Everyone’s favourite Colonial marine Bill Paxton has a solid career in movies, a familiar face in James Cameron outings (Aliens, Titanic etc) and last seen in Haywire as Gino Carano’s father and in hit HBO series Big Love. He spoke recently about his take on the upcoming Legendary Pictures re-imagining of the classic David Carradine series Kung Fu. The actor hopes to be directing a re-imagining of the original concept for the big screen…
“What happens a lot when people go back to redo a TV show to do a movie, a lot of times they don't pay a respect to the original thing - asking why was it successful in the first place. The fighting is important, but people remember the Shaolin teachings, that he would take so much and then start wailing. We went back, John McLaughlin and myself, and we watched the original three seasons…” he explains. " We're pretty much following the story - the "A" story is Caine as a young man, in the American West of the 1870s looking for his birth father. While you're following him there, you fill in with the "B" story, what his background was, how he ended up being orphaned, how he ended up at the monastery, how he was raised to be a Shaolin priest, and then how he had to leave under adverse circumstances…
"The original series was shot so cheap and so low budget. They used the old Camelot set on the redressed back lot of Warner Brothers. They'd be shooting a railway camp and there might be 15 extras, and we're going to have 10,000 men on a hill building a trellis. We're going to be bringing a scale and a grandeur that the story should have always had, but because of budget and time they were unable to. I have to shoot the whole picture in China, because part of the financing is going to come out of there. Legendary is starting a new company called "Legendary East"; it's made of a consortium of Chinese investment. Kung Fu is a natural title for them, it's a Western with an Eastern hero..." he states.
"To take that a step further, I think the character of Caine, whoever this actor this is, and we're going to have to do a big search, he has to be Chinese-something... Chinese-Irish, Chinese-Israeli, Chinese-American, Chinese-Canadian... He's probably going to have to be a pretty skilled martial artist. This is going to be more of a Western, with violence, sort of like what True Grit was, as opposed to a lot of wire work. To me to do a big martial arts film - God, there are so many great ones, and believe me the Chinese do great ones, to me it makes more sense to make it a Western with martial arts," he continues. "What's interesting about Caine is because he's a product of both worlds is that even though he's raised in China he comes to the West, by the time he goes back to China in the third act he's picked up a bit of a Western thing. We've found some clever ways for East to meet West, and to resonate with the audience…”
