There is little doubt about Hayao Miyazaki’s status as Japan’s premiere animator. After such devastating successes as Porco Rosso and Princess Mononoke, not even the lure of early retirement could keep the most famous founding father of Studio Ghibli from delivering what would become the most successful film of all time in Japan: Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi).

The following interview below is a report of the debate / press conference Miyazaki gave in Paris in late December 2001, on the occasion of Spirited Away’s first European screening at the animation festival Nouvelles images du Japon (during which the French government bestowed on him the title of ‘Officier des Arts et des Lettres’). It contains questions from various people, including my own.

Is it true that your films are all made without a script?

That’s true. I don’t have the story finished and ready when we start work on a film. I usually don’t have the time. So the story develops when I start drawing storyboards. The production starts very soon thereafter, while the storyboards are still developing. We never know where the story will go but we just keeping working on the film as it develops. It’s a dangerous way to make an animation film and I would like it to be different, but unfortunately, that’s the way I work and everyone else is kind of forced to subject themselves to it.

But for that to work I can imagine it would be essential to have a lot of empathy with your characters.

What matters most is not my empathy with the characters, but the intended length of the film. How long should we make the film? Should it be two hours long or three? That’s the big problem. I often argue about this with my producer and he usually asks me if I would like to extend the production schedule by an extra year. In fact, he has no intention of giving me an extra year, but he just says it to scare me and make me return to work. I really don’t want to be a slave to my work by working a year longer than it already takes, so after he says this I usually return to work with more focus and at a much faster pace. Another principle I adhere to when directing, is that I make good use of everything my staff creates. Even if they make foregrounds that don’t quite fit with my backgrounds, I never waste it and try to find the best use for it.

So once a character has been created, it’s never dropped from the story and always ends up in the final film?

The characters are born from repetition, from repeatedly thinking about them. I have their outline in my head. I become the character and as the character I visit the locations of the story many, many times. Only after that I start drawing the character, but again I do it many, many times, over and over. And I only finish just before the deadline.

With that very personal connection you have with your characters, how do you explain that the main characters in most of your films are young girls?

That would be far too complicated and lengthy an answer to state here, so I’ll just suffice by saying that it’s because I love women very much (laughs).

Spirited Away’s lead character Chihiro seems to be a different type of heroine than the female leads in your previous films. She is less obviously heroic, and we don’t get to know much about her motivation or background.

I haven’t chosen to just make the character of Chihiro likes this, it’s because there are many young girls in Japan right now who are like that. They are more and more insensitive to the efforts that their parents are making to keep them happy. There’s a scene in which Chihiro doesn’t react when her father calls her name. It’s only after the second time he calls that she replies. Many of my staff told me to make it three times instead of two, because that’s what many girls are like these days. They don’t immediately react to the call of the parents. What made me decide to make this film was the realisation that there are no films made for that age group of ten-year old girls. It was through observing the daughter of a friend that I realised there were no films out there for her, no films that directly spoke to her. Certainly, girls like her see films that contain characters their age, but they can’t identify with them, because they are imaginary characters that don’t resemble them at all.

With Spirited Away I wanted to say to them “don’t worry, it will be all right in the end, there will be something for you”, not just in cinema, but also in everyday life. For that it was necessary to have a heroine who was an ordinary girl, not someone who could fly or do something impossible. Just a girl you can encounter anywhere in Japan. Every time I wrote or drew something concerning the character of Chihiro and her actions, I asked myself the question whether my friend’s daughter or her friends would be capable of doing it. That was my criteria for every scene in which I gave Chihiro another task or challenge. Because it’s through surmounting these challenges that this little Japanese girl becomes a capable person. It took me three years to make this film, so now my friend’s daughter is thirteen years old rather than ten, but she still loved the film and that made me very happy.

Since you say you don’t know what the ending of a story will be when you start drawing storyboards, is there a certain method or order you adhere to in order to arrive at the story’s conclusion?

Yes, there is an internal order, the demands of the story itself, which lead me to the conclusion. There are 1415 different shots in Spirited Away. When starting the project, I had envisioned about 1200, but the film told me no, it had to be more than 1200. It’s not me who makes the film. The film makes itself and I have no choice but to follow.

We can see several recurring themes in your work that are again present in Spirited Away, specifically the theme of nostalgia. How do you see this film in relation to your previous work?

That’s a difficult question. I believe nostalgia has many appearances and that it’s not just the privilege of adults. An adult can feel nostalgia for a specific time in their lives, but I think children too can have nostalgia. It’s one of mankind’s most shared emotions. It’s one of the things that makes us human, which is what makes it difficult to define. It was when I saw the film Nostalghia by Tarkovsky that I realised that nostalgia is universal. Even though we use it in Japan, the word ‘nostalgia’ is not a Japanese word. The fact that I can understand that film even though I don’t speak a foreign language means that nostalgia is something we all share. When you live, you lose things. It’s a fact of life. So it’s natural for everyone to have nostalgia.

