Exclusive Interview | Behind Spider-Man, There Is a Chinese Filmmaker Designing “Danger” in Hollywood
Spider-Man: Brand New Day has exploded at the box office!
On its first day of release in mainland China, the film took in RMB 237 million. The film only premiered in North America on Friday, and given its excellent presale numbers, foreign media predict that its opening weekend box office could exceed USD 300 million, and may even challenge Avengers: Endgame’s North American opening record of USD 358 million.
What you may not know is that behind this film, which has been embraced by movie fans around the world, there is also a contribution from Chinese filmmakers. Peng Zhang, who served as fight coordinator on Shang-Chi, once again collaborated with director Destin Daniel Cretton, serving as stunt coordinator and second unit director on Spider-Man: Brand New Day.
When “Tom Holland” came to China to promote the film, he made a special point of thanking the Chinese team for their training and help.
In 2025, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that, starting with the 100th Academy Awards, it would officially establish an award for Achievement in Stunt Design. This decision means that stunt creation, which has long performed a crucial function within the film industry while remaining outside the mainstream awards system, has finally received a belated form of institutional recognition.
Looking back over more than a century of film history, action and stunts have always been among cinema’s most direct and visually entertaining elements. From the physical risks of the silent-film era to car chases, explosions, high falls, and precisely choreographed street battles in the modern industrial system, stunts have not only defined the rhythm and tension of genre films, but have also been an important reason audiences walk into movie theaters.
Yet compared with departments such as cinematography, editing, and production design, stunt creation has long lacked clear crediting standards and an independent evaluation system. Audiences may remember a fight scene in which every punch feels real, but few know who designed it, or how it was brought to the screen safely and precisely.
Even less widely known is that, in this long “invisible” field, Chinese creators have never been absent. From the profound influence of Hong Kong action aesthetics on Hollywood, to wave after wave of Chinese action performers, martial arts choreographers, and even second unit directors entering the Western mainstream industrial system, Chinese creators have not only participated in the internal construction of the action genre; they have also, in many films that seem unrelated to “Chinese kung fu,” subtly influenced and redefined the expression of Hollywood action cinema.
This time, I had the honor of visiting one of the most representative Chinese creators in today’s Hollywood stunt field: Peng Zhang.
To most audiences, the name Peng Zhang may not be familiar. But if you open his résumé, titles such as The Last Samurai, X-Men: The Last Stand, Kick-Ass, Ant-Man, Shang-Chi, Kingsman, Karate Kid: Legends, and Spider-Man: Brand New Day are enough to trace his career path.
Compared with those dazzling works, Zhang himself is unusually low-key and approachable. He has little interest in publicity built around personal fame. What he would rather discuss is how an action scene is designed from nothing into existence; what the position often broadly translated in Chinese as “action director” actually means within Hollywood’s highly specialized industrial system; and how a Chinese creator crosses the multiple boundaries of language, culture, and industry rules, slowly finding a solid place for himself.
01. Why a Stunt Coordinator Is Not an “Action Director”
To understand Peng Zhang’s work, we first need to clarify several English job titles that are easily confused in Chinese translation.
In the Chinese-speaking world, people are used to grouping Stunt Coordinator, Fight Coordinator, and even Second Unit Director together under the terms “action choreographer” or “action director.” But within Hollywood’s industrial language, these positions are independent from one another and cannot be substituted for each other.
A Fight Coordinator is mainly responsible for “fighting”: the design and execution of close combat and martial arts scenes.
A Stunt Coordinator has a much broader scope of authority, covering fights, falls, car flips, fire stunts, high-altitude work, and all kinds of high-risk action. This person is the central coordinator for the execution and safety system of an entire action sequence.
A Second Unit Director, meanwhile, is responsible for the complete visual presentation of specific scenes. Especially when the main unit has no time to split off, the second unit director handles a large number of action scenes, chase sequences, or pickup shots, and is responsible for the final completion of those images.
Zhang points out in particular that, in the United States, these positions even belong to different unions. Stunt Coordinators fall under the actors’ union, SAG-AFTRA, while Second Unit Directors belong to the Directors Guild of America, the DGA. This means that, in Hollywood, action design and the final visual presentation of action are not naturally in the hands of the same person. The relatively unified and powerful concept of an “action director” familiar to Chinese audiences does not have a fully equivalent single position in Hollywood.
This also explains why the Academy’s new award for Achievement in Stunt Design may be a complex and delicate addition.
Under the current Hollywood crediting system, there is no common and stable opening-credit title called “Stunt Design” or “Action Design.” A great deal of action-related work is scattered across different positions and different unions, each with its own boundaries in credit order and industry understanding. Zhang sees this very clearly: it is of course a good thing that the Academy is willing to establish an award for Achievement in Stunt Design, but who exactly it will be awarded to, and how the specific scope of “design” will be defined, will remain a question that the entire industry needs to slowly work through.
