Television has always been a conversation. Movies come along and they're kind of like three-ring circuses, and there's a new one next week.

With a television show, it's about fighting to get it on the screen every week. It's like going into battle, and you have to fight these fights. Some are big fights, some are skirmishes, some you can come to detente on, but it's always a fight.

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.

As a network, they're not the network that usually picks things up after the first episode airs. They definitely have a methodology that they follow. But they're very happy with the show [Into the Badlands]and they're very excited with how it's performed.

We 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.

Most fight sequences on a television show, probably any action adventure show that you know of, if you asked them how long they probably spend, [it's] one or two days doing the fight. Where we were spending eight days concurrently with an episode doing our fight sequences.

Whenever you do something that's original, not based on a comic book or a novel or an old movie or a franchise, you definitely learn a lot and for I think it was very gratifying to see the people embrace the world.

I mean when you go to a network and say, We want to make a martial arts series in the future. And give them the pitch. And by the way, the only way to achieve the authentic Hong Kong martial arts we need a full-time fight team unit working concurrently, and we're hiring a Chinese fight team from Hong Kong. And they were like, Great, let's go

They [movies] don't really have the cultural impact - other than Star Wars, of course - that they used to because television is something that week to week people invite into their homes. It's a relationship that in success can go on six, seven, eight years. I think certainly in the early days, you definitely want that engagement.

Some of the key components, we wanted it to be so far into the future that you weren't talking about our time. I was joking that the AMC cinematic universe is after the zombie apocalypse by hundreds and hundreds of years.