Kung Fu Factory

by Crimefactory

  Yesterday at the Philadelphia Noir panel, I found very interesting, listening to you speak about your reverence for place. And how, in the books that you write and the things that you like to read, that you like to feel the realism. Like how you love Ed McBain's work but you're distanced by the fact that it's a fake New York. So I'm curious as to how you approach the world of Iron Fist....

  (Duane laughs)

  ...and how much research you had to do in terms of things like the historical one-shots.

  Well, I am a history nerd and I do my research and the Marvel Universe is really, to me, like one step to the left or right of what our reality is, so we have super-heroes, but New York is still New York. And Danny's office is on Times Square and having a fight in Central Park, I love that. But in terms of history, yeah, I would really try and get a sense of what era I was writing about and just little things, not really showing off my homework, to have just enough details to where it feels real, and Marvel tries to make it as real world as much as possible. Even when the Hulk destroys New York city...

  It's still New York City.

  Right.

  So how does that translate into the more fantastical landscapes like K'un L'un and The Eighth City?

  That kind of thing is my love of horror and science fiction, I mean The Eighth City is hell basically and what kind of hell would it be? I had a lot of fun designing this particular hell for Iron Fist. I don't mind making up a place. As far as fantasy and horror, that's interesting. My preference though is to do something real world. I get turned off by science fiction on fake planets and, I don't know, it takes a lot of work to connect with it. I like the science fiction where it's on a ruined earth or, you know, Phillip Dick. He was doing stuff in places he knew and he may have had floating satellites and all this stuff, but it was always grounded in the US...

  (Reed Farrel Coleman wanders over)

  Hey, do you mind if I...? Are you guys interviewing one another?

  Yeah, you can sit in if you want, man...

  No, no, because I'll just cause an argument.

  Fuck you, Reed!

  (laughter)

  (Reed wanders off.)

  Okay, martial arts. Were you a martial arts fan and was there any kung fu film or pop cultural influence on Iron Fist?

  Oh, definitely Growing up, my dad watched a lot of it on TV, the Saturday afternoon movie they'd show and watching the Kung Fu TV series. That was part of my landscape. It was that and Star Trek and horror movies my Dad would put on all the time. So all these things just kind of blended for me and...I don't remember titles or names, to me it's one long, endless kung fu movie. They were always bloodier than most other movies. It hurt, you know, these characters clawing each other and bleeding and still rising to fight again. That was just a big, big influence. The fights in these other movies, when you're a kid, they knock each other around and get up and dust themselves off and they're fine. There's no real violence. Whereas these kung fu movies, they left an impression on me that it really hurt and was more authentic and real, not that they're realistic. But it's funny, I don't go back and watch them, I'm not a huge fan of them today, I just don't seek them out, it's not my thing, but growing up, yeah, it was a big deal.

  It's funny that you say that the TV was on and that you were watching Kung Fu and Horror and Science Fiction movies and that all blended together. To me, that just sounds like Iron Fist.

  Yeah! It is. Honestly it is. I love cross-genre books, you know, that let's just not play with one thing, let's have a few toys in the mix and see how they collide. It's interesting to me. You're right, Iron Fist is great, especially after Ed and Matt's run. They introduced all this history and legacy and it became way more than just kung fu. It's hard to name a genre that it didn't touch...I'm trying to think of one...it even had romance. I love that. I mean, my personal goal, before I die, is to hit as many genres or sub-genres as possible, just to try them, hot rod with them. So at some point, I'll do a proper kung fu western.

  You kind of already did, but please, please...I have to say, it's a very different thing, but when Frank Miller took over Daredevil in the Eighties, he really turned it back into a pulp book. I think of Iron Fist as the new version of that, taking all that history and making it into this complete pulp animal.

  Yeah, definitely. And again, that's really Ed and Matt. I really have to credit those guys. Ed has a really deep sense and knowledge of pulp history and is fascinated by it, and Mat...his mind is one of the most fantastical minds I've ever met. Really, he is an idea machine and the things he puts together in his head both stun me and amaze me. I've been in story conferences with him for X-Men stuff over the years and it's just fun watching him put things together. The two of them on that book was a dream team, and then I come along and ruin it!

  Do you know how they worked?

  I really don't. They must've hashed out the beat sheets back and forth, but I'm not sure who took on scripting duties. At the time, Matt was still kind of the rising star and Ed was kind of the top dog and I'm talking out of my ass obviously, but I think Ed brought in Matt to help him out with it and they both really took it on equally and created this really cool thing.

  I'd like to talk a little about Travel Foreman and how you worked with him. Particularly choreographing these fight scenes. How much direction did you give him in terms of perhaps Iron Fist poses or special strikes or anything like that?

