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Rob Minkhoff on The Forbidden Kingdom
By Fred Topel | Image property of Lionsgate
The Forbidden Kingdom
Rob Minkhoff Directs The Forbidden Kingdom
"I think coming from a background in animation which is all about planning the movie and storyboarding and figuring it out visually, obviously helped a lot planning this movie," said Minkoff. "The thing is when I was a kid, I loved martial arts movies. Even in The Lion King, if you remember, there's a scene at the end with Rafiki when he fights the hyenas, he does some stick form, does a little Bruce Lee move. That's because I'm a big fan."
The Forbidden Kingdom has a modern day teen (Michael Angarano) travel back in time to learn kung fu from the masters. That is how Minkoff felt on the set. "In a way, I got to do the same thing so it's kind of a weird thing how it parallels the story. I got to be kind of [like] Jason with Jackie Chan, who's made 100 great martial arts movies and Jet Li who's made another 100 and Woo Ping who's made [more] and Peter Pau. All these great, great people, and I suppose the other big thing about animation, or working at Disney even that allowed me to do this was I really love collaboration. I really love working with people. I really enjoy the experience of working together because I really respect each of these people as an artist and I really want to bring something of that authenticity to the film and to the screen."
Working on the film also gave Minkoff a travelogue of Chinese sites. "We wanted to shoot all over China in all of these different remote locations, but to manage to do that is very difficult. We had tons of equipment, we had the actors and the crew. We were shooting the movie with the Genesis camera which was the first time that had been done in China, so it was all shot digitally. Fortunately, we had Rafaella De Laurentiis as our executive producer who came up with a brilliant plan on how to get it to all these different places so that we could really show off and showcase these amazing, amazing locations. Other than that, when we landed in Heng Dian, which is the studio that we primarily were based at, which is a studio that has been there for about 10 years and has just really spectacular sets, it's about a five hour drive from Shanghai. It's pretty remote. Pretty much we were in the heart of China but we made the movie."
Minkoff was also the rare westerner on the set. "The other thing was we worked with a primarily Chinese crew. I'd say 90% of everybody on the movie was either from mainland China or Hong Kong. So one of the big issues was obviously the language barrier. That's something obviously you have to work a little harder I suppose to communicate, but there are certain people, Jackie being one of them, he's multi-lingual. He speaks English, he speaks Cantonese and Mandarin, so that really allowed us, and a few key people were able to do that. It allowed us to communicate with everybody and get a movie finished that had a 100 day schedule in 101 days. So that was really remarkable."
The Forbidden Kingdom opens to theatres on April 18th.
For the trailers, posters, stills and more movie info, go to the The Forbidden Kingdom Movie Page.
Fred Topel
Sources: Image property of Lionsgate
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