Jet Li's Interview with CNN's Talk Asia...

As many of you guys know,  Jet Li will be featured in the next CNN International 'Talk Asia' interview program (here's the chinese version of the promo flier):

昨日はジェット・リーはCNN国際テレビとインタビュした。僕はは参加した。面白かった！

As a matter of fact, they taped it in HK last night and I was lucky to be allowed to attend the taping of it (they used a live audience this time for the first time ever).

Here's the english version:

It was pretty good,  the interview was about 1 hour long (i'm sure they will edit it down to less),  we were in a big theater w/ about 50 people in the audience:

this was the producer telling us about the show and to turn off our telephones.

Of course we weren't supposed to take photos while the tape was rolling,  but I got one picture before they started filming when Jet just came in:

Actually there were a few guys snapping away w/ loud cameras DURING the interview,  it was kind of annoying. finally the director guy told them to shut up during one of the breaks. :-P 

I don't want to give away too much about the interview itself, but yes it was entirely done in english, and of course a lot of it was the standard Jet Li interview stuff (asking about performing in the White house,  etc). 

but I was impressed w/ the quality of the research on the questions and research by the interviewer,  Anjali Rao,  she got the difference between 'kungfu' and 'wushu' and didn't say anything foolish like 'were you born at the shaolin temple or did you just grow up there?'  :-P

ALSO I was impressed that it was really NO HOLDS BARRED questioning! In a few cases she asked Jet questions I've NEVER seen him have to deal with when he's done press interviews or talk show appearances. prickly questions about things he probably would rather not talk about.  He handled it all pretty diplomatically of course! :-D

BUT you can already see some of it has been picked up by the Associated Press:

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/12/13/arts/AS-A-E-MOV-Jet-Li-Tibet.php http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/article/285257

Its really unfortunate, but as i was actually there, i can say that these press articles, with inaccurate titles like "Jet Li calls for Tibet-China Unification", etc are significantly distorting what Jet's actualwords and meaning were (he gave a pretty nuanced answer to a very politically 'sticky' question).

Rather than try to repeat his entire answer from memory, let me just tell anyone who is curious to watch the show on December 22nd and see for yourself what he said, rather than relying on someone else's political spin... this kind of distortion has happened before with his blog entry about Chinese film censorship too... so I guess I shouldn't be surprised!

As you can expect because it was all done in English, Jet had difficulty expressing himself fully at a few points (but much better than most of us would do in a 2nd language i assure you!), but no matter what it was really interesting, especially cause it was all happening 'LIVE'...  he didn't know what questions were coming and like i said, some of them were not easy questions!   I also got the chance to hear him speak in person about his ideas for his One Foundation charity and his goals for the future.  It was very inspirational and moving!  At the end he was in such a good mood he didn't want to leave! It was pretty cool!

Check it out on December 22nd on CNN International... (hopefully they'll have it streaming from their website too!)   ;-)

update: they have a bit of a teaser page online already:

http://edition.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/12/14/anjali.jetli/index.html

"Chinese action star Jet Li listens to Anjali Rao's question on Talk Asia's live set in Bethanie Hall, Hong Kong."  endclickprintexclude