What strikes me about Spirited Away compared to your previous films is a real freedom of the author. A feeling that you can take the film and the story anywhere you wish, independent of logic, even.

Logic is using the front part of the brain, that’s all. But you can’t make a film with logic. Or if you look at it differently, everybody can make a film with logic. But my way is to not use logic. I try to dig deep into the well of my subconscious. At a certain moment in that process, the lid is opened and very different ideas and visions are liberated. With those I can start making a film. But maybe it’s better that you don’t open that lid completely, because if you release your subconscious it becomes really hard to live a social or family life.

I believe the human brain knows and perceives more than we ourselves realise. The front of my brain doesn’t send me any signals that I should handle a scene in a certain way for the sake of the audience. For instance, what for me constitutes the end of the film, is the scene in which Chihiro takes the train all by herself. That’s where the film ends for me. I remember the first time I took the train alone and what my feelings were at the time. To bring those feelings across in the scene, it was important to not have a view through the window of the train, like mountains or a forest. Most people who can remember the first time they took the train all by themselves, remember absolutely nothing of the landscapes outside the train because they are so focused on the ride itself. So to express that, there had to be no view from the train. But I had created the conditions for it in the previous scenes, when it rains and the landscape is covered by water as a result. But I did that without knowing the reason for it until I arrived at the scene with the train, at which moment I said to myself “How lucky that I made this an ocean” (laughs). It’s while working on that scene that I realised that I work in a non-conscious way. There are more profound things than simply logic that guide the creation of the story.

You have made many films that are set in Western or European landscapes, for instance Laputa and Porco Rosso. Others are set in very Japanese landscapes. On which basis do you decide what the setting should be for any given film?

I have an extensive stock of images and paintings of landscapes that I compiled for use in my films. Which one I choose completely depends on the moment we start working on the film. Usually I make the choice in conjunction with my producer and it really depends on that moment. Because even from the moment I want to make a film, I continue to gather documentation. I travel with a lot of baggage around me, I have many images of the daily life in the world I want to depict. To make a film set in a bathhouse, like Spirited Away, is something I have been thinking about since childhood, when I visited public bathhouses myself. I had been thinking about the forest settings of Totoro for 13 years before starting the film. Likewise with Laputa, it was years before I made the film that I first thought about using that location. So I always carry these ideas and images with me and I make a selection at the moment I start making the film.

Other than some Japanese animation we get to see on this side of the world, your films always express a sense of positivity, hope and a belief in the goodness of man. Is this something you consciously add to your films?

In fact, I am a pessimist. But when I’m making a film, I don’t want to transfer my pessimism onto children. I keep it at bay. I don’t believe that adults should impose their vision of the world on children, children are very much capable of forming their own visions. There’s no need to force our own visions onto them.

So you feel that the films you make are all aimed at children?

I never said that Porco Rosso is a film for children, I don’t think it is. But apart from Porco Rosso, all my films have been made primarily for children. There are many other people who are capable of making films for adults, so I’ll leave that up to them and concentrate on the children.

But still there are millions of adults that watch your films and who get a lot of enjoyment out of your work.

That gives me a lot of pleasure, of course. Simply put, I think that a film which is made specifically for children and made with a lot of devotion, can also please adults. The opposite is not always true. The single difference between films for children and films for adults is that in films for children, there is always the option to start again, to create a new beginning. In films for adults, there are no ways to change things. What happened, happened.

Do you feel that telling stories in the particular way you do is necessary for us as humans?

I’m not a storyteller, I’m a man who draws pictures (laughs). However, I do believe in the power of story. I believe that stories have an important role to play in the formation of human beings, that they can stimulate, amaze and inspire their listeners.

Do you believe in the necessity of fantasy in telling children’s stories?

I believe that fantasy in the meaning of imagination is very important. We shouldn’t stick too close to everyday reality but give room to the reality of the heart, of the mind, and of the imagination. Those things can help us in life. But we have to be cautious in using this word fantasy. In Japan, the word fantasy these days is applied to everything from TV shows to video games, like virtual reality. But virtual reality is a denial of reality. We need to be open to the powers of imagination, which brings something useful to reality. Virtual reality can imprison people. It’s a dilemma I struggle with in my work, that balance between imaginary worlds and virtual worlds.

In both Spirited Away and Porco Rosso there are people who are transformed into pigs. Where does this fascination with pigs come from?

That’s because they’re much easier to draw than camels or giraffes (laughs). I think they fit very well with what I wanted to say. The behaviour of pigs is very similar to human behaviour. I really like pigs at heart, for their strengths as well as their weaknesses. We look like pigs, with our round bellies. They’re close to us.

What about the scene with the putrid river god? Does it have a base in Japanese mythology?

