Viraldice

Like so many middling horror films, The Wretched gets an A for effort. The film’s creature design is incredible, and the weighty old school score is worthy of a more impressive film, but ultimately the whole assembly is a bit of a belly flop.

The film starts with a throwback to 35 years ago in a lakeside town. We see early on that there is something darn creepy in the basement of a house that is determined to get the newly designated babysitter, but that is about all we see. This amuse bouche is just attempting to ratchet up the tension early on, and it certainly got my interest. I mean, what could possibly be down there?

Fast forward to present day. Ben (John-Paul Howard) is spending the summer with his dad (Jamison Jones) soon after his parents’ separation. His dad, the local marina chief, quickly puts him to work running a tight ship (pun intended) and keeping order on the lake. Even with working all the time, the two seem happy enough to reconnect and sweat together for a couple months. That is, until the next door neighbors start acting odd.

The young couple, with a baby son, are already a little non-traditional. Mom and Dad (Zarah Mahler and Kevin Bigley) are tattooed, rock and roll types. Rather than going out of its way to show these two as just another version of acceptable modern parents, The Wretched uses their alternative leanings as a launching point to contrast their style before and after an incident. When mom brings home a dead deer in her truck to clean and eat, to her husband’s chagrin, unusual things start happening. The first major signal that not everything is well is the long-fingered monster who climbs out of the carcass late one night. Her appearance leads to the mom not acting, nor dressing, like herself ever again.

While I appreciate what The Wretched is trying to do here by showing us her changes with wardrobe, rather than telling is precisely what has happened, the whole transition reaks of the overall lack of subtlety throughout the film. The plot points are called attention to multiple times, while (metaphorically) jabbing the audience aggressively in the ribs rather than letting us discover these adjustments or get to know the characters on our own. There is a place for such filmmaking, but when attempting to create tension or unleash a monster on a small town a little cinematic cunning can go much further than overt finger pointing.

That monster, on the other hand, is revealed slowly and is a brilliant exploration in creature design. Madelynn Stuenkel is credited as “The Wretched,” however within the text of the film she is called the “Dark Mother.” There is a certain degree of mythology building around her which would have been nice to hear more about. I realize I just criticized The Wretched for explaining too much and now I wish it would explain more, but the reason behind that is the fact that the Dark Mother is the best thing about The Wretched. Stuenkel’s performance is both organic and otherworldly and the practical makeup aiding in her transformation is as beautiful as it is unsettling.

Also, the heart of the fear that the Dark Mother brings to The Wretched is the fear of forgetting. Allegedly the Dark Mother feasts on the forgotten, and helps those around them fully forget. This threat of not just death, but assimilation and being forgotten by loved ones is such a basic fear. Imagining your loved ones not missing you one bit if you go missing might be the only thing worse than imagining their pain of losing you. Granted, The Wretched is not especially consistent in applying this rule, but the nugget of a truly good idea is in there somewhere.

It is the accumulation of these good bits which ultimately make The Wretched a frustrating film to watch. It has everything going for it: the score, the creature, the mythology, and the basic human fear of being forgotten. But when thrown together with disregard to its own rules and with some obvious choices in characterization and plot, the overall effect is a bland exercise in unfulfilled potential.

Knives And Skin has been compared to David Lynch’s work a lot - including in this year's Fantasia Film Festival programme. Given that its plot is kicked off by a girl going missing by a river, that the movie subsequently pays more attention to a range of subplots than the A-plot, and that its characters and dialogue are strange and heightened, it’s easy to see why. The similarities are definitely there. But Knives And Skin is more than a mere Twin Peaks ripoff. Rather, it sits at a nexus of Peaks, Donnie Darko, and River’s Edge, telling a multifaceted coming-of-age story in an unconventional, almost hallucinatory way.

Carolyn Harper is missing, and her small town has rallied together to find her. Or rather, they haven’t. Nobody quite knows how to respond to Carolyn’s disappearance, but the search continues all the same. Between Carolyn’s friends, family, and classmates, the town of Big River will reckon with much more than the vanishing of one girl. Strange things are afoot.

