Several new cast and crew interviews have hit the internet. The first (and longer) one comes from UGO Movie Blog.
Chow Yun-Fat
He fires two guns simultaneously better than any other actor living or deceased. He’s fought on paper-thin branches in the lush forests of QING China. He’s danced with Jodie Foster while commanding his own kingdom. And now international superstar Chow Yun-Fat takes on his what is perhaps his most diverse challenge yet; Master Roshi, mentor to Earth-saving hero Goku in the upcoming film version of the wildly successful Japanese mangas Dragonball.
Chow was not familiar with the Dragonball series until the role in the film was brought to his attention. At the time of the manga release, the actor says, “I was so busy doing all of John Woo’s movies, I didn’t see it when it first came out.” But a number of elements in the script appealed to him; the action, the humor, the mythology, but most of all, the relationship between Roshi and his student Goku (played by Justin Chatwin). Their dynamic was key to the actor in both his decision to take the role and how he played the part. “It’s not a traditional master and student relationship, it’s more like a friendship,” he says.
In the manga, Roshi’s character is portrayed as something of a dirty old man. But Chow explains how the character has been toned down, “The way it is now is very appropriate for my character.” He then expounds, “Master Roshi is a very funny guy with a sense of humor.” says Chow . “I never have played this kind of character and for me it’s very brand new; comedy, drama, action, all the CGI.” Having done comedy in his native Hong Kong films before, Western comedy is something the actor was quite new to. He found this to be the most challenging aspect of his role. Speaking of comedy, he says, “It’s very cultural. It’s not easy. (Writer/Director) James Wong gave me a lot of room to create Master Roshi,” he says. “All the time I’m over the top and he’s telling me, Mr. Chow, too much, too much.” Compared to his previous work, the actor explains, “Action is more physical, comedy is difficult for every actor, except Jim Carrey. I try and I hope that (people) like it.”
And while the actor is very used to squibs and heavy physical stunts, CGI is something he’s relatively new to. “I did some wire work in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but not like in this movie. This movie is like forty to fifty percent CGI.” He describes the process of acting against a blue or green screen as quite demanding, or more specifically, like “Acting to the air.”
Chow also cites the opportunity for diversity that Dragonball affords him. He mentions the limited amount of roles Hollywood typically affords Asian actors. Usually, he says he’ll be a “Gangster, a waiter, a drug dealer. This is a great opportunity to let an audience see the other side of Chow Yun-Fat. They can see the guy in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, or maybe they see the King of Siam. I want more different directions for my characters.” And his ideal role? “A character who doesn’t speak a word.” Then he adds with a laugh, “I wouldn’t need a dialogue coach at all.”
James Marsters
“I’d been a fan for five years and had seen ninety-eight percent of the Dragonball episodes before I got the role,” says James Marsters who plays Big Bad Piccolo, archnemesis of Goku in Twentieth Century Fox’s upcoming live action adaptation of the immensely popular Japanses manga. Then he adds, “I’ve got a son who will kill me if I get this wrong.”
Marsters, best known for his infamous role as Spike, the seductively nefarious vampire in Buffy the Vampire Slayer is in full makeup (a four hour ordeal) waiting for a climactic battle scene to be lit on the set of the film in Durango, Mexico. “When I first got cast, I thought that I was not right for Piccolo,” Marsters continues. “I have to give it to (screenwriter/director) Jim Wong, I understand why he cast me now, now I feel like there’s not another human being who can do the role.”
Marsters doesn’t consider his character to be a villain in the traditional sense. “Piccolo was working with the Mystics. He did one thing the Mystics didn’t agree with, and instead of talking about it, they threw him in jail. And it was not a nice a jail, it was like where no molecule in your body moves for two thousand years. I don’t think Piccolo’s evil, he’s just really mad.” The actor expounds by comparing this aspect of the film to literary classics. “In Shakespeare, there really are no villains or heroes, there would just be people behaving in a villainous manner or a heroic manner; it depends on what chapter of their life that you happened to climb in on. And I think Dragonball has the same kind of universe where people start really evil and get redeemed in a fairly realistic way. I think that takes it away from white hats and black hats stapled on characters.”