No, it doesn’t come from mythology, but from my own experience. There is a river close to where I live in the countryside. When they cleaned the river we got to see what was at the bottom of it, which was truly putrid. In the river there was a bicycle, with its wheel sticking out above the surface of the water. So they thought it would be easy to pull out, but it was terribly difficult because it had become so heavy from all the dirt it had collected over the years. Now they’ve managed to clean up the river, the fish are slowly returning to it, so all is not lost. But the smell of what they dug up was really awful. Everyone had just been throwing stuff into that river over the years, so it was an absolute mess.

Do your films have one pivotal scene that is representative for the entire film?

Since I am a person who starts work without clear knowledge of a storyline, every single scene is a pivotal scene. In the scene in which the parents are transformed into pigs, that’s the pivotal scene of that moment in the film. But after that it’s the next scene which is most important and so on. In the scene where Chihiro cries, I wanted the tears to be very big, like geysers. But I didn’t succeed in visualising the scene exactly as I had imagined it. So there are no central scenes, because the creation of each scene brings its own problems which have their effect on the scenes that follow.

But there are two scenes in Spirited Away that could be considered symbolic for the film. One is the first scene in the back of the car, where she is really a vulnerable little girl, and the other is the final scene, where she’s full of life and has faced the whole world. Those are two portraits of Chihiro which show the development of her character.

Where do your influences lie as far as other films and directors go?

I was formed by the films and filmmakers of the 1950s, which was the time that I started watching a lot of films. One filmmaker who really influenced me was the French animator Paul Grimault. I watched a lot of films from many countries all over the world, but I usually can’t remember the names of the directors. So I apologise for not being able to mention any other names. Another film which had a decisive influence on me was a Russian film, The Snow Queen. Contemporary animation directors I respect a lot are Yuri Norshteyn from Russia and Frederick Bach from Canada. Norshteyn in particular is someone who truly deserves the title of artist.

What will be your next project? Are you working on anything at the moment?

We recently opened the Studio Ghibli museum. Maybe museum is a big word, because it’s more like a small shack where we exhibit some of the work of the studio. Inside we have a small theatre where we will show short films that have been made exclusively for the Ghibli museum. I am responsible for this, so I’m currently working on a short film for it.

I’m also supervising a new film directed by a young director named Hiroyuki Morita. The film should open in cinemas in Japan next summer. It’s very difficult to supervise another director, because he wants to do things differently from how I would do them. It’s a true test of patience.

Does the incredible impact that Spirited Away has had in Japan change anything about your method of working?

No. You never know how a film will play, whether it will be successful or not, or whether it will touch the audience. I always said to myself that whatever happens, big audience or small, that I would not let the results have an impact on my way of working. But it would be a bit silly for me to change my methods when I have a big success. That means my methods work well (laughs).

Christopher Reeve discusses bad reviews and cruel humour from movie critics and the challenging studio system. Date aired – April 8th 1992.

Burrard Street is a major thoroughfare in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. It is the central street of Downtown Vancouver and the Financial District. The street is named for Burrard Inlet, located at its northern terminus, which in turn is named for Sir Harry Burrard-Neale.

The street starts at Canada Place near the Burrard Inlet, then runs southwest through downtown Vancouver. It crosses False Creek via the Burrard Bridge. South of False Creek, on what used to be called Cedar Street before the completion of the bridge in 1932, the street runs due south until the intersection with West 16th Avenue.

The intersection of Burrard Street and Georgia Street is considered to be the centrepoint of Downtown Vancouver, along with the more tourist-oriented and upscale shopping-spirited intersection of Burrard Street and Robson Street to the south. At and due northeast of the centre is the heart of the Financial District. Further down closer to Vancouver Harbour stands the historic Marine Building, an Art Deco masterpiece, opened in 1930, two years before the Art Deco pylons of the Burrard Bridge at the opposite end of the street. Finally at the Harbour lies Canada Place and the Vancouver Convention Centre.

Nearer to Burrard Bridge is located St. Paul’s Hospital, established on Burrard Street in 1894.

Burrard Street served as the dividing line between the two district lots laid out on the downtown peninsula in the second half of the 19th century: District Lot 185 (now West End) and District Lot 541 (granted to the Canadian Pacific Railway). The two grids were oriented differently, with the result that only every third northwest-southeast street in DL185 actually continuing southeast beyond Burrard into DL541. Burrard currently serves as the boundary between West End and Downtown, as defined by the City of Vancouver.

Burrard Street is served by SkyTrain’s Burrard Station, located underground between the intersections with Melville and Dunsmuir Streets in the heart of the Financial District. Along the downtown portion, there is a bike lane on the southwest-bound direction towards the Burrard Bridge.

There’s a scene early in the 1985 martial arts film The Last Dragon that features a variety of New Yorkers at a screening of Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon. Bikers, breakdancers, brawlers, and a young man known as Bruce Leroy are watching, shouting, and even fighting along with the martial arts classic, before it’s all broken up by the meanest, the prettiest, the baddest mofo low down around this town… the Shogun of Harlem. As cartoonish and wonderful as that scene may be, it was based on an actual screening of the Bruce Lee film that screenwriter Louis Venosta attended with his then-girlfriend on the 10th anniversary of the icon’s passing in 1983.

