might be thinking of the Kuleshov effect:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuleshov_effect

That was it! Thank you! I also remembered where I heard it since you gave me the name, it was from a Key and Peele episode and I believe they were actually talking about Keanu!

It was during one of the live audience scenes, still looking for it.

Found it! Key and Peele Season 2 Episode 7, but it was Ryan Gosling they were talking about.

Thanks again!

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

Clearly you missed his earliest masterpiece called "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure". Whoever says Keanu can't act hasn't done their research!

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.

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.

> 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...

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