The Kung Fu movie genre is painfully cliché. There’s the reluctant fighter forced back into the ring, the obscure training method seeking revenge, the race against evil quest, and so many others. However, every once in a while, a film comes along that defies such tired tropes, cutting through old stereotypes and clearing a path for something completely new. POLITE SOCIETY is just such a maverick martial movie.

Director Nida Manzoor is a British television writer who some might recognize for directing two episodes of DOCTOR WHO. More characteristic to her style, she wrote, directed, and produced a six-episode series WE ARE LADY PARTS for Peacock. That series follows a British punk rock band comprised of Muslim women. It is an inclusive, female-strong, coming-of-age story that is wickedly funny and subversive. And it’s brilliantly entertaining, not at all preachy, but joyful and engaging.

POLITE SOCIETY is cut from the same cloth. It also has Muslim women in the leading roles – this time two sisters: Ria Khan (Priya Kansara) and Lena Khan (Riti Arya). Lena is an art school dropout, engaged to a suspicious man from a rich family. Ria is an aspiring stuntperson who practices martial arts. It’s a mash-up of many genres – a wedding film, a sisterhood/buddy movie, a coming-of-age comedy drama, a culturally inclusive picture, it even has a Bollywood dance number. But most of all for KungFuMagazine.com, it’s an action film. Ria is a martial artist, something ripped from the pages of Manzoor’s own experience.

We caught up with Nida Manzoor in London to share some insights on POLITE SOCIETY.

GC: I LOVED your film.

NM: Oh thank you!

GC: This is for a KungFuMagazine, so we're going to talk a lot about Kung Fu. 

NM: Oh yes! Let’s do it!

GC: So I read where you practiced martial arts as a teen. Could you share a little bit about that?

NM: Yeah, of course! I practiced Shotokan Karate with my sister growing up in Singapore, and then, when we moved to London, we continued on there.

I certainly really wanted to do Kung Fu because it's like that's where the so the cool stuff is done. But, like my parents were like, ‘You've already got to a certain belt, you know. Really, you're already like a bunch of purple belts. Now you can't swap. You got to keep going.’

So I was like, ‘Oh, there’s something not as flamboyant in Karate as everything in Kung Fu.’ So that was my background.

GC: Sure, sure. And I read where you’ve often cited Jackie Chan as an inspiration, which is so obvious with the comedy Kung Fu, but this is KungFuMagazine. Let's go deeper. What the what other martial arts influences impacted POLITE SOCIETY?

NM: Jackie Chan was a touchstone. The stuff he made in the West were the first things I saw – seeing RUSH HOUR in the cinema.

But then, you know, the comedy was one thing, but it was just the way – the musicality of his films, of his fights, the rhythm. You know, comedy and action – It's like two instruments going. And I remember being so struck by that and thinking that it was the most incredible thing I’d seen. For me, that was one thing – the way Jackie Chan does comedy in action – and it's just the skill. It blew me away.

But then that opened me up to actually revisiting his other films. You know, I started with like SHANGHAI KNIGHTS and RUSH HOUR, and then got to go back to like POLICE STORY and then and then going to see what he did with Sammo Hung. And then I was like, ‘Oh, there's so much more.’

And then again, you know for me, EVERYTHING EVERWHERE ALL AT ONCE when I was in the edit of my film blew my mind because my main character has a CROUCHING TIGER poster on her bedroom wall. And seeing Michelle Yeoh in that film was like ‘Is this a moment? Is something happening that's just incredible?’  She was huge and watching THE MATRIX and like films like CROUCHING TIGER.

And then realizing that [Yuen] Woo-Ping is the fight choreographer there and then getting more to explore. You know, I just watched one of his films that he directed DREADNAUGHT, which is like a comedy, and it's just like it's a whole other level. So my way in has been kind of potted and strange, and it's always been through Western cinema. But then it just makes me, you know, watching behind the scenes of THE MATRIX. And then the Wachowskis are telling me that ‘Oh, we watched a Jet Li film’ that inspired them. And then you kind of opened these doors. It sort of was a circuitous way of discovering Kung Fu for me.

GC: POLITE SOCIETY is so much about sister rivalry. What does your sister think of the film?

NM: She loved it! She was in tears, watching. [laughs] She was in actual tears.

Just because, you know, the violence that two sisters can commit to each other emotionally was – is really visceral. And then that's why I wanted to make an action movie about sisterhood.

In my Karate classes, my sensei would always put me and my sister together to spar, and I found it kind of cruel. I was like ‘Why would he do that?’ I don't know if he just kind of had a thing, but she was stronger than me. She was better than me, and she would always win. And I remember, just fighting with her and then she just kept tripping me up. She was just faster, and I fell, and my face would hit the floor. The physical pain of my the facing the floor, and then the humiliation of all the kids watching in a circle around you, and laughing – and the two pains of like being a teenage girl feeling awkward in your body, being humiliated in front of your peers, and being having your ass kicked physically – it was just all these violences is stacking together. Which is why I needed to make a film about teenage girls that is also a martial arts movie because the action genre so perfectly fits in with what it feels like to be a teenage girl. So, like those two things need to be together.