“Have you seen this guy Bruce Lee?” Venosta recalls asking her before heading to a Times Square theater to join a crowd of fans that he compares to another cult classic. “It was like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, where everybody was dressed in those kung fu suits and the shoes, they were carrying on mock fights in the aisles, it was a lot like that scene in the movie,” he tells us. “They all knew the words to the movie, they were all saying the words out loud and I looked at my girlfriend and said, ‘Are you seeing what I’m seeing?’ And she said, ‘I think I’m seeing what you’re seeing.’”

What they saw became the inspiration for Venosta’s next writing project. The former Fame dancer had already written two screenplays for “very serious dramas,” one of which earned him a Writer’s Guild of America fellowship. This time, however, he was inspired to write for the stage. He told his girlfriend that he saw the kung fu as the dancing in a “hilarious Broadway musical.” Fortunately she saw the bigger picture.

“She said, ‘Are you stupid? It’s a movie. Don’t do it as a show. It’s a movie,’” Venosta remembers. “We were walking and I said, ‘So, who’s the guy?’ I was running through names of friends of mine from Brooklyn and I said, ‘Leroy.’ And she said, ‘Yeah, Bruce Leroy.’ I was actually reading the Shogun novel and I thought, okay, it’s Bruce Leroy and the Shogun of Harlem. I’m going to make it a Brooklyn-Harlem thing. Six weeks later, it was written. The kung fu movie structure was obvious. It was one of the easiest things, honestly, I ever wrote.”

He had the movie theater scene, a hero who was teased for being different, a tough bad guy from the other side of town, and then the “shaggy dog story,” about how the hero had to embark on a journey before realizing what he sought was in front of him the whole time. The rest of the story came from Venosta’s own multi-racial background, as he describes himself as “one of these guys who’s always floating on the periphery of all these cultural tribes.” That’s evident from the concept of a black man obsessed with Bruce Lee’s talents, philosophies, and style, as well as secondary characters like the three jive-talkin’ Chinese Sum Dum Goy employees, who spend their time on the street, lip-syncing to “Sukiyaki Hot Saki Sue.”

“I was always very cognizant of the culture swapping that went on,” Venosta says. “I always thought it was funny, in this particular case you had these black and Hispanic guys who had embraced this Chinese hero. You’d walk through Chinatown and you’d see Chinese guys breakdancing. It was New York but it was also my particular eye for this kind of cultural phenomenon of the culture swapping. I was friends with guys like Mario Van Peebles at the time. We were all sort of part of a little group. We always talked about those blaxploitation films; there was always that dialogue. And I went, but they’re all bad guys. There really should be a young black kid superhero-type figure who kids can look up to with a positive aspirational thing.”

Venosta wrote the screenplay to be his directorial debut, although his version wouldn’t have been so over the top as the movie we know. After finishing the screenplay in six weeks, it took Venosta’s agent four weeks to sell it to a producer named Suzanne de Passe, who brought Motown into the loop. The next thing Venosta knew, he was on a flight to Los Angeles to meet with Berry Gordy.

“It was interesting,” Venosta says of meeting the music legend whose name would eventually be attached to the title of the film. After spending a few weeks living in Gordy’s Bel Air estate, Venosta moved into a place with director Michael Schultz so they could begin their rewrites. The writer’s version would have differed mostly in style, as his Shogun character would have been “a tough dude from Harlem,” and not a guy wearing ridiculous shoulder pads and those awesome ‘80s glasses. However, as he looks back on the film 31 years later, he admits that it might not have had the same success and cult following without those changes. But he still knew his idea was gold.

“I always thought the movie would be a big hit.”

Enter the New (and Last) Dragon

Had it not been for some fortuitous word of mouth, the martial artist making his acting debut as Leroy Green, Jr. in The Last Dragon would have been Tae Bo creator Billy Blanks. But a young kickboxing champion named Taimak Guarriello caught wind of the film and casting through his friends in the martial arts tournament scene, and like most teenagers he didn’t have a clue what was in store for him beyond 18. A career in acting seemed like “a pie in the sky dream,” he remembers, but he gave it a shot, figuring his martial arts skills could certainly win him the role. Of course, with zero acting experience, it was more likely that his audition would be memorable for all the wrong reasons.

“I grew up watching a lot of the Shaw Brothers kung fu stars and obviously Bruce Lee,” the actor and now author who goes simply by the name Taimak now tells us. “The instructor I was training with back then was Ron Van Clief, and also a friend of my mother’s was a dance choreographer on the film and he got me an audition. I did horrible because I never knew what a cold reading was and I thought, as a young guy, that I would just go in there and do some great martial arts moves and they’d like me. I ended up in an office with about three feet of space around me and part of the script in my hand, and I was totally thrown off. So, I eventually kept working on it but when I came to try to get another audition I was told that they already had another actor but they were going to give me an audition anyway. I ended up getting the role and they let go of the other actor.”

