“I would be the only westerner in the cinema, and 90% of the audience would be like, ‘there’s a white guy in the cinema, what’s he doing?'”

When Asian action cinema expert, producer and casting director Mike Leeder left his job in a Croydon department store to go on holiday to Hong Kong, little did he know that – 32 years later – he would still be there. Before he fell in love with the city, he fell in love with its movies; a blossoming romance which started with a Jackie Chan double bill of Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow and Drunken Master, and has led him to working on many of Hong Kong’s biggest and best productions over the last three decades; from Fist of Legend to Fearless, True Legend to Once Upon a Time in China, Man of Tai Chi to the Ip Man series. On screen, he has been on the receiving end of a headlock from Jean-Claude Van Damme and refereed a kung fu battle with Jet Li, as well as working with the likes of Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, Scott Adkins, Mark Dacascos, Donnie Yen, Yuen Woo-ping, and many more. Over the years, his encyclopaedic knowledge and passion for Hong Kong movies has seen him contribute many articles and interviews to leading magazines and websites, as well as providing his voice to audio commentaries for Blu-ray labels across the UK, USA and Europe. In this wide-ranging conversation, we discuss his life in the UK before his journey east; that time he went to interview Jackie Chan, and what happened next; the lack of film preservation in Hong Kong; and how not to get noticed in the martial arts movie world. Read more about Mike Leeder on IMDb and follow him on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.

Mike Leeder and Jet Li in Fearless (2006).

Mike Leeder gets into a scuffle with Jean-Claude Van Damme in Pound of Flesh (2015).

Mike Leeder with Sammo Hung.