30Ninjas Roundtable Interview — Kate Bosworth and Danny Huston Weave the Violent Yarn of The Warrior’s Way » 30ninjas

30Ninjas Roundtable Interview — Kate Bosworth and Danny Huston Weave the Violent Yarn of The Warrior’s Way

Share on Facebook posted 11-29-10 by Max Tedaldi

If there is one question that has plagued my wandering thoughts, burrowing deep within the recesses of my most poignant dreams, it is question of gun vs sword. Which is better? Sure a gun can decimate in quick efficiency, but for pure primitive satisfaction it’s difficult to top the slice of a sword. Nowhere is this eternal battle more present than in the eternal battle of cowboy versus ninja. Luckily for us, we’ll get to see the two warriors their respective weapons go head to head this weekend when The Warrior’s Way premieres December 3rd (pirates are required to sulk outside in solitude). I got a chance to sit at a roundtable with the heroine (Kate Bosworth) and villain (Danny Huston) of the film, and the two were able to shed some light on the violent fairy tale.

A Fairy Tale With Ninjas

Roundtable: I heard that at the age of 14 you were a champion equestrian. If that’s true, did any of that play into this movie and your performance?

Kate Bosworth: Yes, I started riding at probably 6 or 7, very, very young and I was competing every weekend when I got The Horse Whisperer so that was how that came about. Robert Redford was casting out of New York and wanted authentic horse riders, so I went on a whim to the audition.

It’s such a deep love of mine I still do it — show jump. I think I will for the rest of my life. But I suppose there is a certain adrenaline that I chase as a jumper. It’s such a thrill every time you do it. [There's] a certain danger element and it’s certainly an athletic activity. You really have to have good balance and strength so I supposed in a way it really does carry over, whether it be surfing or martial arts, there’s a connection there.

Roundtable: Did you ride a horse in this picture?

Kate: No. I begged. I said, “Can’t you write in a horse thing for me?”

Roundtable: Nobody rides horses in the film?

Danny Huston: I do.

Roundtable: So what we got from the clips that we saw was this idea of a fairy tale with violence. What attracted you [to the script] because there is a lot of beauty, but there’s also a lot of brutality?

Danny: It’s a fable, in essence, yes it has this backdrop, this kind of Sergio Leone backdrop of violence. Without a doubt it has that. But, surprisingly, I came away from the film viewing it more as a love story than anything else. The violence is not extraordinarily violent. It’s violent like the way that kung fu movies are violent. You don’t really feel the sense of something deathly occurring. There are ninjas and they’re masked. So, yes there is a sense of foreboding, but the actual piece is not that violent.

Roundtable: There’s a pivotal fight scene between you (Kate) and the colonel (Danny). Could you talk a little bit about your preparation for that and what you did to get into the role?

Kate: From the moment I landed in New Zealand, I wanted to jump immediately into the martial arts element of [the film] because I’d never taken any martial arts and I was really unfamiliar with it. It did sort of remind me of when I started training for Blue Crush and I’d never touched a surf board. It was this huge question mark! I supposed I’d do better when I know what I’m dealing with, so I immediately said I had to meet with the trainer, I need to know what I’m doing. I wish I’d had more of a background in ballet or dance to be able to tackle it better because it really had more of that element than weaponry. We immediately started training for that and I think we both wish that we’d had a little bit more [time], but such is life when you land and need to shoot a movie. But we really embraced it, we both committed to it completely and did most of the stunts ourselves.

Danny: Yes, I utterly enjoyed it! I had a really thrilling time working on this choreography with Kate. It was like a sort of dance or a ballet, and I suppose that answers to the violence and the violence being very ballet-like, like Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. It has real beauty, it’s very aesthetic and not gruesome. Working on these sequences with Kate was just a delight, with a lot of trust, I suppose, between us. The training we worked on with other stunt people and not with each other, so when we hit the set we were working on the these fight scenes for the very first time with each other. It was quite unpredictable we didn’t quite know what we’d be dealing with in regards to how we would interact with these potentially quite dangerous stunts. I’m brandishing a big old sword and swiping it over Kate’s head and she’s ducking it in a delicious way, there was a certain amount of danger involved which made it exhilarating.

Roundtable: I’m guessing the fighting style between you two was different from the ninja’s fight sequences. Your character isn’t trained as a martial artist, correct?