02. From Moves to Images: A Visual Rehearsal Completed in Advance
Peng Zhang’s professional starting point was not very different from that of many Chinese action practitioners: he trained in martial arts from childhood, later studied at Beijing Sport University, and then entered the industry through stunt doubling and martial arts crew work. He says frankly that, at first, he did not see “film” as a clear dream career. It was simply that people who practiced martial arts had easier access to this line of work.
Unlike many action practitioners, Zhang was not content early on with simply “designing moves.” In his own words, from the beginning of his work as an action designer, he was already accustomed to “designing action through the camera.”
In his work, what he needs to think about goes far beyond whether a movement is beautiful or clean. It also includes how that movement will ultimately be transformed into an image on screen: how the camera should be placed, how rhythm should be organized, where the editing points should fall, and how the spatial relationship of the action can be effectively perceived by the audience.
Today, previs has become a routine part of action design for major films. But Zhang recalls that in earlier years, this was not the industry norm in the United States. Many action scenes still relied on the director, cinematographer, and action coordinator communicating verbally on set, shooting and adjusting along the way. Design depended more on verbal explanation than on visual preview.
Zhang’s approach was different. He would directly shoot the action sequence, edit it into a finished piece, even incorporate some post-production effects in advance, and then submit it in full to the director and cinematography team. His summary of this is plain: “Only this way can I fully express my design for the scene.” This method of “speaking through images” also allowed him to move very early from being simply an action coordinator into the functional territory of a second unit director.
On Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Zhang served as assistant stunt coordinator. According to his recollection, director Guillermo del Toro was one of the earlier creators who truly understood and accepted this way of working. “He had never seen anyone who needed to shoot a preview for him. I was the first. He put my preview on his computer and watched it himself: the next shot like this, this shot like that.” This way of working quickly earned trust and opened up broader creative space for Zhang.
When working with Edgar Wright on Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, his previs plan gave the entire crew a highly unified understanding and concept of the action scenes.
This efficient and complete control over action images was especially concrete during the filming of Karate Kid: Legends. For the fight scene in which the protagonist first arrives in a foreign country and is cornered in an alley by a group of delinquent youths, the budget gave him only one day. “One day. Either you shoot it very short and make do, but you can’t go over one day. That was the budget,” Zhang recalls. The final ring showdown of the film was also shot in only a day and a half.
Within the Hollywood industrial system, that schedule is almost harsh for a complete fight scene. But in the end, he completed action scenes that met the narrative requirements in an extremely short period of time. He did so not by compressing quality, but by precisely anticipating the relationship between action and camera in pre-production.
Looking back, this is an important dividing line in Zhang’s career path: he did not move from “knowing how to fight” to “knowing how to design.” Rather, from very early on, he placed himself at the intersection between action and cinematic language, constantly thinking about how the two could support each other.
03. Action Is Narrative: Fighting Beautifully Is Less Important Than Telling the Story Accurately
One of the most common misunderstandings about stunt coordinators is to see stunt scenes as displays of skill detached from narrative: as long as the moves are flashy enough, the rhythm fast enough, and the scale big enough, the job seems to be done. Zhang does not agree.
His view is direct: action and stunts should be part of cinematic storytelling. Every stunt needs to have meaning. Why do the characters fight here? Why do they fight in this way? Does the action fit the characters’ personalities, push the plot forward, and form an organic whole with cinematography, lighting, atmosphere, and even later visual effects? All of these require the stunt coordinator to work with the director to tell the story well through the stunts.
Once action is separated from story, even the most dazzling choreography is merely lively spectacle. Truly advanced action design must make the audience feel that it is “good to watch” while also believing more deeply in the characters and entering further into the story. Zhang believes that the standard for judging whether a stunt sequence is excellent should begin with the audience’s experience: Is it convincing? Does it have internal logic? Does it genuinely move the story forward? In other words, good action cannot merely be “self-indulgent.” It must serve the film itself. That is the core of a stunt coordinator’s work.
04. The Zhongshan Suit Hidden Inside the Western Suit: The Disadvantages and Advantages of Cultural Identity
When discussing Chinese identity, Zhang’s answer is especially candid. He does not believe that the label “Chinese” comes with an automatic advantage in Hollywood’s action industry. On the contrary, even when ability is equal, Chinese creators often need to put in more effort before they can compete for the same opportunities.
The most direct obstacle is language. In a system where English is the working language, the ability to express ideas quickly and precisely is itself an important part of professional competence. Many times, even if the direction of a scene is already clear in your mind, if you cannot communicate it accurately at the first moment, the opportunity may flow to someone who expresses themselves more fluently.
The second obstacle is cultural. Film discussions are never limited to technique. They frequently involve character relationships, religious backgrounds, and even subtle shared understandings of everyday life. For a Chinese person entering the Western mainstream industrial system, there are objectively more thresholds of understanding and communication to cross.
But Zhang does not leave the issue at the level of lamenting “disadvantages.” What he cares more about is how to turn what might originally be a disadvantage into a methodological advantage.
He particularly emphasizes that the truly valuable part of Chinese martial arts training is far more than “knowing how to fight.” It naturally carries stronger performativity, rhythm, and spatial awareness. These things do not necessarily have to appear only in martial arts films. They can be extracted and integrated into car chases, gunfights, alley fights, and even all kinds of stunt design that seem entirely unrelated to “Chinese kung fu.”