That’s the plot, ostensibly, but the real meat here lies in the stories of the characters circling around it. Everyone spends the movie dealing with their grief, but their coping mechanisms and their own issues vary wildly. Two girls tentatively begin a lesbian relationship. A family struggles with the pressures of infidelity, distrust, and an incoming third child. A student sells her mother’s prescription meds to her teacher. A sad clown hides his unemployment from his family by pretending to go to work, sitting in a field, and engaging in an affair. It's all odd, and all oddly captivating.

Writer-director Jennifer Reeder imbues all of this with an aesthetic so thick and palpable it might as well be a character in its own right. Christopher Rejano’s cinematography is all reds, purples, and browns, with Mike Olenick’s languid editing giving even daylit scenes a feeling of temporal ambiguity. The score, lush with synthesisers, is just as hazy, lending the film a dreamlike quality that will either hypnotise or repulse, depending on your attitude toward such things. Songs appear in the film both as soundtrack, and as diagetic musical numbers, the characters singing ‘80s pop tunes as slow a-cappella hymns. And characters behave in emotionally-true but logically-inexplicable ways.

Heightened, weird dialogue is difficult to do well, but Reeder nails it. Hilariously banal, creatively profane, and stunningly idiosyncratic, Reeder has created a highly-quotable patter that feels true to real-life girlhood and yet also entirely unique to her own characters and world. Some of it is made up of amusing non-sequiturs, but elsewhere the dialogue attains an air of disaffected poetry, bordering on the absurd. It helps, also, that Reeder’s cast is made up of terrific actors, and that she’s clearly got them all operating on the same wavelength. There's true consistency of voice here.

Reeder might have been born in the early ‘70s, but her film speaks to the generation currently emerging into adulthood in an uncertain world. Two scenes in particular really hold Knives And Skin together. In the first, a musical number midway through the film, the characters sing Naked Eyes’ “Promises Promises,” transforming it from a poppy breakup song into a lament for an entire generation. In the second, the students gather on their school’s rooftop to catch a glimpse at a distant highway poking above the trees, just to reassure themselves there’s a way out. Youth today often express a sense of hopelessness and betrayal, given the uncertain political and economic climate (and literal climate), and the dream, dashed a little bit more every year, that anyone can be anything they want to be. Knives And Skin paints lots of tiny pictures of that idea. Its young characters bristle to get out but have nowhere to go.

Knives And Skin is also a specifically female-driven movie in a way many “female-driven movies” aren’t. Most of its principal characters are women, certainly, but it’s the sheer variety of personality within the cast that makes it such a unique film about women. Each character has idiosyncratic style, attitude, and dreams, and underneath the detached veneer of the film, all are taken seriously. The film’s men, similarly troubled, are also taken seriously, but they’re mostly there to drive the women’s stories. So singular is this movie’s specific flavour of feminism - so convincing is its reclamation of slurs and the like - that our festival audience clamoured for merch bearing the phrase “I treat girls like shit.”

At nearly two hours, Knives And Skin could easily lose a little of its running time. But its slow, dreamy pace is also key to its success, just as in other noir tales less neon- and glitter-soaked than this one. Its weird narrative digressions, strange world-building, and stylistic flourishes all contribute to a portrait of the state of having nowhere to go. Strange, funny, beautiful, and profoundly melancholic, Knives And Skin begs to be seen big and loud. Look for it in cult-favourite lists in years to come.

Hobbs & Shaw is just around the corner. Get your tickets now!

Jason Statham is a man of many talents. In previous lives, he was a championship diver, martial arts master, and a fashion model before making a seamless transition into acting via a variety of tongue-in-cheek action movies culminating in Statham's inevitable joining of the Fast & Furious family. Spin-off Hobbs & Shaw finds him tussling with fellow bald and hard-man The Rock. Before that, though, Statham took on a comedy heavyweight in the form of Melissa McCarthy.

