The iconic actor opens up about his seven-year filmmaking journey that made him a force in China. And also, escaping Sad Keanu .
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A big part of Keanu Reeves' allure is that it is hard to know what he's thinking at any time, whether on camera or on a bench or in interviews. On a late October afternoon, the 49-year-old actor is tucked into the corner of the couch in his small trailer beneath the Williamsburg Bridge in Brooklyn. He has an hour break after shooting fight sequences inside an empty bank for his next movie John Wick and his face is glistening with sweat and covered in convincing fake bruises and slashes.
Reeves is kind but quiet, never dodging a question, but he also doesn't tend to offer long responses or digressions. Clearly, he's not all that worried about public perception or internet ephemera.
In the downtime he has from shooting John Wick, an action flick about a hit man "who has his demons but is trying to be an angel," as the zen poet of an actor says, Reeves is working to promote his directorial debut, Man of Tai Chi. It is a Fight Club-meets-Karate Kid-meets-The Social Network tale of tradition versus technology and power versus virtue, a real merging of East and West mainstream filmmaking.
Set in China, the film took seven years to finance and produce, which, upon its Nov. 1 stateside release, made Reeves a sort of — and maybe this is him just being modest — accidental visionary.
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During the course of making the three Matrix films, Reeves got to know Tiger Hu Chen, a Chinese martial artist and stunt man. In the middle of the '00s, the two friends, along with a writer named Michael G. Cooney, began developing a story about a student of the ancient exercise discipline Tai Chi (which you probably best know as the slow, meditative activity practiced by groups of elderly parkgoers).
Chen became the film's star — his character is named Tiger Chen — while Reeves took on the role of the villain named Donaka Mark, a masochistic businessman who runs an underground fight club that broadcasts its death battles on the internet.
Over the course of the script's development, which ended up including dialogue in English and Mandarin, Chen was responsible for overseeing the many nuanced representations of Chinese culture, "especially the language of the master, because it's using a different kind of way of speaking," Reeves explained. "He talked about being a higher hand."
Eventually, Reeves decided that the project would become his directorial debut. Oftentimes, finding a director means a movie is on the fast track to production, but that was far from the case for Man of Tai Chi.
Reeves pitched the movie to Han Sanping, the head of the all-powerful, government-backed Chinese Film Group, back in 2007, when the wave of trans-Pacific sales was a mere ripple. (Now, of course, China has become the biggest foreign consumer of American films, and a tantalizingly gold mine to Hollywood studios, which are catering their products to the country more and more.) Man of Tai Chi had to find financing — Village Roadshow Asia and Universal International ended up providing crucial cash — and then go through the rigorous and sometimes unpredictable script censorship practiced by the China Film Group, which controls which movies can be seen in the country. The review was even higher stakes for Reeves and his team, because they were vying for co-financing from the CFG.
The script came back with several notes concerning the proposed film's depiction of China — the CFG prefers to sweep social criticism or suggestions that government officials are anything less than humble servants of the people — which required some adjustments.
"Originally, all of the underground fighting took place in Beijing, but it couldn't," Reeves says. "We couldn't have a corrupt police officer, and the fighting couldn't take place in Beijing, or even in mainland China. But they were fine with that in Hong Kong and Macau. It actually opened up the movie."
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