After being beaten up at high school, Maria Tran took up tae kwon do in 1998. 'I had a lot of aggression,' she says. Credit:Nic Walker. Hair and make-up by Allison Boyle. "There's a point there that I never get," says Kane. "What started him to get to that aggressive state? Did you say something?" Tran says she can't remember saying anything, that it must have been a mistake. "I know she can stand up for herself," Kane tells me, "and if somebody says something that's offensive she's, like, that's it." He turns to Tran. "So I was just wondering if you …" He raises his fists, to show how he thinks Tran might arc up to a nightclub pest. But she says no, it wasn't like that.

The heart of the action-movie industry is Hong Kong, and very few Australian actors make it there. For Asian-Australians, it can be doubly hard because Hong Kong filmmakers generally have no difficulty finding Asian actors. Hong Kong-based producer, consultant and casting director Mike Leeder says, "People come here and forget that instead of being in an environment where you're a minority – and you might have got work because you were a minority, competing against 20 other actors – in Asia, you're competing with over 250,000 other Asian actors." If it's difficult for an Asian-Australian actor to break into movies, it is even harder for an Asian-Australian fight choreographer, and almost impossible for an Asian-Australian fight choreographer who is a woman. "In Hong Kong history there are, I think, two female fight stunt choreographers," says Leeder. "Even in America, even in England, there aren't a lot of female fight co-ordinators." And yet 32-year-old Brisbane-born Maria Tran has made and starred in small-scale action movies in Australia for public broadcasters, appeared in films made in Hong Kong and Vietnam, co-ordinated screen fights for a US mixed-martial arts champion, and worked with industry legend Jackie Chan. "I wish I'd had my shit together as well as she does at her age," says Leeder. When I see someone aggressive, my body starts to tingle and I start to judge distances.

Maria Tran's parents were boat people. Her father had been a soldier in the South Vietnamese Army, and spent six years in Communist "re-education" camps after the war. Her mother worked in publicity, and tried to leave Vietnam seven times before she finally succeeded. "Each time she escaped, she would get caught," says Tran. "Then she was put in jail. It got to the point where it just became normal. She'd be there for a certain amount of time, then she'd get out, then she'd work, save up money and get on the next boat." Her parents were accepted as refugees, and met and married in Australia. They moved first to Cabramatta, then went to Queensland for work, labouring on mango farms around Bundaberg. From there, they moved south to Dinmore, east of Ipswich. "My parents tried so hard to assimilate," says Tran. "They decided to open a fish-and-chip store, because they thought that was as Australian as you could get. They tried to get rid of their accents, which they never did."

Tran says the business was the closest fish-and-chip shop to Pauline Hanson's in nearby Silkstone. School was not always easy. "I remember kids used to go 'Ching-chong China girl'," she says, "When you're young, you don't really know what racism is. They say stuff like that, but you think, 'Ah, they must like me, because they're talking to me now!' So I used to go home and Mum and Dad would say, 'How was school?' 'Yeah! They like me! They called me Ching-chong China girl!' And my parents said, 'Yeah, we'll call you Ching-chong China girl.' They thought it was an endearing name." The family left Queensland for Fairfield, in western Sydney, where her father took a job in a welding factory. Tran continued her education at Westfield Sports High, not because she was an athlete but because she lived in the school's catchment area. "I was smart, but I hated my own identity. I hated knowing that everyone looked at me and thought, 'Look at the nerd.' I wasn't like the typical girls, reading Dolly magazine and trying to get with boys. I was very active, always running around and trying to play handball with the boys. I was trying to find my own identity, but facing so much rejection. Even my friends dumped me." She intervened in a playground fight to save another girl from bullies and consequently got beaten up herself. As a result she started to study tae kwon do in 1998. "I had a lot of aggression," she says. Her father was tormented by memories of Vietnam and his time in the re-education camps. He turned to drinking and gambling, and the family fell apart. Tran left home at 16 and went back to Queensland, where she entered martial-arts competitions, but "popped" her knee while trying to axe-kick an opponent in the head. "It was so painful," she says. "I was literally screaming."

