Martial arts has always been important to RZA. His hip-hop group The Wu Tang Clan was based on a classic style of martial arts, and his directorial debut was his long dreamed of martial arts film The Man With the Iron Fists. He practices and loves to watch martial arts movies too. RZA got to go to Thailand to film Tom Yum Goong 2 with Tony Jaa, and stars in this week’s new release Brick Mansions, an English language remake of District B13.
David Belle reprises his role as the Parkour running hero, teamed up with an undercover cop (Paul Walker) to stop a bomb in the neighborhood. RZA plays Tremaine Alexander, the local drug lord who has much more flare than his French counterpart. Tremaine likes to cook and some scenes show him preparing elaborate meals. RZA was cool enough to remember me from interviews for Man with the Iron Fists, including just this past January when he announced he was writing a sequel. This time I got to get RZA’s thoughts on Parkour, CGI martial arts and more on that Iron Fists sequel.
CraveOnline: You were influenced by Wu Tang and Kung Fu in your life and your music. What were your thoughts when Parkour came along 10 years ago?
RZA: 10 years? Maybe a little longer?
District B13 was 2004.
The cool thing is Parkour hit the movie theaters 10 years ago, but the art developed earlier than that. I remember Parkour. I’m a hip-hop artist so I got to travel the world, and Parkour was growing in the ‘90s but it didn’t hit the movie theater until 10 years ago. Now that it’s coming to America, I’m so happy to be a guy that’s part of it, part of this cast that’s going to exposure it to America. The cool thing about borrowing art, think about Ong Bak. Ong Bak led to a movie called Chocolate. Now, when you go watch our superhero movies, we see those moves in it now, years later. The Raid, now by next year or a year or two…
We’ll have the American The Raid.
Exactly. So I love to see the cross-pollination of art translate to our culture because when we accept it, it goes bigger. If America don’t like it, it’s still third world.
Have you added any Parkour to your practice?
Not nowadays. What I can say is this to you. Me and David may be around the same age, right? Very weirdly, and this is the truth, in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, Brownsville, which is a project, we did something called Cat Agility where the guys would run around, nine of us would run around and because of the way the project was made, we had to run around and jump off shit and do shit. That was fun to us. There’s a writer that’s a buddy of mine who’s now a writer named Darryl Glover. Look him up and ask him what’s the name of the thing you guys used to do in Brownsville back in 1979, 1980? Not the same. These guys are just do]ing some incredible shit.
It’s like when breakdancing first came out, all we did was the sweep. And by the time it got popular they were spinning on their heads. Some of the foundation of this spirit, I look at everything as a spirit. Even skateboarders, when I had a skateboard it was skinny and all I could do was the tap. Now these guys are jumping off of 360s and 720s. I just say that the spirit of subculture and the spirit of art strikes the world, but somebody develops it and masters it. David became a master at this. Where some guys could say, like how Bruce Lee brought Wing Chun to the world, like maybe before he did it 200 guys knew what it was. Now two million guys know what it is. David brought Parkour to the world with District 13 and now with Brick Mansions, it’s over. This shit be over.
Did the character of Tremaine grow when you came on board, or was it already bigger than the role in B13?
No, Luc Besson wrote this and I guess he wrote it for the American audience. When I was reading it, I did see the original. I was like damn, a lot of things are changing from the original and I wondered why. It had nothing to do with me, to my knowledge. Even this message is different, wouldn’t you agree? This one is a little more political. It wasn’t so political in the original, not political to the sense of this magnitude. I don’t know who Luc met in his life or what inspired him to write a character that was such a savage find some humanity, I don’t know. All I know is that as an actor, I didn’t find it until halfway into the filming because the original was in my head. I don’t want to be that guy. I know what he’s doing. He just shot a guy for nothing. He shot a guy for laughing. How is anybody going to care about this guy? Why?
I’ll never forget the day when I realized it. It was when I came in, when I put the suit on with the silk scarf and I kidnapped the girl and was coming to talk to her. That was the first day as an actor, and this was probably about my ninth day of filming. I had 22 days out of their 60, probably 35 days into production and I was like, “Wait a minute. Tremaine has to have something special. If not, who gives a fuck about this guy really? Why should he be anybody but an asshole that deserves to rot like the guy he just shot in the earlier scene?” No, because he has another quality about him. He has something that’s valuable. He’s just a product of his environment. You give him a better environment, he’ll give you a better leader.
Was the cooking your idea?
No, the cooking was written in as well. It wasn’t written as far as the details. It wasn’t him physically doing everything he was doing. As an actor you’ve got to take material and you’ve got to find your rhythm with it. No, they had a line in the original screenplay that said “his mother’s jerk pork.” And I was like well, when I was growing up, the Jamaicans in my neighborhood, the mean ones ate curry goat and that’s what he’s going to be making. So I found some things about some of the people who I knew and I just tried to embody that, and I like to cook. I don’t know if you know that about me.
