Keanu
Reeves Wants to Play the Villain in His Directorial Debut ‘Man of
Tai Chi
Last year
Keanu Reeves started talking about
Man of Tai Chi, which would be his first
feature project as a director. The martial arts film would be set
in the present day, but is intended as an homage to classic kung-fu
films. Now Mr. Reeves says he wants to play the villain in the
film, which is gathering financing now.
Speaking to MTV, he said,
We want to do it in Chinese and English,
do it as kind of a co-production with CFG perhaps, which is a
Chinese film group, kind of a studio. It’s tricky.
That’s the sort of financing deal we might start seeing a lot of
soon. It’s how Ryan Johnson’s
Looper got made, and we’ve
already started to hear about other films looking to use Chinese
money to get off the ground. (Not the
Red Dawn remake,
though.)
The
Man of Tai Chi script is packed with action, he
says.
There’s 18 fights. We’ve timed it out. It’s about 40 minutes of
fighting. I want to make a good, solid kung fu movie. Good story,
good plot — but let’s get some good kung fu going!
Honestly, that sounds like fun, and possibly a good double-feature
with RZA’s
The Man With the Iron Fists. Keanu Reeves has
got some solid kung-fu training thanks to the
Matrix
films, and hopefully all that experience, even though it is a few
years in the past, can help shape
Man of Tai Chi. But
first he’s shooting the samurai film
47 Ronin, which he
just described as follows:
It’s kind of a western. I call it a story
of revenge and impossible love. The samurai become ronin, outcast,
and decide to enact revenge on the person who is responsible for
the death of their lord. And I play an outsider, a kind of
half-breed with a mysterious past named Kai, who’s in love with the
princess and she’s in love with me, but we can’t be together. But
during this journey and revenge, things change.
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