Marsters also took on the role for personal reasons. When speaking of both the film and the manga, Marsters comments, “I’m a fan because it helped me raise my son to understand his aggression and his anger is not a bad thing. It’s a dragon you have to ride. You can’t kill your own dragon, but at the same time, you can’t let your dragon run you out of control. Dragonball helps to teach young boys that being a real man is being a goofy man sometimes. Being a kind man, being a gentle man. And that has nothing to do with being weak. That is a good role model and it’s helped me explain to my son how to be a man.”
Knowing what magnitude Piccolo holds in the story, Marsters has put his own unique stamp on the role. “I really wanted the character to be hungry, old, decrepit and ugly. And for that to work for me, I had to look in the mirror and think myself ugly and decrepit. I wanted a makeup that my girlfriend would not want to kiss.” Then he pauses and comments, “Which I got, and which is really frustrating.”
Writer and Director James Wong
Taking a break from the genre he’s most known for (see Final Destinations 1 and 3 and the X-Files for more on this), writer/director James Wong turns his talents to adapting Akira Toriyama’s hugely popular manga Dragonball to the big screen in a tentpole film larger in scope than anything the filmmaker has undertaken before.
Wong was not all that familiar with the series before he began work on the movie. “Except through my kids, who were watching Dragonball Z, I didn’t really know too much about it. When I heard about it, I thought ‘wow,’ I don’t know what to do with this thing, it’s so crazy.” But that was enough to spark his interest. “I looked at the mangas and it gave me a whole different perspective of what this movie could be. So I read the books and I was totally enthralled by them. They’re really charming and fun.”
Wong found himself dealing with the challenge of staying faithful to his source material and adapting the work so it can be enjoyed by all audiences, not just diehard fans of the original. “There’s eighteen books, so there’s an incredible amount of story that can be put into one movie.” He explains further, “I also wanted to age up Goku, because in the mangas he’s only about twelve years old and it’s not until the end that he becomes a teenager. So we wanted to start him on his eighteenth birthday, and that changes a lot. But I think the most important thing in the movie is to capture the tone and the fun that Dragonball is. It was a matter of trying to figure out the journey for Goku, how he comes to realize who he is.”
Adapting a work of such fantastical depths was another pressing aspect of putting the film together. “We obviously had to take out parts that we could do. The mangas are so fantastic, there are so many different places you can go.” The filmmaker’s goal is to take Goku from relatability into this otherworldly universe. Wong explains, “As he goes on his adventure, things that he visits and environments that he’s in become much more fantastic. We wanted to bring in people who don’t know Dragonball into the world and hopefully (that) allows them to go out, look back at the Manga and get caught up in it the same way like I did.”
Another aspect of the picture Wong is looking to make an impression with are the fight sequences. He says, “One of the things Fox asked was, ‘how is this gonna look different and feel from other martial arts movies that we’ve seen?’” From this question, the filmmakers responded with two different approaches. The first involved the use of state-of-the-art high-tech tiny cameras—so small they can actually be fitted directly onto an actor. Wong explains, “Our visual effects supervisor suggested you can have actually a “fist-cam.” To which he demonstrates by indicating an area on his arm he’d mount the camera and then throwing a slow-motion punch. The other approach involved shutter speed. Wong says, “(Director of photography) Robert McLachlan showed me this thing on YouTube where a scientist poked a hole in a balloon shot at a thousand frames per second. And when the pin hit the balloon, the balloon broke apart immediately, but the water retained the shape (of the balloon), and then it started cascading down. We thought that was a really interesting look, and we thought how can we employ this technology, this camera within our fight sequences. We built some moments around this incredible device.”
Ultimately, Wong speaks of his greatest hope in making Dragonball, the live action film. “If we can get this movie to get people excited and have them read mangas, that would be the greatest thing, to introduce this world of Dragonball to the public and if they get into it, they’ll really get into the whole saga. So I think this is a really special project and I’m really excited to be doing it.”
Producer & Costume Designer
Bringing a manga/video game/animated series to life is no small feat. In order to successfully adapt the sights, tone and feel of the work, every department has to think way outside the box of what they’re normally accustomed to. Writer/Director James Wong’s Dragonballscreenplay, based on Akira Toriyama’s massively successful series, creates a larger-than-life universe where an ordinary kid becomes a master warrior who defends the Earth from unspeakable aliens, proved to be a chief qualifier of this rule.
