His The Man With The Iron Fists, opens on November 2, so, naturally RZA's doing the press tour thing.
Among one of his stops was New York Times HQ to discuss the music, and, of course, the film. It's a 2-page piece full of revelations, like, while most believe that Iron Fist is his directorial debut, he's actually directed 2 films before this, under his alter ego Bobby Digital (both he financed himself, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and both were never released):
Among the projects from that period that he says he couldn’t resist was a film that he directed, starred in and paid for ($400,000) based on his superhero alter ego, Bobby Digital. RZA said that one studio offered him about $250,000 to distribute the movie, and another $500,000, but he had his heart set on $1 million. “At this time, I think I was more conceited,” he said as he sampled from plates of red velvet waffles, onion rings and a vegetarian Reuben sandwich. “I’m not going to take no 250, 500 grand from nobody, during this bloom of my life. I played hardball and the deal walked away.” A second feature he directed and financed, a martial-arts movie called “Wu-Tang vs. the Golden Phoenix,” similarly languished, and both films remain unreleased.
We've highlighted both films here on S&A, and maybe I'll revist thata post to remind you folks, in case you've forgotten.
He also mentions that the Iron Fist script collaboration with Eli Roth began in 2009, so it's been a 3-year journey to see this $20 million project come to fruition – a journey that he details, from script, to getting Quentin Tarantino's blessing, to pitching to studios and finally selling it, all the concessions he had to make, and finally how he labored to edit the film down from 3 hours to the 96-minutes version we'll see in theaters next month.
Maybe the blu-ray disk will contains the 3-hour director's cut.
He reveals that filmmaking is the perfect medium for a man of his cast creative talents, allowing him to merge worlds, adding that, at 43 years old, he'd love to make 10 to 12 films over the course of the remainder of his life.
And lastly, there's mention of upcoming projects; we already know about his teaming with Reginald Hudlin to adapt celebrated comic book author Grant Morrison's latest work, titled Happy!
But we definitely weren't aware of another project that's on his to-do list, something called One Spoon Of Chocolate. The New York Times piece doesn't say much further about this mystery film, except that it's a still-gestating period piece that would span the 1960s and 1970s.
Hmmm… curious.
But now that the word is out (a google search revealed absolutely nothing), I'm sure he'll be forced to talk about it in detail, in successive interviews.
Check out the full interview HERE.
