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Wesley
Snipes
Stars
in
"The
Art of War"
Snipes
Talks to AC Team About Producing, Acting, Martial Arts...
and What's Next
AC Team's Suzanne Kai was invited to participate in a round table
conversation with action star Wesley Snipes in Hollywood.
She found a multi-faceted dynamo. Wesley, the international
star, the film producer, and yes, Wesley, the publisher of hot,
new writers.
Snipes walked into the room with the energy and charisma
of a star, wearing a colorful jacket, and ready to talk about his
new movie,"The Art of War" co-starring Marie Matiko ("The
Corruptor"), Donald Sutherland ("Instinct"), and
Anne Archer ("Clear and Present Danger").
Here
are highlights of the interview, which was interspersed with Wesley's
laughter.
Q: One
aspect that makes "The Art of War" interesting and unique
is that your character is not the typical action guy... he wants
to get out of this racket, and really, he thinks it's going to be
this easy assignment and once he finds out what's happening to his
partners, that's when he becomes motivated to go on the offensive.
The idea that your character is not some James Bond, Rambo guy...
He really wants to lead a normal life. He doesn't necessarily want
to do this.
Snipes:
And we want to try to keep it consistent with the way these guys really
are. I mean I know some guys who do this, and these guys are simple
guys. You would never know that they do what they do, and they know
how to do the things that they can do.
And
I always try to say to myself, Wes, if you are going to play a character
that has all these prerequisites, and it's based on either real
experience, or a real occupation or a real person, the people who
do that should feel, yes, they should feel like, yeah okay, that's
right.
That's
the barometer in which I set for myself. And then everybody else,
we hope they like it.
Q: Can you tell
us about the genesis of the project?
Snipes:
Conceptually, I think the project was written with Jet Li in mind,
and then they brought it to us??quot;What do you think you guys
at Amen Ra Films can do with it?" We said great! We can make
a good political suspense who-done-it. Good political thriller,
and on top of it we can add the action.
Now,
the suspense thrillers, I think, work consistently. They are timeless,
really good ones. Hitchcock films, you can watch now, you can watch
it ten years from now, you've watched it ten years before. Some
of the stuff that Harrison Ford does in terms of his political thrillers,
you still like them, you still watch them. Then you add the extra
element of the action on top of it, man, you got a whole different
genre of movies. And then you raise the quality of action films,
so people don't go and say, "Oh, another action movie. Oh yeah,
mindless action." No, no, not this one.
And
that's how we put it together. Found Christian, and said hey man,
this is what we want to achieve: we want to make it slick, we want
to make it make sense, first and foremost it has to make sense,
that the story has to be tight, and we need to cast it with some
good actors, and then we'll handle all the action parts.
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