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Blood : The Last Vampire

Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki

 

Interview with Producer William(Bill) Kong

 

Q: How did you get to know the animated version of "Blood: the Last Vampire" and decide to make a live action film?

Bill Kong: I was invited to one of their early screenings in Tokyo. I think it was their second screening of the film with critics and journalists. I immediately fell in love with the film. Even form the first shot, the train sequence was fantastic! That anime really opened my eye. I thought I could make a great action film out of this. So that was the beginning. But it took me several years to nail down the rights to make the film because many people optioned it, and it was a complicated process.

Q: Not only did you cast the lot of international actors, but also the staff as well as the director. How did you hire the french director Chris Nahon?

Bill Kong: First of all, he was friends with my co-producer Abel Nahmias. Abel is actually from Pathe films and is a very famous producer in France. So he is very good friend with Chris. And also my friend Jet Li recommended I use Chris. They worked together on the film called "Kiss of the Dragon." For that film, the action choreographer was Corey Yuen as well. So they are all like part of my family.

Q: Could you talk about the process of casting Gianna Jun as Saya? Because she was in her mid-20's back then, people initially didn't think she could pull this off as a high school student. But she did!

Bill Kong: When I first saw the anime, the truly challenging thing was whether you can cast the right female lead as Saya or not. I think you have to find the right Saya in order to make a film successful. I had the opportunity to work with Gianna Jun about several years ago. Gianna is a beautiful actress, she did a lot of work in commercials, and she had a lot of movies to do. You know, in order to play Saya, you have to stop everything and start training for at least a half year to be able to become an action star. And then another five months to shoot.

But when I presented the anime to Gianna, and after she watched it, she was very happy and called me up saying "I'll do it." She actually trained for seven months and another five months on the film. It was tremendous devotion and passion in a project. She really gave a more than hundred percent of herself in the movie. That was the key. So I was very fortunate to be able to convince her. And after Gianna joined the film, Koyuki also wanted to do the film because he is a fan of Gianna, so I was able to cast Koyuki as Onigen.

Q: Did Koyuki train just as Gianna Jun?

Bill Kong: No, she didn't train as Gianna, because she had much less action. I think she did a few weeks only; we only needed to train her for a few weeks. But having an important actress like Koyuki willing to do the action film is a very big blessing for me.

Q: Could you talk about working together with Corey Yuen, because you've known him for quite a long time. How has your relationship developed over the course of years?

Bill Kong: Yes, I've known Corey for long time. Because I've been making a lot of action films in Asia, I do have a good relationship with all of the action choreographers. But every action choreographer has his own niche and is good at certain things. Like Tony Ching (House of Flying Daggers) is very good at flying in the air, and Yuen woo-ping is the greatest martial arts action choreographer in the world. Everybody has his own strong suits. So when I developed the project from day one, I decided like, "this project is for Yuen woo-ping, or this is for Corey Yuen." So I know what they're best at. And i think this film is the best of Corey Yuen's work.

Q: I heard that you guys shot some of the sequences in Argentina. Why Argentina?

Bill Kong: We tried to go to Yokota Air Force base in Japan, but they didn't let us shoot there. So we had to find an air force base that had all the planes, and find planes from the 60s. We went around the world, and only Argentina had it. And their air force base is very much like Yokota.

Q: What were the toughest things that you encountered while you were shooting?

Bill Kong: I think we shot almost five months. So it was a long shoot, and action scenes take a long time to shoot. The toughest one was a rooftop scene at night, and it was raining. So Gianna had to be shooting the whole night in wet conditions, and it was really cold. It's extremely difficult for an actress to go through those kind of shootings, and the action part was tough. There were lot of difficulties during the process.

Q: How did you start off as a producer in the beginning?

Bill Kong: I came from a background as a distributor, where I bought movies from America and Europe. When the business became very tough, it was very difficult to buy good films, so in order to get the company going, I decided to go into filmmaking. So it's not by means of my interest or education. It's really by the forces of economics and survival.

Q: How has the success of "Hero " and "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" changed your life?

Bill Kong: It only made me more busy, that's all. Before then I got like 8 hours sleep, but now only 5 hours.

Q: I was just curious about the process of the make-up of the vampire? Was that really a hard process?

Bill Kong: Yeah, it was a prosthetic. We had the L.A make-up production do the prosthetic; they were the same people that did "Fantastic Four" and all those films?

Q: What are you working on right now?

Bill Kong: I'm working on a new martial arts epic with Yuen Woo-ping called "True Legend," and I'm also working on a new project with Zhang Yimou.

Q: What about the "The Warrior and the Wolf"?

Bill Kong: That's already in post-production. Joe Odagiri is wonderful to work with and we also have Maggie Q.