“It wasn’t a tough choice to make,” Venosta says of casting Taimak as the film’s hero. “There weren’t a lot of guys who could actually pull off the stuff this guy needed to be able to do. Billy was actually, again, more like the Brooklyn kid I had envisioned. But I think Taimak was fantastic.”

So, what was it about Taimak that made him perfect for the role? Despite the actor not matching Venosta’s vision of the film’s hero, the writer remembers liking Taimak’s soft-spoken nature, while Schultz seemingly found the perfect man for his own vision of the film’s hero. “Michael said that I had a quality that was like Bruce Leroy in the sense that there was an innocence yet street,” Taimak explains. “Since I was from New York City, I had a thing going on that they liked. But also being a martial artist in real life and being somewhat like the Leroy character, I guess they thought I had something that would resonate.”

Taimak wasn’t alone in terms of inexperience. Leroy’s love interest, Laura Charles, was played by Canadian singer and model Denise Matthews, better known as Vanity, who had three minor acting roles in 1980. Co-star Faith Prince had two small roles before she became the would-be pop starlet Angela Viracco. Glen Eaton also made his acting debut as Johnny Yu, Leroy’s cocky but comically inept sidekick, while a young Ernie Reyes, Jr. helped beat up Sho’nuff’s henchmen. Even William H. Macy and Chazz Palminteri padded their résumés with bit roles as J.J. and Hood #2, respectively.

Eaton was 14 years old in 1972, when Bruce Lee starred in The Chinese Connection and The Way of the Dragon, and he remembers being fascinated by the icon to the point that he and his brother would emulate his talents in their own fake fighting. That was the extent of his martial arts “training” in life and for The Last Dragon, but it was perfect for his character, Johnny Yu, who excelled at showing off the moves but didn’t have the guts to actually use them.

“It’s different,” Eaton explains of the film’s concept. “It was a comedy martial arts. It’s not typical. The picture was made very well, so when I saw the picture I was much more impressed with the way they made the picture, how well it was done, and the script was good but it was the picture. I was like, wow, they really brought it to life.”

Schultz, who is now 78 and still directing episodes of TV shows like Arrow and Blackish, already had more than a decade of experience behind the camera, directing hits like Cooley High, Car Wash, and Bustin’ Loose and the notorious flop musical Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The young actors were also aided by the presence of Julius Carry III, who had a solid TV background by the time he played Sho’nuff, and Christopher Murney, who played the ultimate bad guy, Eddie Arkadian, and made his acting debut in 1968. The film wasn’t exactly in line with what Murney was used to, but he enjoyed working with the younger actors: “They were fun, they were eager, they were young, they were willing to learn.”

“They all bring something entertaining to the film,” Eaton adds. “As the years go on, people still like it and other people watch it for the first time and they like it because they’re entertained. It’s a good message, and I think that’s, a lot of times, what we want.”

The Legend of the Shogun of Harlem

Sadly, some of the actors who made this film so special have died over the years, all of them far too early. Leo O’Brien, who played Leroy’s younger brother Richie, passed away in 2012 at 41, while Carry died from pancreatic cancer in 2008 at age 56. In February, Vanity died from renal failure. She was 57.

“She was trying to pursue a more wholesome type of character because she was doing those pretty steamy music videos,” Taimak remembers of his first and only big screen love interest. “Berry Gordy asked me if I thought she was the right one and I told him ‘yes.’ Not only because she was gorgeous but because she had something that the other actresses, although may have been better actresses, didn’t have. And he hired her.”

Carry’s performance was arguably the most important in terms of cult status, as the simple question “Who is the master?” is bound to elicit shouts of “Sho’nuff!” Taimak says that he and Carry had some “pretty interesting encounters” during the filming of The Last Dragon, but it was all for the sake of chemistry. “He would not like the fact that I thought he was funny and start fights with me, but then run away when it got serious,” Taimak laughs. “So we had a fun time. Everybody was very passionate about doing a great job so everybody supported each other.”

“He was just a terrific actor,” Eaton says of Carry. “I crack up every time I see him in the film. Especially that anger. He’s never happy, so he’s constantly expressing that hostility. That’s what makes his character fun. Rather than a serious, evil, mean guy, he’s funny to watch. Funny to watch him get all angry and his big ego, and so that’s part of the thing with the picture. You’re able to laugh and enjoy the good guys and the bad guys, all the characters.”

Had Venosta had his way, the Shogun character would have never been so outrageous. He wanted a tougher, meaner, more serious guy to represent Harlem in his war within NYC, but he’s certainly happy with the way that Carry portrayed the villain.

“I would never have thought to put Sho’nuff in these shoulder pads,” he admits. “He would have been a tough dude from Harlem. Immersed in the kung fu culture but not this cartoon incarnation, which again, today I like. I actually love what Julius did with it. And interestingly enough, part of where that came from was they hired a Broadway guy to do the costumes. He was kind of like that character in The Producers. And he came up with this look and I was kind of like, ‘Huh?’ But it works. Again, I think it ended up adding a great aspect to the film that, again, is not a choice I would have made but a choice I’m happy was made.”