When Spy writer-director Paul Feig caught Statham in the ludicrously entertaining Crank movies, he knew instantly the tough-as-nails action star could do comedy even if, at the time, it was the furthest thing from his repertoire. Statham's Crank character was in on the joke but the actor still played it straight, which made his portrayal even funnier. For the role of super-spy Rick Ford, a turtleneck aficionado with more than a few tall tales about his illustrious career ("I drove a car off a freeway on top of a train while it was on fire. Not the car, I was on fire") and a sandpaper-rough Cockney accent, Feig only had one man in mind. Statham was the last person anybody else would've considered for the role, and yet it fit him like a perfectly tailored suit (of his own creation, natch).

Ford's refusal to accept newcomer Susan (McCarthy's previously desk-bound agent) as his equal is similar to how Shaw dismisses man mountain Hobbs who, as far as he's concerned, could never blend in the way Shaw can due to, well, looking like The Rock. Still, neither Shaw nor Ford is necessarily a bad guy. They're both smug, self-assured pricks, but it's impossible to hate either because they do get the job done every time – albeit in the most ludicrous manner possible.

Rick Ford is a truly brilliant creation, loaded with bravado but completely clueless once he's lost or, rather, thrown away the job that defines him. In vast contrast to Jude Law's suave Bradley Fine, Ford is rough and impulsive. There's a frequently hilarious juxtaposition between Fine's suited and booted Bond-lite (though the British Law, weirdly, sports an American accent for the role) and Ford's bald, turtleneck-sporting, and foul-mouthed east-ender (listen for how he punctuates each "fuck"). Ford is a bit like Daniel Craig's Bond, only with even less patience. When he appears in a brand new suit out of nowhere, confusing everyone, he deadpans "I fucking made it, didn't I?" as though it makes perfect sense.

Statham's is an intensely controlled performance that bounces perfectly off McCarthy's amiable persona, their relaxed back-and-forth growing sharper as Susan gains the confidence to fight against her detractors. Both play it straight, which gives the jokes room to breathe without any nudge-nudge-wink-wink posturing. McCarthy is, naturally, the looser of the two. Statham's poise as a model and diver serves him well; he's very exact with his timing, spitting out lines at speed but always enunciating (as with the many "F" bombs). Many of his funniest lines were fed to the actor on set by Feig, which gave him seconds to nail them and then deliver them deadpan. His performance is taken to another level when you consider Statham didn't necessarily get to rehearse these moments.

It's worth mentioning, too, that Law, who has considerably more experience in lighter fare, isn't nearly as comfortable doing comedy here. While performing an impression of a crazy cupcake, Law overplays his hand by relying on exaggerated facial contortions. Contrast this with Statham listing all the things he's done that everyone told him he couldn't – "walk through fire, water-ski blindfolded, take up piano at a late age" – without a shred of irony. Hell, the first time we meet Ford, he's trying to force the other agents to admit there's a Face/Off machine somewhere in the building that he's not allowed to use. In less capable hands, these moments would play too broadly, but Statham has the control, honed through years of selling death-defyingly insane stunts and playing gangsters who will do anything for their cut, to keep everything in check. He sells the insanity as the mundane. 

Spy is McCarthy's film but, just as her fledgling agent has to prove herself against a disbelieving commanding officer (a take-no-shit Allison Janney), her worried BFF, Nancy, and all manner of bad guys, she also has to shake off Ford at every turn. As the film flits around various European hot-spots, Ford repeatedly shows up to compromise Susan's mission, most memorably appearing out of the darkest corner of her hotel room to brag about speaking in front of Congress as Barack Obama ("In black-face? That's not appropriate...") and, later, sitting behind Susan in a cafe dressed, as Nancy points out, as though he's in Newsies. Ford keeps going on about how stealth he is but, hilariously, the super agent blows his cover at every turn.

