We Got This Covered: Which martial arts movies inspired your artistic vision for this film?
RZA: There are so many martial arts films I’ve seen over the years that could’ve laid down the foundation for this one. The ones I was most inspired by were The Five Deadly Venoms, The 36th Chamber of Shaolin which Gordon Liu starred in and so many others.
But the main thing was to make sure that, knowing martial arts movies have their pros and cons, I try to stick with the pros. I tried to make sure that this film would be made with an American sensibility, and most of these movies are made from an Asian sensibility. I was trying to figure if I could be able to what Quentin Tarantino did with Kill Bill because he gave us a modern day martial arts film that’s a movie.
My first cut was four hours…
Eli Roth: But that’s natural because he shot a million feet of film. The first cut being four hours is reflective of him and me adding stuff and adding stuff, and when you cut it all together it was four hours.
RZA: That’s one of the good things of having Eli on this journey with me because he said that was natural, and I didn’t know that was natural.
Eli Roth: We also talked about musicals and relating it to music. In musical theatre if you have a song it has to advance the plot, and if you have one that doesn’t then it gets dropped. That’s how we looked at our fights; we said these aren’t musical numbers but we’ve got to learn something at the end of this fight, and this fight has to have a purpose. We can’t just have gratuitous martial arts going on or the movie’s going to get boring.
We Got This Covered: Eli, what was it that you saw in RZA that made you believe he could direct a movie?
Eli Roth: It’s what I saw in RZA when we took this plane flight from Iceland back in January 2006. He’s someone who has it, they’ve got the vision and the creativity and the passion and the fresh ideas. I didn’t need to watch anything else he shot to know he could direct a movie, I just knew it. But what I love about RZA is that he was so humble and was so willing to learn, and he really took the time to learn. It was great experience and a very hard shoot especially for a first time director.
RZA: I took the time to study movie making. A boxer can’t just jump in the ring; you’ve got to practice and practice and practice. It’s like when some says “how do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice.” I learned about all the lenses on the cameras just so I could talk to my DP about how much lighting I needed.
Eli was a witness of me being very determined and very focused in delivering this project first, but also letting this be the foundation of me bringing more movies to the silver screen.
That concludes our interview but we’d like to thank RZA and Eli for talking with us. Be sure to check out The Man With The Iron Fists, in theatres this weekend.