The Lighter Side of Villains

What helped make Sho’nuff such a great bad guy was the presence of the cartoonishly sinister Eddie Arkadian, who was forced to recruit all of the city’s toughest brawlers to take down Leroy for protecting Laura Charles and beating up all of Eddie’s hapless muscle. The mobster character was influenced by Schultz and Gordy, as Venosta thought it was the most “over the top move” of all of the film’s over the top aspects, but he still liked Murney’s performance. And Murney, being the veteran actor of this cast, decided that Eddie would be best suited being as cartoonish as possible.

“He was straighter in the beginning and I just kept pushing it further, seeing how far I could take him,” Murney explains. “Michael just let me go and if it was too much Berry was always on set. Sometimes they would say, ‘Well, that’s too far,’ and then I’d either agree with it and pull back or let it go and see what happens, see how it plays. There was one scene that we shot, the first scene that we shot in the film where some money was exchanged with Sho’nuff, and they had gone through all of the trouble of putting me in a hairpiece. In that scene, I came back and they said, ‘Jeez Chris, we’ve got a problem, we gotta lose the piece.’ And I said, ‘Well, let’s just ditch it, we don’t need it.’ They said, ‘What do you mean?’ And I said, ‘Well, just leave it. It doesn’t matter. It’s in the middle of the movie and Eddie’s just a cartoon character anyway. Just don’t explain it, just leave it.’ And they did.”

For a newcomer like Faith Prince, who played Murney’s on-screen love interest, working with someone who was pushing it “too far” or just far enough came with a dilemma. She had to keep herself from breaking. “Chris Murney was hilariously funny,” she says. “The hardest thing for me was to get through scenes being committed and not laugh because it was just so outrageous. Chris Murney is brilliant. It was all we could do to commit to every scene like it was this heightened drama, and we were just cracking each other up.”

The bigger problem with taking his performance to the creative limit was that it almost cost Murney an eye. In his fancy office, Eddie’s brother Rock, played by Mike Starr, keeps a fish tank with a giant-but-unseen meat-eating fish. When Leroy arrived in ninja gear to rescue Laura, of course he had to dunk Eddie’s head in the mysterious, bubbling vat. But when they filmed that moment, the pipe that produced the bubbles proved more dangerous than one of Leroy’s throwing stars.

“If you go back and look at the scene again, you’ll see that when my head is pulled out of the tank there’s a little cut right above my eye,” Murney says. “When I dunked my head in on this particular take, I didn’t realize how close I was and I missed my eye by about an inch when I did that shot. By an inch. The bubble pipe just hit me right in the forehead, right above my eye. And you can see a little blood mark of where it hit my forehead.”

Eddie was driven by a desire to see his girlfriend, Angela, succeed as a pop singer, so he chose the rational course of action: kidnapping Laura, the host of an MTV-style dance show, and forcing her to air Angela’s bizarre music videos for songs like “Dirty Books” and “Test Drive.” If Eddie was cartoonish, then there isn’t a word to properly describe Angela, but Faith’s performance earned high praise.

“Faith was hilarious, she was wonderful,” Venosta says. “She’s still one of my favorite things in the movie. Not quite the way I wrote Angela but an extreme version of it.”

It goes without saying that Angela was inspired by Cyndi Lauper, as Prince recalls Gordy even asking her to “come to Motown to be our Cyndi Lauper.” Gordy was so serious about creating a pop star within a movie that he even presented the idea to Prince as a new career option, she says. She took it as a compliment, naturally, but Prince’s heart was in acting on screen, not playing a character in the real world.

Still, Gordy was receptive to Prince’s input for this secondary character. In filming the music videos, she remembers working with “the hottest guys on the scene,” as if they were filming actual videos for MTV. But when Gordy recut the song and took it in a different direction, Prince was confused because she liked the original and thought it was better for the story and her character. She wasn’t trying to question a musical genius, but when she did, he called her up to his hotel room for a conversation.

“I walk in the door and there are two bodyguards and they usher me in, and Mr. Gordy is sitting in his room and he’s got one boombox on the left of him and one boombox on the right,” she recalls. “He had the original cassette of the thing we laid down on the left and he had his cut in the cassette on the right. He said, ‘I thought we’d just take a listen.’ We listened to both and he looked at me and he said, ‘You know, for your young years, I wish I had 10 people around me like you. You are not a young person.’ I said, ‘No sir, I’m not.’ He said, ‘You’re right, the story is better in the first cut.’”

Years later, Prince attended a party at actress Allison Janney’s house where guests were required to bring their most embarrassing acting footage. There was a big screen set up in the back of the house and everyone would watch and laugh at each other’s select moments. Prince’s footage was one of the music videos from The Last Dragon, but instead of laughing along with it, she says, the guy playing the clips shut it off. Why? “He goes, ‘You’re too convincing,’” she recalls. “It’s like you’re really trying go for it, like good acting. But that footage, even though I was doing it to be funny, it held up much better than anything there because it was so committed.”