In fact, the one time he actually shows up in disguise, it comprises a wholly unconvincing ensemble; bad wig, sunglasses, moccasins, and a shiny seventies-style shirt. On the dance-floor of an exclusive club, Ford moves about erratically, the only time his veneer cracks slightly. Scrambling around with Susan on the floor, his slippery shoes throwing him off balance, the two trade barbs as Ford accuses her of wanting him (a joke that will pay off hugely in the film's final moments, when they end up in bed together). Then, after talking himself up throughout the movie, Ford's big moment sees his coat catching on a doorknob, leading him to fall and knock himself out. Waking up, he asks if he caught the bad guys. Even after embarrassing himself in front of everyone, Ford still believes he's the greatest agent of all time.

There's never even a whisper that he could be a double agent, so committed is Ford to the cause. Although he drives Susan nuts, going so far as to grab on to her legs as she clings to a departing helicopter, while yelling "I've done this before!" and chastising the woman for not wearing coarser pants(!?), Ford means well, as she acknowledges herself. He's not a complete asshole, just a bit of an uptight nerd. When Ford complains that he's watched everyone he's ever loved die in front of him, Susan suggests it's because they're all killing themselves to get away from him. He's a pain in the ass of everyone around him, but Spy kicks into high gear whenever Statham appears onscreen, particularly when he's "hiding" in the background.

In a film in which Peter Serafinowicz plays a pervy maybe-Italian who almost runs away with the whole thing, Statham still manages to be a standout. Maybe it's because the role was such a departure or him, and a massive shock to the system for anybody with even a passing knowledge of his previous work. Even Statham himself acknowledged he wasn't sure he could do it, having turned down every comedy script he'd been offered prior out of fear the material wasn't the right fit. But once Feig assured him he could play it completely straight, as though Spy were a serious espionage thriller, Statham was sold. In fact, it's easy to see a through-line between the 2015 movie and Statham's slotting seamlessly into the F&F universe, where he's also proven to be a scene-stealer.

Rick Ford was a great way for him to hone the action-comedy chops he's putting to use opposite The Rock, et al, encapsulating his essential brawn, brashness, and bravado but still with the requisite edge to tussle with someone like Hobbs or Susan who, as the movie unfolds, starts to snipe back at him, which only spurs Ford on. Fittingly, Ford gets Spy's last big laughs, too, first making a big show of speeding off in a boat to clear his head ("Do you think he knows that's a lake?" asks Nancy), and later rolling over to a disgusted Susan in bed and telling her to shut up 'cause she loved it. In contrast to his arrogant attitude over the rest of the movie, Ford even cuddles up to her, suggesting he might be a big softie underneath it all. Whether Hobbs and Shaw are heading in the same direction remains to be seen, but we live in hope.

By most standards, Cats is not a very good musical. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music is, save for a couple standout songs, repetitive and annoying. T.S. Eliot’s text, written decades before Webber wrote a single note, has no real story, as it’s literally a collection of poems. No character really gets more than a single song of development, and most can be summed up in a sentence or two. And of course, the whole show is performed by actors in skin-tight cat costumes, which for many inspires deep discomfort.

Tom Hooper’s film adaptation will likely bear the same issues. Based on the trailer, it appears the movie will use additional dialogue to drape a stronger story arc over the musical numbers, but there’s only so much one can do with this material. The music will be the same, more or less, performed by a cast of movie stars and celebrities who may or may not have the pipes of Broadway singers. And the movie is essentially pulling the CGI equivalent of the show where costumes are concerned, with technically well-executed but conceptually off-putting human-cat hybrids. Plus, it’ll surely bear Tom Hooper’s predilection for bizarre, unmotivated directorial choices, and the only people who like those are Academy voters.

I agree with all these criticisms. They’re valid and accurate and again, by most standards, the movie probably won’t be very good. But like the show, the movie clearly isn’t aiming for those standards, and in that sense, those criticisms kind of don’t matter. Some may even prove to be positive attributes. Cats is going for something rarely seen in mainstream cinema these days, and something that I’m genuinely excited to see in hundred-million-dollar-budget big-screen action.

