Thanks to Nina who has tweeted the link for the Life Weekly interview. Many thanks to the person who created the page with the interview and shared it.
The interview is here. Here is a brief and loose translation using both the google and bing translator. This is a long interview and I do not have time to translate the whole thing, sorry. I am doing only the first part that talks about MOTC. The interview also talks about Side by SIde, past projects and Dogstar. You can use either the google or bing translator for the rest.
We see Mr. Reeves at noon and he is tired from all of the uninterrupted interviews from the morning. As he quickly took a break to smoke a cigarette, his staff joked,”that we shouldn’t ask about his 1/8 Chinese decent or what kind of Chinese food he likes – he has been asked 100’s of times and is tired of hearing it.”
His face covered with a thick black beard, Mr. Reeves ran his fingers through his hair twice. He said that except for when he is filming, being a star is no trouble for him as he is able to live his life with ease. He said, ” I always think I should be able to do my own thing, it is important – is it not.”
In fact, Keanu Reeves is in Beijing to promote his directorial debut Man of Tai Chi. He said, “The project took 7 years with the script being modified for 5 years. When you tell a story, you have to figure out what to say, write it down, figure out what direction to go in and then review it. This process results in a draft and the process must be repeated many times to get a good story that can be understood.”
Mr. Reeves said the script originally had 134 pages and took 5 hr. It was very difficult but he need to condense the script to 90 pages. (The google translator did not assign any units and the bing trtanslator said page – I have no idea if pages is correct.) He said the story came together for him as he focused on the two masters: The master of light (good) who you want to be and the master of darkness (evil) that boldly tells you to go boldly ahead and feel your passion. This conflict is easy to present but how the master speaks and talks to his students was tough for me as. With respect to martial arts and the Kung Fu Master, he is a foreigner but he understands that with reflection you can unitie people around the wisdom so they can cope with many problems.
Mr. Reeves calls a spade a spade and says, ” Good Kung fu action films, fight scenes, the picture is beautiful, it makes me feel like dancing! And the roles in Kung fu movies are always good and deep in their meaning. I love Kung Fu movies!”