This has also been one of his most important creative methods over the years. Take, for example, the famous gunfight sequence in Kick-Ass, for which he was responsible for fight design. Although it was not a martial arts scene in the traditional sense, he still injected into it the bodily sense of rhythm and space found in Chinese martial arts, making the action less confined to a flat plane and giving it more depth and rhythmic texture. When Chloë Grace Moretz’s double, a young boy from China, moves, dodges, and spins through the frame, audiences may not immediately think of “Chinese martial arts,” but they will faintly sense that, in its physical arrangement and movement rhythm, the scene has a distinctive quality different from conventional Hollywood action.
Zhang uses a vivid metaphor to describe this approach: if you are clearly filming a character in a Western suit, you cannot insist on draping him in a Zhongshan suit. But you can quietly weave the most exquisite parts of Chinese action training into it, making the film better rather than more abrupt. Truly sophisticated cultural input is never about forcing a label onto something; it is about making that culture part of the film’s texture.
05. Shang-Chi: When Culture Could Finally Be Placed on the Table
If, in projects such as Hellboy II and Kick-Ass, Chinese action culture was more often a methodology that had been refined and “hidden inside,” then in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, for which Zhang served as stunt coordinator, that cultural input could finally be expressed clearly and directly.
Zhang mentions that Shang-Chi is an action project one hundred percent connected to Chinese culture and Chinese martial arts. In this project, he was the one who proposed the design concept for the Tai Chi portion of the film. In particular, the sparring sequence between the parents, which carries a strong Tai Chi feeling, was something he first shot in advance and presented to the director. In his view, Tai Chi is far more than a “move.” It is more suited to carrying a character’s temperament and cultural depth: strength within softness, borrowing force to counter force, organizing movement through internal energy and rhythm. Placed within the relationship between the characters, this aesthetic logic fully works, allowing the action to truly enter the level of character building.
From this perspective, Shang-Chi is important not only because it is the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s first Chinese superhero film, but also because it provided an important opportunity: in a mainstream Hollywood blockbuster, Chinese creators no longer needed to hide or translate their own cultural experience, but could directly transform it into screen language.
For this reason, after Shang-Chi, director Destin Daniel Cretton continued to collaborate with Zhang on projects such as American Born Chinese. In Zhang’s view, that sincere respect for Asian culture, and the working relationship in which cultural understanding is carried through into action and visual creation, is itself a rare form of trust.
06. Working in Different Industrial Systems
When discussing the differences between the Chinese and American film industries, what Zhang cares about most is not any single technical process, but the professional conditions faced by action practitioners in different working environments.
Over the years, he has often traveled back and forth between different regions for filming, and he has also brought Chinese action performers to the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and other places to participate in projects. In this process, one of his deepest impressions is that the same job can take on very different professional forms under different industrial systems. For many action performers coming overseas to shoot for the first time, the most direct feeling is not necessarily only a change in income. It is that they begin to realize this job can, in another system, have clearer divisions of labor, more explicit working standards, and more stable career expectations.
In North America, action performers and stunt practitioners usually have clear union affiliations, and income standards, working hours, safety procedures, and travel arrangements are also relatively clear. This systematic way of working is not only about improving efficiency; it also makes it easier for practitioners to see this work as a career they can invest in over the long term.
Zhang’s own experience working in different systems has also made him especially attentive to these seemingly “behind-the-scenes” conditions. When he returns to China to shoot films, he does his best to fight for better treatment and working environments for the martial arts team. In his view, these things are not add-ons. They are important factors that determine whether an industry can retain professional talent over the long term.
He is not willing to simply summarize the difference as “which side is better.” To him, what may be more important is this: when a person spends a long time doing high-risk, high-intensity action work, can the industry provide support, protection, and room for development that match that work? It is precisely through this comparison and movement back and forth that he has gradually become clearer about why he continues to stay in this industry: not because it has been romanticized, but because in a more mature industrial system, the professionalism of action workers can be more clearly understood and more easily transformed into a long-term career.
07. Reunderstanding Danger: After the Names Are Seen
Looking back at Peng Zhang’s career, one clear thread runs through it from beginning to end: what he has always been doing is transforming action from a physical skill into a cinematic language.
Zhang’s significance may not lie in a narrative such as “a Chinese person achieved success in Hollywood.” What is more worth seeing is the world revealed through his career path: a world that concerns martial arts, physical ability, and risk control, but also camera, rhythm, narrative, and industrial collaboration; a field that requires crossing the barriers of language and culture, while also continuously transforming individual experience into screen language.
Those who create danger have, from beginning to end, always been part of cinema.
Special thanks to Noelle Kim for her contribution to this article.
About Author Will Zang
Independent filmmaker and film publicist; member of the Television Academy, member of ASIFA-Hollywood, and member of the China Television Artists Association.
This article is originally published in Chinese on GeekMovie on July 30, 2026. Read More
