The last ninja movie I remember seeing is American Ninja. No, it was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Anyway, it’s rare and Ninja Assassin gives the stealth martial artists their due. It’s up to director James McTeigue to turn Korean pop star Rain into a badass action hero. He told us how he did it in an exclusive interview.
Crave Online: We haven’t seen a ninja movie in at least 20 years. What is unique about ninjas to put on film?
James McTeigue: Well, I think if you talk to any kid, they love ninjas. I think it’s because they’re all dressed in black. They’re made fun of like black pajamas on but they always have cool weapons. I think that even though they don’t know directly what ninjas are, I think almost through osmosis, they know that they’re out there. If you’ve seen The Dark Knight, for example, there’s ninjas in that. If you saw even Speed Racer for example, there’s ninjas in that. So I think people know in the ether what ninjas are and hopefully they’ll come along to this movie and then they’ll definitely know what they are.
Crave Online: Were you able to capture the outrageousness of Asian cinema even more than The Matrix did?
James McTeigue: I guess I tried to capture a different outrageousness. A lot of people ask me about the violence and the blood in this film. Compared to some of the Asian cinema, it’s minute in comparison. Compared to the way it’s dealt with in anime, it’s completely miniscule. I was just hoping that I could make the two cinemas collide, make Asian cinema collide with the American cinema so it felt satisfying.
Crave Online: To me, The Matrix used Asian aesthetics in confines of the structure of the rules of the world. A lot of Asian cinema is anything goes.
James McTeigue: Yeah, I think the thing that is always really hard for a western audience is the Asian sense of humor. So I think that is sometimes jarring in Asian cinema. I didn’t go for that approach and I know Ninja Assassin is much looser with the rules than The Matrix was, for example. But I think that’s part of a homage too. I just tried to keep the comedy down. I didn’t want it to be like the comedy in Kung Fu Hustle or something like that.
Crave Online: Just the blatant chopping up of people is like the dark sense of humor they have.
James McTeigue: Yeah, it is and at the point that you’re decapitating people, hopefully you’re looking at that in the spirit with which it was developed. I’m not saying in any way that it’s real so hopefully I set the tone from the start of the movie.
Crave Online: Is 92 minutes your original cut?
James McTeigue: No, actually. It was a little longer but I think ultimately what I wanted to do was tell the backstory and then make sure the two worlds of the ninja, one being Raizo’s ninja world, one being Mika’s ninja world collided a lot quicker. So I took it down but that’s kind of normal in your editing process. You start off with your director’s cut, then you start peeling it back.
Crave Online: For some reason I expected an epic.
James McTeigue: For a start actually, I guess I’m of the opinion that most movies are too long. A kids movie, two and a half hours long? What are you saying there? I like films that are sort of direct and to the point. You get on the ride and you don’t get off until it stops. I don’t love a lot of meandering around. Your expectation is probably right because a lot of those films have been a little epic in nature. So yeah, but I’m glad for it to be 90 minutes.
Crave Online: You’re not supposed to be able to see ninjas. How did you conceive of how we’d see them in a movie?
James McTeigue: I guess I had fun with that in the first scene. Basically, it’s this kind of faceless kind of shadow killer assassin takes all those guys out. Then, I guess I used elements of horror and film noir to make them keep resolving out of darkness, almost like they’re hiding in the shadows the whole time. I think you have to see them because ultimately I have him running down a Berlin street dodging cars, but they sort of disappear as fast as they appear. It was fun to mess around with the mythology of them.
Crave Online: Even in the dark, we can see them well enough.
James McTeigue: Absolutely. I think you want to feel their form there. That’s what you want to do and you always want to feel when they come up that there is a terror or a horror element to it. Yeah, it’s just like a balance. Some of it I do in post production but a lot of it’s the way you light the scene on the set.
Crave Online: Is there any special effect of blending them into the shadows?
James McTeigue: For the most part it was done in camera. One or two times, in the DI, the digital intermediary, I would get with Maxine Gervais who’s a great colorist and blend it a little more so it felt like they were resolving a little easier out of the shadow.
Crave Online: How hard is it to get CGI blood right?
James McTeigue: If you spoke to Dan Glass who’s a visual effects supervisor, hard. And I was picky. I really had an idea of how I wanted it and to do fluids and liquids in CG is one of the hardest things to do. Yeah, I was very pedantic about it. It took a long while. We had a lot of vendors from all over the place, some in Germany, some in Scandinavia, some in the Philippines, some right here in the states. I was trying to get a consistency amongst all of it but I thought they did some great work. They really got the idea that I wanted it to be sort of anime-like.
Crave Online: Yeah, it’s not supposed to look real.
James McTeigue: No, not at all and I thought that’s why ultimately the MPAA gave me the rating that they gave me. They understood that I wasn’t saying that it was real, that it was highly stylized, that I was basing it on comics and graphic novels and gameplay. So I think they got into the spirit of it but it’s hard. The answer to your question is it’s hard.