Her teacher pushed her kneecap back into place, but her knee began to swell and the next day it ballooned, and it was never right again. "Every now and then it slipped out a bit," she says. "I lost the spirit of sparring for fear of popping my knee out. At that point, I didn't realise how important your knees are." She looks away from me and addresses her patella. "You know I love you, knee," she says. After a year in Queensland, Tran returned to Sydney, finished school, and started studying psychology at the University of Western Sydney. When she chose the discipline, she says, "I thought psychology was the study of psychos." At university, she took free courses in film-making, and made a number of short films, including Maximum Choppage Round 2, which was shot in Cabramatta over a period of four years. "We used to get chased by police officers because we had weapons and we were doing all this stuff in public," she says. Although Tran no longer felt comfortable sparring, she continued practicing martial arts. In Cabramatta, she trained in Shaolin kung fu, and today she has a black belt in tae kwon do, a blue belt in hapkido, and a brown belt in kung fu. She has also boxed, and flirted with the traditional Vietnamese martial art, Vovinam. But while she was at university, she realised her real love was for the martial dance of choreographed combat.

Since she was at school, Tran has idolised Jackie Chan, the most successful figure to emerge from the Hong Kong action-movie industry. Chan has made more than 100 movies, many of which combine highly stylised action with screwball comedy. "I used to think, 'Jackie, he's so cool. He's, like, a loser in every film, yet he gets to win at the end of the day,' " she says. Tran decided that Chan was the kind of person she wanted to become – both personally and professionally – so she began her Quest for Jackie Chan documentary project in 2007. She travelled around Australia, meeting people who had either been inspired by Chan or worked with him. She visited Canberra, where Chan had lived for several years from 1976, and where he met the young Kevin Rudd. Then Tran followed Chan to Hong Kong. She was, by then, determined to make it in action movies. Maria Tran: 'The stunt guys I know in China were really impressed with her,' says casting director Mike Leeder. Credit:Nic Walker While she was in Hong Kong, Tran met Mike Leeder, who had been a casting director on Jackie Chan's Rush Hour 3. "The stunt guys I know in China were really impressed with her," he says. "Same with the guys in Vietnam. Because she's not just talk, she can do it. Maria, if you watch her showreel, that's really her flipping through the air and taking some hard falls and doing takedowns and everything."

Tran found work with production companies in Hong Kong, but went home when she ran out of money and was no closer to meeting Chan. I ask why she didn't simply call Chan's agent and ask where he was. She says she did, but that "didn't work out" and, anyway, the movie she hoped to make was as much about Chan's influence on others as it was about Chan himself. In 2013, Tran co-directed the short film Hit Girls, in which she co-starred with up-and-coming Hong Kong actor Juju Chan. Tran had learnt that Juju Chan was in Australia and admits she was "kind of stalking her". Eventually, Chan agreed to work for nothing on Hit Girls, the story of two female assassins who pose as escorts in order to murder a heart-throb gangster (and the only action movie in history to include a pub in Fairfield among its executive producers). Tran and Chan jointly won the 2013 award for Breakout Action Star – Female at the Action on Film Festival for their roles. Juju Chan was scheduled to star in Fist of the Dragon, a movie being produced by Roger Corman, the godfather of exploitation cinema, and directed by Antony Szeto. "I kind of knew the director from a long time ago, after years of stalking him," says Tran. "I have this thing where I stalk someone, then I show them my stuff. They say, 'Stop stalking me.' But eventually they say, 'Hey, Maria, I'm coming to Sydney. Let's meet.' "

Szeto gave Tran both the role of fight supervisor and a part in the movie. When I speak to Szeto, he describes Tran as "a driven person". In the action-movie industry, he says, "You've got to be able to somehow keep going and keep going and keep going until you finally make it." Fist of the Dragon stars mixed martial artist Josh Thompson, who has a chin like a brick. When he speaks his lines, it looks like a puppeteer is pulling his jaw up and down with invisible strings. "He's a really nice guy," says Tran, "but I remember telling him one day, 'We need that shot with you punching, but it needs to sell. At the moment, it just looks like you're hitting a potato sack. There's no movement.' He's like, 'Oh, are you going to show me how to punch? Huh? Huh?' I had to get someone else to talk to him. He didn't want to talk to me because I'm a woman. After this, he calmed down, but in the heat of the moment he was, like, 'Why am I listening to this young female Asian telling me how to punch?' " Martial artists in movie roles tend to confuse choreographed fighting with actual fighting. "Most of the time, when it comes to stage combat or screen combat, it's actually acting," says Tran. "You're selling the moves." But actors often have problems with fighting, too. "A lot of actors are brilliant in drama," she says, "but in fight scenes they suffer because they're not comfortable within the physical language. They go all floppy."