GC: How was directing fight choreography for you?

NM: So much fun. I mean, I just got to bring in all my favorite film fights and be like, ‘I want to this. Can I do this?’ And you know we have budgetary constraints, so it was basically being like, ‘Yes, yes, no, no way. That's not possible.’ I come from short film background, and a TV background, so I understand we have to cut chunks of the fight out on the day to adapt to the kind of needs of the reality of the situation. So we had to adapt the fights. Often we had to kind of rearrange it, and I had to always think what moves I loved most and what are our big money shots and making sure we protect those.

I love directing action also because it forces you to slow down. I realized, like films can be, you know, ‘Go! Go! Shoot a dinner scene!’ In action, in martial arts, you've got to slow down. You've got to make sure you've got the shot. There's safety involved, and there's like so much prep involved of like when are you using a stunt performer? And when are you using the real actor?

And that was something that Hong Kong Kung Fu movies were a big influence on me, as like they said kind of action where the actor does most of it. It has a kind of truth in their bodies. There's a truthfulness today, and that's why we had months of prep with the actors to learn the fight choreography, to shape the choreography around their skill level. So we wouldn't rely that heavily on the stunt performance, because even if it's imperfect, it's kind of true.

And I feel like that, when you get to a certain kind of action movie now, which is so reliant on CG, and so reliant on stunt performances, it loses the truthfulness in an actor possessing that character, and so it was important for me for the actors to do as much as they could. So they have to train a lot.

GC: You know, I did notice that CROUCHING TIGER poster, and I thought that was very kind of you.  You mentioned that this feels like a moment, and I was thinking about that in terms of a Muslim teen girl inclusiveness and MS. MARVEL is the one that comes to mind immediately. What are your impressions of that? And how does that kind of figure into what you're doing with POLITE SOCIETY and what you did with WE ARE LADY PARTS?

NM: I love the comics. I remember reading the comics, the first few issues, and thinking it was groundbreaking and brilliant and wonderful. And just existing is only helping. And it being successful is only another thing that that gives me hope and joy that my film might find an audience. And you know, it makes me hopeful to feel like there may be more films and shows that represent different kinds of people that allows us to play with genre.

I wanted to make an action movie also because it gave me a chance to make a spectacle – events cinema – which is what I grew up on, be it Kung Fu movies, but also Bollywood cinema is all about the spectacle of entertainment bringing audiences in. And it also says, like this character, this South Asian Muslim girl, is worth a film. It is sort of saying that you belong here. You are important. You're worthy to have a film about you. And there is something that felt important, like if I made an action film, it would say that.  It'd be like ‘No, this is also your genre. It's not just for men, you know you belong here too.’ And there was something exciting about it.

GC: Speaking of Bollywood, I think Westerners might be inclined to lump POLITE SOCIETY into the Bollywood genre, which it really isn’t, although there are some parody moments, like the dance scene. I saw that as an homage, but how would you feel about being pigeon-holed into the Bollywood genre?

NM: I don't know. Yeah, I mean, because the film is taking from so many genres, I don't feel like I'm being pushed into that one more than necessary. When people say ‘It's just an action movie’ that also makes me uncomfortable because I’m like ‘Oh, but it's all these other things.’ But you know for me, I have a love of action, and so I love Bollywood, and I when grew up, it was probably my earliest memories. I was watching Bollywood movies, so it never sits badly with me. But, like you say, the film isn't just that. It would kind of miss something to just say it's sort of like a Bollywood film.

But it’s just one of the inspirations that's been kind of at the heart of it. You know also tonally, Bollywood films kind of sometimes reach a kind of fever pitch of absurdism, where everyone shouting, and it's just like high drama, like melodrama almost, and that something I wanted to draw on. This is a tenor of a Bollywood film that sometimes can be quite like over the top, in a good way.

GC: Even RRR is having its moment now, right?

NM: Yeah.

GC: I was reading that TIME100 NEXT article where Riz Ahmed said you ‘explode’ expectations. Do you feel that’s accurate?

NM: It was super kind of him to say.  I definitely feel like I want to subvert stuff, because you know, as a woman, as a South Asian, there's a kind of rules and norms and expectations of like conforming and behaving well. And so the cinema I wanted to make is to push against that and say, there's a kind of a wildness to being a woman. And that's and that's why I wanted to use these big genres. I do remember that conversation I had with him, and he was surprised that I wanted to do action. And I was just like ‘I love it. I want to do it.’ And yeah, it's really a nice thing for him to say.

I hope the film finds an audience, and then we'll see. We'll see if it does.

GC:  After your experience making POLITE SOCIETY, are you going to do another martial arts film?

NM: Yes! I mean, if anything, it's given me an appetite for it, like I just need to direct more of it, because it's just so much fun. Getting to have a bigger canvas with something that I’m excited to do because I had a great time making this one.

GC: That's wonderful! We'll look forward to that.