Next Stop: Broadway?

From Busta Rhymes recreating Sho’nuff’s look in his 1997 music video for “Dangerous” to UFC fighter Alex Caceres calling himself “Bruce Leeroy,” there’s never a shortage of tributes to this film. Earning $25 million at the box office, the film was a hit despite less-than-glowing reviews. Its quotability, catchy music, and all-around campiness have since made it a massive cult classic. In fact, as we interviewed Venosta, a fan interrupted to let him know how much he loves the movie. But that’s rather tame compared to some of the more diehard fans.

“Two couples, separately, told me they got married because of the movie,” Taimak remembers. “They were dating and either the wife or the husband was such a fan of the film that they just played it for their wife or husband and they fell in love watching the movie. It became part of their jargon when they talk to each other. The man would say, ‘Who’s the master?’ And she would go, ‘I am!’ It integrated into their lives and then people at their jobs would use all the different lines from the film. The lines are just iconic, so memorable.”

If the movie was a box office success, fans adored it, and everyone enjoyed working on it, why was there never a sequel? “Ten, maybe 15 years ago I started getting emails from people: ‘Why isn’t there a sequel?’ I was like, ‘Well, nobody’s asked me to do a sequel,’” Venosta laughs. “I don’t know why there’s not a sequel. If somebody wants to do a sequel, I’ve got ideas for sequels. It wouldn’t be hard to do a sequel. I don’t think a remake would be very interesting. I don’t think you’d want to do it like they remade Karate Kid. I think you could still sequelize it, there’s still an opportunity to introduce a young character who would interact with an older Taimak.”

In Taimak’s appropriately-named autobiography, The Last Dragon, he includes a treatment and some ideas for The Last Dragon sequel that never happened. People have certainly thought about making the follow-up and even a remake, as terrible as that thought may be, but the actor says the decision ultimately rests with Sony Pictures and Berry Gordy’s son, Kerry. Perhaps there’s a good reason as to why this particular movie remains remake-free.

“I don’t know about a remake because it’s like remaking Michael Jackson,” Taimak says. “You have something so loved and so unique, how do you remake Michael Jackson? How do you remake Bruce Lee? People say that I gave them that vibe of when they watch Bruce Lee, because there was something about when they saw me in this film. And I was being myself but he was a hero of mine and he still is. You can copy or be inspired but you’ve got to be yourself. The movie has to be its own thing.”

Not having experience in martial arts or pop music, Murney originally saw the film as a paycheck, and he’s still pretty shocked today that it’s such a cult phenomenon. “It’s nice that it turned out that way,” he says of the fan following, but he thinks it’s better that there was no sequel, and certainly no remake. “I don’t know if you can call it lighting in a bottle, but it’s close. It just came together and it worked. They’d be making a mistake if they tried to do a remake only because the danger of a remake, it’s always going to be compared to the original. So that’s a chance you take.”

In 2008, it was reported that Wu-Tang Clan member and The Man with the Iron Fists director RZA was working on a remake of The Last Dragon and he was focused on landing Rihanna to play the Laura Charles role. His pick for Bruce Leroy was Chris Brown, even after the singer assaulted Rihanna, because he thought a good guy role could serve as damage control. In 2009, RZA said that he and Samuel L. Jackson (reportedly cast as the new Sho’nuff) were working with Sony and the Gordy family to tell a new version of this story, but he didn’t believe the script was good enough. And as recently as 2014, RZA was still defending his desire to remake a cult classic, comparing it to laundry detergent. But that’s the last we’ve heard of it.

That doesn’t mean, however, that we’ve heard the last of Bruce Leroy. The Gordys and Sony may control the big screen destiny of Bruce Leroy, but Venosta still has stage hopes for his Brooklyn hero.

“Because I had originally envisioned it that way, I carved out the Broadway rights in my contract,” Venosta reveals. “I actually could do it without asking anybody. It’s the question of finding the time to do it, and sit down and do it. In fact, one of these people sent an email to Bruno Mars saying, ‘Hey, Louis wants to do a musical of The Last Dragon, want to write some songs?’ This was just two days ago. So, if Bruno Mars calls me I’ll be like, ‘Let’s go.’ That would blow my mind. It can be Bruno, it can be Alicia Keys, it can be Jay Z, it can be any of them. There are some great songwriters and musicians that I think the fun part is, I’m curious to find out who are the obsessive fans of The Last Dragon that would like to go, ‘Yeah! Let’s do a Broadway musical!’ That’s what’s nice about it, it has this energy that I don’t have to convince people that it would be a fun idea. It has its own energy.”