So for me when I got on set I was like, “Yo, bring me two pounds of goat meat. Give me some peppers. Give me some hot shit. I’m gonna eat it.” I kind of had fun, but they said that in the screenplay, it said that he knew his mother’s secret recipe. The line was, “If my mother knew I was adding this much pepper to her jerk pork.” I changed it to curry goat I think but the idea was let me cook it. Let me go ahead. Let me be for real. Let me go. Then I got happy with it. You know, you get happy with something. The bottom line is when it got good to me, I was throwing my spices in. I wonder how they edited that scene.
So you actually tasted it?
I didn’t taste the curry goat though. I left it for the crew. I’m a vegetarian.
You got to be in Tom Yum Goong 2 with Tony Jaa. Were you concerned about Tony going into CGI?
No, not at this level of the game, no. Tony’s been working so hard for so many years, man. He’s been injured so many times. He injured me. I only did one movie and I got injured. 3D is big, it’s popular, it’s fun, it attracts more kids to the theaters. I wasn’t upset with that. I read about some people that were upset with it but people that don’t grow with their artists need to figure that out, because your artist is going to grow. He’s going to grow a beard. He’s going to grow gray hair. You can quit him, you’re going to grow gray hair too though. So when we abandon our artists and abandon their growth, we actually abandon a part of ourselves because our artists inspired it. Don’t let inspiration stop being inspiration to you. That’s just my advice.
When Gordon Liu came on the set of Iron Fists, he was an older brother now, he had a little sickness already. He is not going to do no Kung Fu for me. He did Kung Fu in Kill Bill for Quentin and that was eight years earlier. He was not ready to do Kung Fu for me. I’d actually seen him do Kung Fu in a movie two years prior, True Legend with so much wire[work], it wasn’t 36th Chamber. So I didn’t need him to do Kung Fu for me. I needed him to be that teacher, that master, that abbot. From his first movie, 36th Chamber, there was an abbot that just did that and knocked him across the room. I told him, “That’s who you are now. You don’t never gotta punch nobody again. All you gotta do is look and they know.” To me, that’s me growing with him. You’ve got to grow with your artists and grow with people that inspire you.
I agree with you. We can’t reject our artists as soon as they do something different. We might not agree with every way they grow but I like the idea of growing with them.
For me, I got fans that see this picture of me as Tremaine, I’ve got a lot of girls loving it but some of the guys say, “Oh, he’s getting soft.” I’m known for things in my mouth and hair all nappy and shit. They want to see me crazy still. What bugged me the most, actually this hurt me a little bit, when Paul passed, I was in the studio and I stopped working on the project I was working on and I decided to write a song for him. When some of my fans were like, “You wimp, you soft” it pissed me off and shit.
Actually I did feel a little offended by it because forget them at one point, but what about the respect, yo? It cost me $1000 a day. Actually this studio was three grand a day that I was in at that time. It’s in Malibu. So I took my time to do something else. I could’ve just sat there and kept rapping about my dick, which my song was about getting some pussy, the first song I was writing. I could’ve kept that going. No, I made them take it off, change the session, light candles and let’s take a moment to pay our respect. And while paying the respect, my heart had filled with emotion and my eyes were getting a little watery and shit, and I was like, “Oh, shit, this is crazy” because it’s scary.
More than anything it’s scary because he’s a good man. I try to be a good man. I try my best to be a good man every day. It’s not easy for none of us, but I try. Now a good man being dead and you lose it, that shit is scary. He got children. So because of that, I decided to spend my time writing a song, yo. And I called my son who was visiting me from New York. I was like, “Yo, come here, I want you to play.” He never played on a song before. He just plays with his band and whatever. I said, “Well, I need somebody to play. I got a song, I need somebody to sing it too.” I sung it first. I can’t let nobody hear that. I had an engineer who could sing and he sung it over for me. People were like, “You soft, you soft, you soft, you soft, you soft.” Anyway.
I know you’re only writing Man with the Iron Fists 2. Is the Blacksmith going to be in the sequel?
Yeah, he came back a little bit.
Is the plan to go theatrical?
I don’t know. I think the quality of it is going to determine it. I think they’ll look at it and they’ll figure it out. The plan was always to do a few of these. The plan was to franchise the character, to franchise that world. We wrote so much story about it, even now there’s a whole bunch of saga of it, of great scenes that nobody will ever see, or they will see, depending. I wrote so much about this character. Remember, this is a long dream character.
Will we finally learn how he wipes with those iron fists?
[Laughs] We talked about that. There’s one joke, because he was so morbid on the first one, there’s a scene where he’s captured and he says, “Excuse me, you. Come here, can you scratch my balls?” I think it’d be a good joke but then the director was like, “No.” So I said, “Can you scratch my nose?”
That might be the one that ends up in the movie.
That might be the one they use.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever and The Shelf Space Awards. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