While the film is packed with stunts and gizmos of all shapes and sizes (weapons and gadgets range from a Humvee/tank built from spare parts to a small capsule that mutates into a motorcycle), Dragonball will also be a very visual effects-heavy film. Producer Tim Van Rellim claims the movie will present, “A realistic future, you don’t know where you are, or what time period you’re in,” and to achieve this, somewhere close to eight hundred visual effects will be employed to bring the world to life.
But the aesthetic look of the film is only one aspect of the production. Costume designer Mayes Rubeo was told to study Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai in order to capture the wardrobe style the filmmakers are going for. In paying homage to Dragonball creator Toriyama, Rubeo explains, “We tried to make the costumes as close to a Japanese gee as we could.” She then continues by saying that while tradition was important, her department is also aware of the movie’s audience. Alas, the costume department tried to modernize their costumes to a degree. The result is a hybrid of Old East meets New West.
Costumes were tailored specifically to characters. Rubeo says, “Piccolo (the movie’s predominant antagonist) was the most important guy in terms of power, so we wanted to give him a rich fabric, and elegant look, but also keep the interesting elements from the anime.” Conversely, Master Roshi, who serves as hero Goku’s teacher and mentor, is always seen sporting a Hawaiian shirt. “He’s sort of like the Big Lebowski of them all,” Rubeo explains, “with an interesting philosophy.”
Propmaster Colin Thurston also found his team creating devices and gadgets not of this Earth. With a dragonball locator, which is a palm-sized tracking device, Thurston was able to save the visual effects department a great deal of time and money. “We’ve actually got a live action working object, which everyone is gonna think is really good but is really just light through a piece with computer graphics (drawn) on it,” he says with a smile. The movie’s guns, of which there are a wide variety of types and calibers, were a long time in discussion before they were constructed. “We had conversations about whether we were gonna adapt real guns to make them work, but you can never come up with a really good design that you don’t have to have the basis of a real gun on it,” says Thurston. “So we went completely independently.”
Originally set to be released in August of 2008, Dragonball has been pushed to April 2009. The producers seem relieved by this, as now they’ll have more time to render the movie’s effects to the level they were initially designed at. A strong credo around the set is that the film is not just aimed at manga fans. The filmmakers are looking to bring in a much wider audience, appealing to everyone between the ages of eight and thirty.
And here’s a new interview with James Marsters. This actually came from the magazine, Death Ray.
DR: So what liberties have you taken with Lord Piccolo?
JM: In the cartoon, Lord Piccolo is this old, wizened man. He looks like he is 95 years old and he’s green. He looks like a wart. He’s got so many wrinkles and he walks with a stick. He’s this crone figure in a big hood. But Piccolo is younger than that in our film, he’s more powerful than that, but he’s still old and in some ways decrepit. His transformation is something we’re going to save until later.
DR: Spike, Braniac, Captain John an now Lord Piccolo – you have a reputation for playing sympathetic monsters . . .
JM: I cut my teeth in regional theatre, which means we did a lot of Shakespeare because you didn’t have to pay any rights. And I’m very happy that I sis. IN Shakespeare there are not good and band guys. There are just people who are in conflict or who are making mistakes. That is reflected very much in Dragonball and Dragon Ball Z.
DR: What about Piccolo? You could have chosen to play him as irredeemably evil . .
JM: I don’t think he is evil at all! He has a very good reason for being angry. He was a victim of this binding spell. He was in a place where he couldn’t breathe, his molecules couldn’t move and a though would take a thousand years to come to the outside of his consciousness . . . simply for being in disagreement with the mystics., They rob him of his youth. When he finally bursts out of prison, he’s an old man and he’s mad! And so he has to find the dragonballs.
DR You’ve been filming in Mexico, but there is, of course, a Japanese influence everywhere. What kind of world is this?
JM: It’s just like the cartoon. It’s in the near future. It’s a multi national world where ethnicity is not really addressed. IN the cartoon they had a dog as president of the world! It’s the weirdest thing. So we’ve cast it from all over the world without an eye towards ethnicity.
Read the rest of the interview here!