In some people’s Zelda codec, boat = monotony. Wind Waker’s Triforce trawl and irksome wind realignment did for many of you, leaving jaded gamers in its wake. Well, get over it. Although a canonical continuation of Wind Waker, this is a custom-built DS outing, determined to deliver more than a control-scheme makeover. From the moment Link plunges his hand into a chest and pulls out… nothing at all to an off-key discovery jingle, you know you’re in for something quite different.

Ignoring the under-nourished connotations; Hourglass is Zelda Lite – throwing out the end-of-the-world bombast that producer Eiji Aonuma usually can’t resist. Ganondorf’s gone and the only thing standing in the way of Link’s life of leisure is a phantom ship that whisks away his pirate chum Tetra. Hardly a classic villain – it’s a boat for crying out loud – but it fits perfectly with the scale of this particular adventure. Hourglass is a smaller, tightly choreographed romp – a portable experience through and through.

Gone is the sprawling ocean, wisely squeezing all the islands into a two-by-two world map that takes only five minutes to circumnavigate. Unlike Wind Waker, where the lonely doldrums above water made those few submerged Hyrulian moments oh-so-special, PH knows not to push its luck – you just chart a course on to the map with the stylus, and off you go.

Music soars, seagulls tailgate your vessel and Link stands proudly on deck, beaming at the impressive draw distance. This would have been enough for us soppy romantics, but Nintendo know more is needed to keep people on board (har har). And so golden frogs explode from the ocean froth, horse-racing fences rise and need a tap of the jump icon to traverse, and a variety of pirates and marine-based nasties taste canon ball, courtesy of highly responsive screen-tap cannon attacks.

Link is drawn towards the stylus like a moth to a flame, giving him a fluidity of movement that far surpasses the old-school dual axis movement of previous handheld Zeldas. With silky movement at their disposal, the designers are allowed to lob all manner of dexterous spatial tasks Link’s way.

Via some supernatural means, the titular Phantom Hourglass enables Link to wander the temple without choking on pink fog – but only as long as the sand flows. Guarded by the armored chasers, you have to traverse each floor without wandering into their Metal Gear-ish cones of vision – they’ll give chase should they spot you. One swipe from their swords and it’s back to that floor’s entrance, minus some time. Padding out the stealth sections of Wind Waker and combining them with the level of puzzling usually reserved for the toughest dungeons means you’ve got a Zelda innovation of serious note.

Deeper floors reveal new dungeons on the “outside” containing the items and sand required to go deeper still. You’d think the back and forth would grow tiresome, but the Sea King’s Temple has been designed with repeat visits in mind. It’s a stunning piece of level design, constantly unfolding in surprising new ways.

And items? How did we cope before? When you realize that the boomerang can spell out your name, there’s no question what a godsend stylus-driven items are. Not simply content with giving you huge amounts of control – drawing intricate paths for the boomerang and bombchu never grows old – they’ve found new things to do with the most tired of items. If the hookshot’s tightrope tricks don’t make it into the next Wii Zelda, there are going to be some angry letters.

Handheld honing will annoy some factions of the Zelda community, though. Despite sporting a solid 15-hour story, side quests aren’t as plentiful as we’d hoped. Cannon-shooting minigames and letter delivery tasks are fine, but the main “fairy stones” task is somewhat voided by it only really kicking in after the main quest – which was when you actually needed the power-ups offered as a reward. However, this is a tiny gripe.

Robson Street is a major southeast-northwest thoroughfare in downtown and West End of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Its core commercial blocks from Burrard Street to Jervis were also known as Robsonstrasse. Its name honours John Robson, a major figure in British Columbia’s entry into the Canadian Confederation, and Premier of the province from 1889 to 1892. Robson Street starts at BC Place Stadium near the north shore of False Creek, then runs northwest past Vancouver Library Square, Robson Square and the Vancouver Art Gallery, coming to an end at Lost Lagoon in Stanley Park.

As of 2006, the city of Vancouver overall had the fifth most expensive retail rental rates in the world, averaging US$135 per square foot per year, citywide. Robson Street tops Vancouver with its most expensive locations renting for up to US$200 per square foot per year. In 2006, both Robson Street and the Mink Mile on Bloor Street in Toronto were the 22nd most expensive streets in the world, with rents of $208 per square feet. In 2007, the Mink Mile and Robson slipped to 25th in the world with an average of $198 per square feet. The price of each continues to grow with Vancouver being Burberry’s first Canadian location and Toronto’s Yorkville neighbourhood (which is bounded on the south side by Bloor) now commanding rents of $300 per square foot.

In 1895, train tracks were laid down the street, supporting a concentration of shops and restaurants. From the early to middle-late 20th century, and especially after significant immigration from postwar Germany, the northwest end of Robson Street was known as a centre of German culture and commerce in Vancouver, earning the nickname Robsonstrasse, even among non-Germans (this name lives on in the Robsonstrasse Hotel on the street). At one time, the city had placed streetsigns reading “Robsonstrasse” though these were placed after the German presence in the area had largely vanished.

Robson Street was featured on an old edition of the Canadian Monopoly board as one of the two most expensive properties.