Danny: No. My character has never seen anything like ninjas. He’s a turn of the century cowboy. Kate’s been trained and I don’t expect her to come at me with what she’s got either, it’s unbelievable what she does.

Finding Your Character

Roundtable: Kate, with all of the different types of movies you’ve made I don’t really see any correlation between any of them. They all seem very diverse. Was that by design on your part, or were you just going where the opportunities were exciting?

Kate: Yeah, it’s kind of as simple as that. There are so few good opportunities out there, and there are even less out there for females, so I think it’s just been about what material is interesting or unique, something that kind of terrifies me a little bit, will push me, and allow me to learn and grow and be better. Yeah, that’s sort of how it’s been in terms of being able to choose different projects. The last two I just shot were like night and day from each other and certainly different from this.

Roundtable: So what was it about this one that made you say “yes”?

Kate: I feel like this film, for both of us, was out in the stratosphere. It was unlike anything I’d ever read. She (Lynne) was so wild, untamed and feral that I needed to sort of get my head around that a little bit because that was so different from anything I’d ever played. The script was bold and all the characters were bold. I didn’t’ want to be “the girl”. I thought, well, she’s been raised by this kind of band of misfits. She’s going to be rough and fierce and fiery. I remember one of the moments when I found my character was when I was in costume fittings and James Acheson told me to try on these shoes for shape. They were men’s shoes and I put them on and I said I’m wearing these, and I did. They were like 4 sizes too big but they had this clomping boyish effect and I thought Lynne probably just found these in a friggin’ trunk somewhere. She didn’t even have shoes of her own, so there was this kind of floppy quality and lack of refinement and it sort of clicked in that moment. I thought this might be sort of crazy to some people but I’m gonna be bold and go with this and be true to this world and true to who she is. Then the evolution for her, when she meets this warrior, he kind of softens her a little bit, she becomes more in tune with her heart and she changes and matures ultimately.

Roundtable: We also noticed in the clips that you speak with a bit of a southern accent.

Kate: Yeah, a bit! (laughs)

Roundtable: Did you work with a dialect coach or did you just wing it?

Kate: I did a little bit, but you know there was something about it where I thought that I’d just go for it. Just like her red hair, I wanted her so much to have red hair, it was very specific for me to see her physically and then to have this, again, this kind of feral tone to her. You do hear her accent sort of soften as she mature and softens. Yes, I wanted her to start out like she’s done some pretty rough things with her fellow carny friends. They’ve been pretty brutal to her throughout her existence.

Roundtable: Can you talk about the kinds of training that you did? What skills do you now have that you didn’t have before you started this picture?

Kate: (haha) I think I’ve sort of forgotten everything. The thing is that I haven’t really kept up with the whole knife throwing thing.

Danny: That’s not what I hear! (laughs)

Kate: Yeah, well, we keep that quiet. I haven’t surfed in so long as well. I know it’s so disappointing and when surfers come up to me and they’re like, “ooohh” and they’re so excited and I feel like I really let them down when I say I haven’t surfed in so long. I feel like I need to apologize. I say I did at the time, and I was so into it. I guess I try to overcompensate.

Roundtable: Can you talk about the skills you had to learn?

Kate: I took ballet a little bit last year and I thought this would have been useful when I shot this movie because there was so much inner core strength and balance that I had to have. I don’t know if I’m the most coordinated person on the planet, so it was sort of about honing that. When you have a sword in your hand and you have to swing it around and center yourself and then move the other way, it’s just so much harder than you think, especially turns, twirls, holding your balance and using the knife. Just doing a turn without anything in your hands and keeping your balance perfectly centered is really, really difficult. It’s something that seems so simple and then you try it and it’s really hard. So it was really getting the basic fundamentals down for certain moves. The routine that was most terrifying to me was the sort of frenzied love dance. It’s long and we had to shoot it in its entirety. It was literally a 5-minute dance sequence with knives. We’d grab each other here, and then we’d both turn and go off, and then we’d twirl up to each other. I thought, I’d better get this right. I would say I’m harder on myself than anybody else is, so I’d be the one to say let’s do it again, let’s do it again, until I felt relatively comfortable with it. That being said, we didn’t have a whole lot of time to practice.

