Wu-Tang’s RZA in His Director Era, Fueled by Tarantino
The cinephile makes his case for theatrical — and why filmmaking is ‘an orchestra’
Many years ago, when I was a fresh-faced reporter, a magazine sent me to cover the junket for Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. I was quickly thrown into the deep end: You’re here; you have to interview everybody, the publicists told me.
And so I did… starting with RZA, the legendary leader of the Staten Island hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan, who made his film debut in Jarmusch’s 1999 film.
Being the subject of my first-ever interview, he was kind enough to humor me and my ignorance at the time, and the experience gave me a valuable lesson: Know what you’re going into, and be prepared for anything.
It’s a message that’s applicable not just to RZA’s latest movie — the revenge thriller One Spoon of Chocolate — but to his experience with filmmaking itself.
“If I could give you an analogy: When you’re making an album, maybe you’ve got 10-12 people. Making a film, you need an orchestra,” he tells me on the latest episode of Rushfield Lunch. “You need hundreds of people to deliver a good quality film. To be a director, you have to have a lot of your brain operating at the same time. I approach it even knowing my lenses and my ISO (film speed, or its sensitivity to light). My brain has always been that way.”
Coming to theaters in May, One Spoon of Chocolate focuses on Unique (Shameik Moore, who voices Miles Morales in the Spider-Verse films), a military vet and ex-con whose attempt to start fresh in a small town quickly goes awry when he clashes with a gang of white supremacists. As with RZA’s debut feature, The Man with the Iron Fists in 2012, One Spoon of Chocolate is presented by Quentin Tarantino, RZA’s longtime mentor. (“As a filmmaker, RZA really brought home the bacon on an old-school, foot-to-ass, revenge-a-matic!” Tarantino said in a statement. “This picture drives audiences wild wherever it screens. We’ll sell you a whole seat, but you’ll only use the edge of it.”)
RZA, 57, and Tarantino met in the early 2000s and quickly became “kung-fu brothers” due to their shared interest in the genre, he says. That friendship later turned professional when RZA produced the soundtrack for Tarantino’s hip-hop epic Kill Bill.
“I ended up spending about six years with Quentin, and that’s where I really became a total cinephile because he introduced me to so many different genres of films,” he says. “I never would have watched Paul Mazurski’s films. I never would have been a big fan of Kris Kristofferson, beyond the movie Convoy, but his whole catalog. There were so many things that I got exposed to that I became a cinephile.”
Hear much more from the New York-born renaissance man in our chat today, including why it was imperative that One Spoon of Chocolate received a theatrical release and what movies he’d recommend to young audiences hoping to learn more about the revenge-splatter genre.