THE CAINE SCRUTINY : My dinner with David Carradine.
The hotel at the Hengdian Film Studios could provide a perfect location if a Chinese producer ever decides to remake Kubrick’s The Shining. It’s vast and desolate. It has everything (gym, pool, game room…) everything except people, because the people who stay here are always out at the adjacent studios, filming until all hours.
I’m here for meetings relevant to Forbidden Kingdom, the Jackie and Jet project currently shooting here, a film which TWC is a distributor of. Walking the halls of Hengdian, I’m vaguely surprised to see the form of David Carradine striding towards me. Will he cry “Here’s Johnny!” as he axes his way through a locked door? No, he simply stops, smiles and does a kung fu salute, as though it’s the most natural thing in the world for us to meet at this place and time.
It would be impossible to overstate the impact that David’s Kung Fu TV series had on this impressionable youth. We all worshipped Bruce Lee, but somehow knew we could never be him, or even anything close. Unlike the distinctly exotic Bruce, Kwai Chang Caine, though a bona fide Shaolin disciple, kind of looked like me. (Margaret Cho says the show should really have been called ‘Who’s that white guy?’)
David and I first met years ago in a London Chinatown restaurant, where he graciously agreed to an epic interview focusing entirely (to his chagrin) on the Kung Fu TV series and The Silent Flute. Since then, our paths have crossed occasionally but memorably. He visited the set when I was making Jackie Chan : My Stunts to interview the Chan man. We met at Cannes film festival, back when I was with Media Asia, and he used our office balcony to smoke as he conducted an interview. When I was involved with the early stages of the fantasy Dragon Tiger Gate, I negotiated a deal for David to play the master who teaches the heroes the ultimate level of kung fu. Donnie Yen was all for it, but his co-director voted him down, and they used the creator of the DTG comic book, Tony Wong, instead. Dragon Tiger Gate was shot at Hengdian, which leads us neatly to our latest encounter…
The man who would be Caine was in Hengdian to shoot a new tele feature, White Crane. He has an earlier one, Son Of The Dragon, in the can. These play very much to his Kung Fu audience, casting him as a martial arts master adventuring in China. The series also features several old and new friends of mine: Wu Shu prodigy Osric Chau, Crouching Tiger mama dragon Cheng Pei Pei, Naked Weapon actress Anya Wu and it reteams David with his Kill Bill co-star, Darryl Hannah. David says that this will be all kung fu, but does not raise Caine. His character here is darker, like a Wudang-trained Dark Knight.
After our surprise encounter, David and I repair to the wonderfully named Hummer Café, one of the few decent eateries in downtown Hengdian, and catch up on our respective war stories. I tell him how, on watching 36th Chamber Of Shaolin prior to our Dragon Dynasty release, I was surprised how many elements the film appropriated from the Kung Fu TV series (which was made earlier). He asks me to send him a copy. We discuss his kung fu training, and he talks about the new system that his partner Rob Moses has developed, which sounds like a Tai Chi application of Fritjov Capra’s The Tao Of Physics. He tells me how, when shooting Son Of The Dragon, he was filmed executing a free flowing Tai Chi set (‘using no form as form’). The sequence was cut from the finished film, but Genius has the rights, and we’ll try and get the footage for the DVD.
It’s also fascinating to get David’s insights on his encounters with several generations of Hollywood legends. Given the vast disparity of films he’s appeared in, people forget that he began his career working with the likes of Scorsese, Altman, Hal Ashby and Ingmar Bergman. He tells me, in detail, about the lost Orson Welles’ masterpiece The Other Side Of The Wind, and about how he won the rights to the book on which his indie feature Americana was based. He recalls how, told by a fortune teller that he and Quentin Tarantino were fated to work together, he set out to ‘postulate’ the concept into reality, and saw the destiny fulfilled when the pair killed Bill together.
Whether he acknowledges it or not, David has been an inspiration for many film folk of our generation, myself included, and it was great to find him in such fine form.
Now if I could only find my &*^%ing hotel room…
Comments
- Esco, Connecticut, USA | 2007-08-26 21:11:03
- Pavel N., Poland | 2007-08-28 10:15:00
- Jon V, Palm Desert, CA | 2007-08-25 13:01:33