Wu-Tang Clan founder, actor and director, the RZA, used his SXSW keynote speech to explain how his years of film fandom influenced his approach to production with the seminal hip-hop group.
The at times philosophical and meandering speech saw the RZA (real name Robert Diggs) plot out his “map” toward becoming a film-maker, which started when he saw Star Wars and the Michael Caine movie The Swarm before he gravitated toward grindhouse flicks and kung-fu movies.
Those moments, he said, fed into his approach to laying the foundations of the Wu-Tang Clan’s sound, which often sampled martial arts films such as the Shogun Assassin.
“Those early films are my music,” he said. “If you look at The Swarm – and the Wu-Tang are called the killer bees – you can see there was a subconsciousness of that film that got embedded in me.”
“When you look at Star Wars or the martial arts films – the sword swing or the lightsaber swing –and then Wu-Tang being a sword-style of lyricism, you see that all these different films have guided me, informed me, molded me and helped me find my artistic expression to music that [was founded] on film.”
He went on to connect the dots between the art of directing and hip-hop production.
“Directors are samplers,” RZA explained during the 45-minute talk. “Film is their medium of sampling. I used a sampler to sample old beats and movie clips. They use films in their minds to sample old ideas.”
There were more philosophical moments, which could have come straight from a Wu-Tang album skit, such as when he explained his theory about artistic expression and “wave lengths”.
“We all have an artistic expression inside ourselves, that’s my strong belief,” he said. “I believe that the artistic expression is actually a wave length; sound is a wave, writing is a wave. I think art is a wave. And I think that when someone is able to catch that wave they can express their art through any medium.
He explained that he used to ditch school with Ol’ Dirty Bastard in order to go see films at the Lyric Theatre in New York. “We were just two kids trying to escape our reality,” he said.
His transition into film-making started when Jim Jarmusch tracked him down (via a mutual connection with a drug dealer) and he began to work on the soundtrack to Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai.
Meetings with John Woo followed (RZA sampled Woo’s film The Killer), and he explained how he eventually asked Quentin Tarantino if he could become his “student” and join him on set for Kill Bill – a film RZA provided the soundtrack for.
There are a few Wu-Tang-based films planned for the next year with the Ol’ Dirty Bastard biopic (starring Michael K Williams) set to start shooting soon and a documentary about Wu-Tang member Raekwon’s seminal Only Built 4 Cuban Linx on the way too.