Nobody goes to see Cats for the story. It’s all about the spectacle. As far as musicals go, Cats is pure theatricality: an opportunity for designers and choreographers to show off in the most ridiculous of settings. That’s not for everyone, certainly, and it’d be a horrible state of affairs if all musicals did the same, but there’s room for that kind of show. There’s also room for that kind of movie, and what excites me about this December’s Cats is how hard it appears to lean into that sense of spectacle. Everything in the trailer is heightened and a little bit insane, from the character and set designs to the colours and lighting to the performances themselves. So far, it looks dynamic and gorgeous, at times even evoking a kind of high-budget, uncanny-valley 1950s musical, and I’m fascinated to see whether the film reflects that.

Dance musicals are something of a lost art in cinema nowadays. For whatever reason, they’ve faded out, replaced by fast cutting, naturalism, and visual tricks. Moreover, people just don’t seem to take dance seriously, outside the dance world - they can’t appreciate work that celebrates body and movement for its own sake, or tells story through physicality. Dance movies are widely considered a "lesser" genre; the idea of going to a dance show is laughable for many people; interpretive dance is mostly a punchline onscreen (that one episode of It’s Always Sunny acting as a rare exception). One of the few recent films to truly explore storytelling through physical performance is Gaspar Noe’s Climax, but that hardly reached a wide audience. Dance is one of the purest forms of expressive symbolism we have at our disposal, both on stage and on screen. It saddens me that it’s shrugged off by a public (and a snarky Film Twitter) that should be able to appreciate the history of the musical genre and its theatrical roots better than this.

It’s curious to see the Cats trailer drop the same week as Disney’s much-vaunted photorealistic remake of The Lion King. Both are cat-themed, both are musicals to one degree or another, both are based on extremely successful properties, and both feature a pervasive use of computer-generated visual effects. And somehow, despite their diametrically opposed approaches to character design - human dancers with weird CGI fur on one hand, unexpressive but photoreal lions on the other - both have been met with widespread derision.
 
Cats also bears a remarkable contrast with Hooper’s previous musical Les Miserables. With its committedly handheld cinematography and naturalistic on-set singing, Les Mis aimed for a sense of realism that itself was off-putting and strange, given its grandiose and theatrical source material. Compared to that movie, Cats feels almost like an abstract art film. There’s no “right” way to do musicals, and there’s definitely room for this approach.

Personally, I’d far rather see a movie designed like Cats than one designed like The Lion King (2019). The characters might be weird to look at, but at least they can fucking emote; at least its characters can tell their single-song stories with some quantum of passion. Imagine for a moment a live-action remake of The Lion King that took a more Cats-like approach. There’s a perfectly good stage musical based on the movie right there already; why not use that show’s additional songs, and its distinctive visual design language, to make a remake that expanded on the original and actually used actors’ performances? The degree of CGI usage is up to you to imagine, but I would contend that any movie even approaching the stage show’s lithe physically stylised animals would be significantly more engaging than the dead-eyed monstrosity we actually got.

Again, all the criticisms of Cats are on-point, though many have presented them in a predetermined, unnecessarily mean-spirited way they’d been revving up for months. The weird character design just isn’t a negative point for me - the bizarre costumes has always been part of the show's appeal, and it's hard to imagine the movie working any other way. Sure, it’s probably an overuse of CGI where makeup could’ve worked, but if it enables the choreography to shine through, I’m in favour. I’m fully prepared to catch flak for this unpopular opinion, and I’ll be as irritated as anyone else if it’s both as bad and as successful as something like The Greatest Showman. However it turns out, though, Cats is shooting for a spectacular stylistic gamble - and I'll always be excited to see that.

Spoilers for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood to follow...