In Australian movies, fight scenes tend to be scrappy, awkward and brawly, tremendously overplayed but infused with a kind of pantomime realism. In Asian cinema, a fight is more like a dance, a punch followed by a block followed by a step followed by a kick, with two partners collaborating to make every block and blow look hard and true. "There's a story that's woven within the movement," says Tran, "and it takes certain types of actors who can present those movements in a way that's sellable." In 2015, Maximum Choppage was reimagined as a six-part ABC kung fu comedy show, and a vehicle for comedian Lawrence Leung. Tran missed out on the lead female role, which really hurt her – instead of being the star, she was the star's stunt double. However, that same year she was invited to Vietnam to appear alongside Vietnamese star Truong Ngoc Ánh in the movie Tracer (Truy Sat). Unfortunately, she was summarily deported. "They scanned in my passport," she says, "and the next thing I knew all these police officers and military pinned me and took me to this interrogation room and asked, 'Do you know this person? Do you know that person? You're on the blacklist. You're part of this terrorist association.' "

The "terrorist association" was the Vietnamese Community in Australia NSW, in which she served as a vice-president. The VCA protests outside the Vietnamese Embassy every year on the anniversary of the fall of Saigon, and the Vietnamese government considers it a hostile organisation of migrant reactionaries. "And I'm, like, 'I only joined this association because I wanted to reconnect with my roots,' " says Tran. They sent her home regardless. With Ánh's help, Tran was finally allowed into Vietnam to shoot Tracer – in which, ironically, she was cast as a terrorist. However, the authorities remained suspicious, so Tran was not invited to the film's premiere in case it turned out that the woman cast as a terrorist and detained as a terrorist actually was a terrorist. Tran had begun making Quest for Jackie Chan in 2007. In 2016, she received a call from Screen NSW, saying that Chan would be in Australia to make the movie Bleeding Steel and had asked to meet her. She was given an unpaid attachment as part of the stunt group, but she'd never trained formally as a stunt person, she says, because she sees herself primarily as an actor who is a martial artist rather than somebody who jumps through burning hoops. Since she was not accredited to do stunts in Australia, she was told to stay on the sidelines and hold mats or apple boxes. "And I became really good at that. Each time Jackie needed to sit down, that box was there. He's like, 'This girl's quick. She knows when I need the apple box.' " It took a while before she felt it was appropriate to speak with Chan, but she was formally introduced by his pilot, who was a fan of her YouTube videos. "And Jackie starts talking to me," say Tran. "He says, 'Are you Vietnamese? I speak Vietnamese, too.' And then he started speaking to me. 'Do you understand me?' 'Er … no.' He spoke Thai." She managed to make a short film as an homage to Chan's Police Story while they were shooting, and showed it to him at the wrap party. He invited her to come to Canberra with him the next day to meet his family. She filmed him revisiting his childhood home, and visiting the cemetery where his parents are buried.

Tran is ambitious. She would love a career in Hollywood but, in the meantime, she is building her portfolio at home and in Asia. "Being Asian," she says, "a lot of the time we keep everything internal. If we want something it's, like, 'No, we've got family honour, commitments, doing what is right for our community.' But what if you put what you want to do first? People might hate you, or feel that you're being selfish, but if you don't do that, in the long run, you're gonna suffer for it." In the end, Quest for Jackie Chan was a success. Her father has recovered from his problems – "Nowadays he's okay," she says, "he's enjoying life." Tran and her friend Phillip Kane have just finished filming three episodes of a show called Tiger Cops for the ABC's Fresh Blood initiative, and Tran has a stunt role in the upcoming Jason Statham 20-metre-shark movie, Meg. (She was allowed to work on Meg – at least on scenes filmed in New Zealand – because the producers needed Asian stunt people who could swim, and they are thin on the ground – and in the water. Tran admits, though, that she had to learn to swim for the role.) Life seems to be working out for Maria Tran. Does that mean violence solves everything? Tran says she was once on the train to Carramar in a carriage with a big and angry-looking man. She walked away from him, but he stood up and followed her all the way to the end of the train. "As a martial artist," she says, "I was thinking of moves. What can I do? I can do this and this. These are the self-defence tactics that I know: should I try or should I not? And the thing I decided to do was this: I stood up, walked up to him, sat next to him and said, 'How was your day?' In my head I was, like, 'What! What are you doing?'

"We had a conversation all the way to Carramar, and he was telling me his day sucked and things didn't go his way. By the time I got to Carramar, I was like, 'This is my stop. I hope everything's okay.' And he said, 'I'm glad I didn't do what I was planning to do.' "I got off the train and I was, like, Whooaa! Being in a combat state isn't always ideal. Sometimes it's better to understand where people are coming from, and at least trying to empathise."