Film director Destin Daniel Cretton has made families under stress a focal point of his work. His 2013 short film “Short Term 12” is about the caretakers of a group home for at-risk teens. His 2017 film “The Glass Castle” was based on a novel about a girl growing up with wandering parents, one an alcoholic, the other an eccentric artist.

So when he decided to take a shot at something seemingly completely different — a superhero film — he had no trouble in seeing it in terms of family. And that was how he described it to Marvel Entertainment executives when it was announced that it would be producing “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.” The film debuts Friday in theaters around the country.

“My pitch to Marvel was a family drama wrapped in a kung fu movie,” said Cretton, a Maui native who retains close ties to the islands. “The drama and the intimacy — to me and to Marvel — were just as important as making some incredible fight sequences and spectacle via effects sequences.”

The character Shang-Chi first appeared in print in 1973 as Marvel Comics caught on to the burgeoning interest in martial arts, buoyed by Bruce Lee’s film “Enter the Dragon.” In the comics, Shang-Chi, designated as the “Master of Kung Fu,” would often join British secret service agents in their battle against evil.

Cretton was not a comic book reader when he was young. “My mom wasn’t into us reading or watching anything that had any kind of violence in it,” he said with a laugh. “Even in the comic book world, I don’t think she would have been very happy for us to be reading those.”

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His film, however, should make audiences plenty happy. The action sequences are spectacular and exciting, with the martial arts presented in an eye-catching fashion. Lead actor Simu Liu, who prior to the film was a fan but not a practitioner of martial arts, was turned into a fearsome fighter, with the help from stunt coordinators like the late Brad Allen, who trained with Jackie Chan’s stunt team, and Chinese experts who specialized in the various martial art styles portrayed in the movie.

“We had the best of the best in whatever style we wanted for each sequence,” said Cretton, who, despite his mother’s predilections, would sneak into theaters to see martial arts movies and made home movies of them.

Cretton also gave credit to two other stars of the movie, Awkwafina, who plays Shang-Chi’s sidekick Katy, and Ben Kingsley, bringing back his character Trevor Slattery from “Iron Man 3.”

“Working with Awkwafina was such a joy,” Cretton said. “She’s an incredible improviser. She just breathes life into every take, and it’s so fun to be surprised by the performance of the actors. And working with Sir Ben Kingsley is unlike anything I’ve experienced before. He’s such a professional. He puts so much thought and care into every role, even a role like this, where he’s kind of the Shakespearean clown of the movie.”

Cretton also managed to work some personal favorites into the film, such as the Eagles’ hit song “Hotel California,” sung by Awkwafina, as Katy, in the middle of a fight sequence.

“She said, ‘This could be a good spot for something funny.’ We just brainstormed a couple ideas, and I threw out, ‘Well, you could try singing a verse of “Hotel California,” and she did it and it was hilarious,” Cretton said with a laugh. “That’s a song that I’ve been wanting to have in a movie for a long time.”

Hawaii audiences should also be on the lookout for “a few nods” to Hawaii in the film, although a reference to “Kamehameha” is actually from the Japanese anime series “Dragon Ball Z.”

“When Shang-Chi was hanging out with his friends, it would feel like me hanging out with my friends on Maui,” Cretton said. “I know very much what it feels like to hang out with a bunch of Asian Americans. It doesn’t feel foreign, it doesn’t feel forced. It feels relatable and in a lot of ways it does feel specific, like very specific to the Asian American experience.”

In addition to “The Glass Castle” and “Short Term 12,” Cretton is known for directing 2019’s “Just Mercy,” based on the true story of a lawyer defending a death-row inmate, and 2017’s “The Shack,” about a tormented man who receives an invitation to meet with God. His debut film was 2012’s “I Am Not a Hipster,” about a struggling singer/songwriter in San Diego, where Cretton went to college and later film school.

Cretton said he took the same approach to directing “Shang-Chi” as his other films.

“The creative process is always the same,” he said. “You’re always just looking through a lens at one frame and trying to find the best version of that frame.

“At its core, this is still a family drama, which most of my movies would fall under. It’s all the bells and whistles that were new to me, but the process was really fun. I felt like I was back in film school and learning all kinds of things every day.”