It’s funny how much ownership we claim over our heroes and their stories, especially when they’re fictionalized. Bruce Lee is of course a mythic figure not just within Hollywood lore, but the Asian community, and the world stage, and so much of his life remains a mystery. But in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, he squares off against Quentin Tarantino’s mostly fake, perhaps equally larger-than-life stunt man Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) - and contrary to perhaps every expectation, Lee does not conspicuously prevail. But according to Mike Moh, the actor who plays Lee in the film, the martial arts hero hardly gets his ass kicked. “It was a tie,” Moh insisted. “Five more seconds, and Bruce would have won.”

Moh spoke with Birth.Movies.Death. about his small but important role in the film - which was partially and perhaps ironically to bolster the legend of Pitt’s stunt man. Talking about playing the influential and iconic martial artist and entertainer, Moh talked about his own trepidations portraying a big-mouthed Bruce Lee who gets served a heaping dose of humility, and offered some thoughts about how Lee’s presence in the film reinforces many of its themes - including but not limited to the private battles fought to become who we are meant to be, the skillful, sometimes indistinguishable blend of myth and reality that conquers our memories of a specific time or place, and finally, the determination and sometimes desperate pursuit of greatness in a world that’s ready to, well, throw you at a car and reduce you to a punchline.

How did you first get the role of Bruce Lee, and what was your experience like discovering what the character would do in the film?

I don't know how far into the process they were but I got a call from my agent. I live in Wisconsin, so I wasn't able to just go and pick up the material because the script is so secret, so my agent's like, we need you to fly [to Los Angeles] tonight so you can pick them up and audition 12 hours after that. Of course I paid my own way out there, and my first audition was with the casting director, Vicki Thomas. I had auditioned for Bruce a few times for different projects in the past, so I wasn't completely unprepared when it came to the accent - I was okay at it - and I had an idea what I wanted to do. But this was like 12 to 24 hours of prep for this pretty intense monologue; it was a good chunk of dialogue. So I did it, and a week later, my agent said, hey, Quentin responded to your tape.

Here I'm thinking, wow, I made a new fan in Quentin - so if this doesn't work out, maybe something else will. It's always good to just make connections and let people know who you are. But I flew out again and this time it was with Quentin, and that was a surreal moment. I didn't realize how tall he was! But he was really loose and gave me a hug and it was all good. And the first part of our meeting was just talking with him about the ‘60s, about Bruce, and I don’t know if it was for him to make me more nervous or more comfortable, but either way I was ready and I went in the room and did my thing a bunch of different ways. He seemed to like it, and then we actually got into some of the ideas for what he wanted for the fight scene. We were up on our feet doing that as well as the dialogue, so that was fun. Before I left, he said, do you have any questions? And usually at the end of an audition I would just say, thank you so much for your time and be on my way, but at the request and encouragement of my wife, she told me to tell him you're the guy - you need to show him how supremely confident you are. So I took a page out of “what would Bruce do?” and Bruce was extremely confident, so I looked him in the eyes and said, “Mr. Tarantino, I just want to tell you that if you choose me to be in your movie, people are going to think Bruce came back to be in your film.” He kind of laughed it off, because at that time, I wasn't sure that I was going to get the role. I was sure that I would do a great job and that I was the right guy, but my hair was short and my accent wasn't fully there. So I wanted to reassure that I'm going to do everything in my power to make sure that this is the rendition of Bruce that you want in your film.

Another week or two goes by and they want me to fly in next day again, this time for a chemistry read. I'm prepping in my mind, thinking I'm probably going to read with Brad, so this is exciting. And then I get a call from the second AD and he's like, here are the directions to the table read! So I showed up and there is everybody, and he introduced me to Burt Reynolds. He said, “this is Mike Moh. He's playing Bruce Lee.” And at that time I still didn't have the role - or if I did, nobody told me - but I went in and everybody starts walking in, all the stars. And at that point I only knew of Brad, Leo and Margot being in the film, because this was pretty early on. And then I see Burt Reynolds and all sorts of other people. Al Pacino was the biggest surprise. But I just remember knowing in my mind I was treating this as an audition, so while everybody's mingling and getting to see each other, I'm in business mode, scrambling through the script. And I finally land on page 53 - I'll never forget 53, 53, 53 - so every page that they read through, I was getting more and more primed and amped and nervous and anxious about my final test. And then at page 53, I put on a great performance; Brad and I had great chemistry from the get-go. People were really responding, so that made me feel good. And then he even threw a couple of curve balls. I read for Business Bob Gilbert, who is played by Scoot McNairy, so it was a good chance for me to kind of say, I can do this. I'm not just Bruce. I'm an actor. I can be great in whatever role you put me in, but know you're making the right choice for me as Bruce, obviously.

