The Washington City Paper recently talked to RZA about his new movie “The Man With the Iron Fists”. I’ve posted some excerpts below, the link is here.
RZA on making movies:
“The process was all preparation, I really had to prepare myself. I tried to make a few independent films years ago, like Bobby Digital and Wu Tang vs. The Golden Phoenix, which we actually have in the can. I think now that I’ve finished this film, I can go back and re-edit those. But anyway, it was a long process. A lot of hard work, a lot of mindpower, even a lot of physical work. Just keeping myself in shape, mentally and physically, it wasn’t easy. But I’m a man that was prepared for the job, a man with a determined idea, and I just kept pushing for what I wanted; I didn’t let the dream go.”
WCP: I read a quote from you in an interview that said you “like to make your albums like movies.” How different is your process for making movies than it is for making music?
RZA: Music can be done by one man. He can make a whole album by himself if he has the talent and the ideas. Although, in a studio environment, in my experience, we’d maybe have about a dozen people—the engineer, a few musicians, those type of people—but it can all be done by one person, essentially. A film is, I want to say, 100 times deeper. First of all, you’re dealing with hundreds of people. I had over 400 people working for me; I had 17 departments, and I had to talk with the heads of each department and then make sure they go back and tell of their people what had to be done. To me, this is the supreme power of the brain, because it’s all still one vision, one thought, and one product, but it’s a massive collaboration of energy that has to come together. And as the director, you have to be able to move all of that energy together to a focal point. It’s like taking all the power and making it into a single laser beam. If you don’t have the ability to do that, it’s going to show and the product isn’t going to come out.