Roundtable: In that scene there are different levels of proficiency. You get better as you go along. Was that hard to accomplish?

Kate: No. I started out being horrible and I sort of got better the more time I spent doing it. I said to them, “Please don’t have me do this love routine. I won’t be able to do it. Please will you put it at the end.” So they did it.

Roundtable: When you have a performance that has a skill attached to it, is it that much harder to act and remember the skill that you’re doing and at the same time still be your character and perform?

Danny: In a way, the skill feeds the acting. The closer you are to the skill being passable the closer you are to feeding your character. It’s not that dissimilar to an accent in a way. An accent starts to create mannerisms, you hold yourself differently because you sound different.

Working in the World of Green Screen

Roundtable: How do the rules change when you’re working in the CGI world?

Danny: You just don’t know what’s going on around, so you really depend on the director to give you a clear idea of what it is that you’re seeing and reacting to, more importantly. I have this scene where I’m shooting upwards and it’s kind of lost in translation but I have to shoot up, and I said, “What am I shooting at?” and the director said, “Light 26!” It’s just a stage light there’s no number. So I say, “Well what is light 26?” and he says, “It’s a ninja and there are hundreds all around you.” That’s the kind of thing where you’re a kind of victim to the CGI world and what they put in there afterward. Hopefully your actions correspond to what these great artists are putting in after you’ve done your work.

Roundtable: Danny, you seem like a nice guy, do you think you’re destined to play bad guys for most of your career?

Danny: Well, maybe I’m not so nice.

Kate: That’s not true!

(laughs)

Danny: I don’t know. There might me something to it.

Roundtable: Maybe it’s more fun to play the bad guy?

Danny: Maybe they’re more fun, maybe they have more complexity. They’re a meal, in a way, unto themselves. They don’t consider themselves to be bad guys. Villains don’t think they’re villains necessarily. They have a reason to be doing what they are doing. Maybe I have a certain expertise that’s developing in being able to get a scalpel out and prod these individuals and see how they feel and tick. I had a line in The Constant Gardener, which is a story about pharmaceutical corruption, and my character had a line that was, “those patients would have died anyway.” I thought that it was one of the most horrific lines I’ve ever read, but I thought if my character can make sense of it and I can deliver that line as if it makes sense, then I’ve got the key to the character. That’s kind of how I deal with these villains. They’ve made sense out of it for themselves and that’s all the more chilling.

Roundtable: Danny, last night (at the screening) you said that your character viewed his mask as his better side. Can you tell us a little bit more about what you meant by that. Was it his character or was it more of a physical thing?

Danny: I found that the mask was, in a sense, kind of beautiful. It was smooth and had a kind of peaceful quality and it slowly but surely became more beautiful than my other side which was kind of contorted. The mask is on tight so this [points to cheek] was all pressed and this eye is the only eye that can see, so this eye kind of wanders around like that, so the real side of my face became the mad side and the leather, gruesome mask suddenly became beautiful.

Roundtable: Does your character have a dichotomy of good and bad or is it just evil and more evil? Does the mask represent anything for your character?

Danny: It’s his disfigurement. I don’t think it’s anything else other than the disfigurement. He’s a very vain guy, and he’s going to these villages and he’s checking these women’s teeth. He’s phobic, he doesn’t like dirt, and they’re (Kate’s teeth) are the most gorgeous thing he’s ever seen compared to the other teeth that are out there which are just all horribly rotten. He’s cursed to live in this horrible dusty place and he’s obsessed with cleanliness. So there’s this element where even though he’s creating harm he actually doesn’t see it as such. He’s going to these towns and he’s committing these rapes, but I think he sees them as flirtations, and fun dances, you know a little liaison here or there. The desert flower is what he’s after and Kate, from the colonel’s point of view certainly, is a wild desert flower and he is just romantically obsessed. She scarred his face and possibly his heart.

Roundtable: Can we get a quick word from you on what it was like to play opposite Jang?

Kate: People have been asking me if it was difficult with the different cultures and it really wasn’t. He’s so lovely, and I’m sure you’ve spoken to him, but he’s such a gentleman and so respectful and willing to explore and collaborate and it was really an effortless relationship between the two of us which was really important because I suppose it could have been more challenging than it was. It was just a wonderful experience for me. I really do have so affection for him.