Did you have any concerns, personally or unfortunately representationally, about portraying a version of Bruce Lee who loses a fight to this other character, which seems impossible at least in our sense memory of who he was?

Of course, when I first read it, I was like, wow. I'm not going to tell you what the original script had exactly, but when I read it, I was so conflicted because he’s my hero - Bruce in my mind was literally a God. He wasn't a person to me, he was a superhero. And I think that's how most people view Bruce. And the thing about it is, Number One, it's a Tarantino film. He's not going to do the thing that everybody expects anybody else to do. You’ve got to expect the unexpected. And Number Two, I knew from the jump, Tarantino loves Bruce Lee; he reveres him. So let me be clear; in the film it was a challenge - “best two out of three.” I got the first point - I knocked him on his ass first. And Bruce at that time was so cocky and maybe got a little excited and he didn't know Cliff Booth has killed dozens of people with his bare hands - and that's what people may not realize up until that moment in the film. It's a hugely important scene - what better way to show how dangerous Cliff is than for him to show up and even match him for a little bit with Bruce? And the only reason why I got thrown into that car is because I was so cocky, like, oh I'm going to do this again. And at that moment when I get slammed, that's when Bruce realizes, oh shit, this guy is not just a stunt guy. Because Bruce didn't always have the most affection for stuntmen; he didn't respect all of them, because he was better than all the stunt guys. So after I got slammed, I get serious. And then we get into this scuffle, which is stopped - so it's a tie. I can see how people might think Bruce got beat because of the impact with the car, but you give me five more seconds and Bruce would have won. So I know people are going to be up in arms about it, but when I went into my deep dive of studying Bruce, he more than anybody wanted people to know he's human. And I think I respect him more knowing that he had these challenges, these obstacles, just like everybody. I don't know any actor out there that doesn't have some sense of wanting to be more - and I think that's the sign of somebody that wants greatness, and will achieve greatness, always wanting more. And if you reference the legend of Wong Jack Man, this was Tarantino, so maybe in this universe, it's not Wong Jack Man, it's Cliff Booth who he runs into and gives him [a fight], like I know I could have taken him at the time if I wasn't so cocky. And now he's going to go back and refine his Jeet June Do and become the legend or a stronger version of himself because of this encounter with Cliff. At least, that's how I see it.

That take also reinforces some of the themes of the movie in that these are all people who to one extent or another are trying to establish or prove themselves. Were there discussions about deeper thematic ideas that Tarantino wanted to explore either in the overall script or with the character?

Bruce wasn't the global sensation that everybody knows now at that point. At that time in his career, he was on Green Hornet, an ABC TV show, trying to battle against Asian stereotypes. He had to wear a mask. He was a sidekick. He was dealing with the stuff that I and many other Asian American actors have been dealing with, but because of what he went through and because of how he was able to bust through doors and make new waves, he made it easier for us to make our way. So at the time he was finding his way just like Rick was in the movie. Bruce wasn't a central character, but what better way to help people remember that Bruce also was - I don't want to say struggling, because he was a child actor and he was always very successful with that. But he was always searching for that next level. I know his ultimate goal was to be the Number One actor in the world, not martial arts actor. He wanted to be a bigger name than Steve McQueen, which, depending on who you ask, he definitely did that.

Where did you draw the line between doing an impersonation of Bruce and really inhabiting him as a person or a character?

