comic-con comments from Azumi director Ryuhei Kitamura

first off, the coverage for comic-con on G-4 blew. hardly anything about comics. I think it's cool that they went there, but they did like 6 hours coverage a day for E-3 (which is obviously more up their alley) but only 2 crappy hours for comic-con, and then repeated all weekend like it was new shit. I stayed up on saturday just to see the same shit I saw the night before.

anyway, Ryuhei Kitamura isn't the most famous japanese director around now, but I guess he was at comic-con promoting the american theatrical release of his movie, Azumi, which came out like in 1994 in japan (or it feels that way). I found this on fuckedgaijin.com, but will link you to the original post. after watching bai-ling on entourage tonight (season 2 rerun...I am getting caught up), his statements ring even more true. "cute" only takes you so far. where's the ass-kicking?

CS: How did you go about finding a young actress that could do all of the action required of the role?
Kitamura: That was the most difficult part. This producer asked me and I said, "I will do Azumi, but we have two big problems, one is the story. The comic is so big, so long, so how do we make a two-hour story out of the huge comic? The other thing is the actress problem. Who's going to play Azumi?" It's impossible to find an actress who can move in Japan. It's not like Hong Kong or China or Korea. Most of the Japanese actors and actresses, they can't move. That was the problem, I knew that, but "Azumi" was a very big movie so studios were all saying they wanted to use someone famous. Someone famous is easy to find, but it's a different thing if she can move, so I had to find somebody who I can train as Azumi, maybe famous or maybe becoming famous. Me and the producer auditioned 200 beautiful girls. We just called every beautiful girl from 14 to 23, all over Japan, but we couldn't find one. I was so desperate. I'm not the kind of director that can make a movie just as a job, so if I have no confidence in it, I'm not going to do it. On the one hand, we were fighting how to write the script. It took like a year and a half til we finished the script. (from comingsoon.net)