That was the dangerous part, especially because it's a heightened sense of reality that Tarantino is so good at. You don't want to make it cheesy by going way over the top and making Bruce a character, so that's the fine line you want to straddle. But look - he's a big personality and I love his personality; I credit his ability to straddle confidence and cockiness as something that I strived for as a young kid who was kind of unsure of how I fit in growing up in the Midwest. That helped. But it wasn't about, I’ve got to hit this thing, I got to do this, got to make this move. It sounds cheesy, but I feel like I was channeling him because of the two months I had to prepare. I mean, give me a day to do it and yeah, I'm doing an impersonation, but give me two months and I'm doing my best to be him.

Was there a particular scene or movie that you found especially inspirational or influential in terms of your performance or to help you get inside his head?

No, I didn't use a movie. I mean, obviously I've watched them, just because I'm a fan. But during the scene they weren't rolling cameras, he was just holding court on the set of his show. So when you listen to him candidly in interviews, when he's not filming a TV show or a movie but maybe just being caught on video, he was always on, but in a different way - a very genuine, attractive way. There was something magnetic about him. So I used those as references - like his home videos, his Pierre Berton interview, all those things. That was the kind of attitude I wanted to portray.

How would you characterize Tarantino as a director? How did he help you give the best performance that you could?

Nobody can question how committed he is to it. And because he's in a unique position of having full control of everything, no studio is going to come in and tell him what to do, he wrote it, he lived it, he's dreamed it and he shot it in his head a million different ways already. So when he asks you to be prepared and when he asks you to do something, you don't belong in that set unless you've done a hundred percent preparation. I remember the final fight rehearsal that I had with Brad, on a Sunday. He was coming in just to see where we're at and give his input, and at the end of it, he was very happy with the fight but he pulled me aside. He says, the way I have this, it's going to be one continuous take. This was my first time hearing that it would be a one shot. He said, “it’s going to be very intricate. We're going to have to give it a bunch of times and there's going to be a lot of juggling and timing, and things have to work out. But it all rides on you. If you don't get it, I don't get the shot that I want. So I just want to let you know I believe in you and I wouldn't have hired you if you couldn't do this, but it's all on your shoulders.” I think I might've just paused for a second, and then I just confidently looked him in the eyes. I said, “Quentin, you made the right choice. I'm the guy for this and I'll be ready.” And off he went, and then two days later I was on set and we got that one shot. I think they blocked the whole day for just that sequence that they didn't cut, and we got it on like the third or fourth take, before lunch. And throughout the scene, you can sense the whole set just getting excited, like we're going to get this, we're going to get this right. And Quentin said, look, I'm going to cut if you don't do this perfectly. There's no sense in wasting film, and there's no sense in wasting your energy. So don't worry if I cut, we're just waiting for the right ingredients and the right timing. So on the third or fourth time, it's going great, I'm feeling it, and we're flowing. Even the extras, I feel like they helped me so much; they were also invested in it. And then he says, “cut!” Everybody's frozen. And then Quentin jumps up and down and he’s screaming, and as soon as we saw that reaction, everybody explodes into applause. Me and Brad run over to each other first and we’re checking each other, because I had just kicked him and he took a fall straight to the concrete. He's all good. We're hugging. That was definitely a Hollywood moment. And after that he said, “okay, that's the one that's going to be in the movie, but we're going to do it one more time.” And then he says, “why?” And everybody says, “because we love making movies!” I'm the only one that didn't know that thing, so I'm just like, what is happening? So we did it again and we got another great take. I'm not sure which one he used, but I just remember it so vividly and I think I always will.

You talked about auditioning to play Bruce Lee in the past and now you have finally had an opportunity to do it in such a visible way. Do you feel a sense of catharsis, like you’re done playing him, or do you feel inspired to try to do that again in a larger way?

Well, if people were thinking about doing it, I would hope that after they see me that they would think that I'm the guy to do it. Whether or not I would all depend on the story, and the team. I mean, although my appearance in the film is brief, I feel like I put in a good performance as Bruce, so I don't feel like I need to show more. But at the same time, it’s a good question. I don't know. I guess time will tell.