  Oh, he ran with it. My thing is to not give the artist too much so they feel handcuffed. I want them to feel as though they are equal creator on these things. I describe when necessary for a plot point, but almost always, Travel especially, had ideas far better than the lame images I had in my own head. And it's funny, he lives in the Philadelphia area I believe [where Duane lives], but we never met. I never spoke to him. It was all through script. I think, by choice, he just works alone in a solitary kind of way. So it was me writing these scripts and then seeing the results. There's one I remember, I had a crazy idea. There's a fight in The Eighth City where Danny's fighting an opponent who grows every time he hits him. I just thought it would be fun to see, but what Travel did with that, the sense of scale he put on the page, I was stunned by it.

  And those beautiful panels of those repeating fists in the same fight sequence....

  Oh, yeah, again that's his. Again, I'm not like Ed and Matt. They, I think, they would have those moments far more scripted than I would. They have a keener sense of the visual than I do, so I love that, getting that stuff. It's disappointing when I work with an artist who takes me too literally, doesn’t feel free to kind of go off and show those cool moments that I wouldn't think of cause I'm a word guy.

  Are there any untold Iron Fist stories you have that you didn't get the chance to tell?

  Yeah, there are a few. I hope maybe someday I can get to do a couple more. I knew where we going with the series, how to continue past The Eighth City, but that didn't happen. But with the one-shots, I have at least a half-dozen ideas for other Iron Fists that I want to tell, but I'm going to save them for now. Just in case, you never know.

  Fair enough. Wrapping up, why comics? What is it about the medium that you clearly love so much?

  I grew up with it. It's a fusion, that mid-point between books and movies, you have such a cool visual element to play with and it's a different way of telling a story. I was really influenced by them when I was a kid, but I guess I really started buying them again when I got a job that actually paid money where I could afford to buy these things. I mean, it was ten years ago when I started buying them again seriously and was really blown away by the quality of what was going on. Once you start reading a lot of something, the story-telling machine in your brain starts to seek those other formats. I don't know if that makes any sense, like, you know, you read a lot of mystery/crime novels and you start your ideas and go, you know I could do that too, almost by imitation. You see someone playing in a rock band or something and you want to try it yourself. I don't know, I guess that's th
e creator in me. So, I've always wanted to badly and my agent is also the agent for Greg Rucka and all these other comics guys and I always thought I'd try something to pitch, but never thought I'd pull the trigger on it. It seems daunting actually, to break in. and it was only with a chance email exchange with Ed Brubaker and we hit it off and he said, “Did you ever want to write comics?” and I said, “Yeah, hell yeah,” and I just thought he was being polite, and he passed on my name to Warren Simons at Marvel, I sent my books and it just kind of went off from there, which was a pleasant surprise. A huge surprise. I really thought that if I ever did break in, it'd be through begging somebody and doing, you know, four page back-ups in the back of some comic and that would have been fine. I would’ve been happy with that. But, it's a dream, to be able to do this.

  How does your workload break up?

  It varies. Like right now, I'm writing a book, plotting a book, and I have (laughs), I have two...uhh..a...no, I have two mini-series I'm actually working on, but it's different stages, you know, edit deadlines, artist deadlines...I picture plates on pencils; keep them spinning, make sure that none are wobbling or about to crash off. And it's fun. It's great fun spinning those plates, but there is danger sometimes where you have like eighteen plates and it's like, fuck, what am I gonna do? (laughs). But so far, so good. I thrive under pressure, it seems.

  nerd of noir’s kung fu/crime sleepers

  Crime Double Feature: Klimactic Kung Fu: Sam Peckinpah’s Killer Elite (1975) and Sydney Pollack’s The Yakuza (1975)

  There are a number of factors that connect the two films in this edition of the CSDF: both are from great American directors working outside of their comfort zones, both are concerned with San Francisco and Japan, both are about the yakuza and strong male friendships, and they both were released in the U.S. during the year of our lord nineteen and seventy-fucking-five. That’s all well and fucking fascinating, but for the purposes of this special issue of Crime Factory, the Nerd is mainly concerned with the fact that both have crazy-ass East-meets-the-fucking-Wild-West showdowns in their final minutes. Samurai swords and shotguns, dear reader - that shit is like peanut butter and chocolate to the Nerd.

  Let’s kick off the night with Sam Peckinpah’s dangerously overlooked Killer Elite. James Caan plays Mike Locken, a mercenary working for a shady outfit that does the CIA’s dirty work in San Francisco. His best friend, co-worker and roommate George Hansen (Robert Duvall, whose real-life friendship with Caan no doubt informed their great chemistry in this film) betrays him early in the film, killing their current client and shooting Locken in the knee and elbow. After months of painful rehabilitation and specialized judo and karate training that caters to his new mobility impairments, Locken’s old boss hires him to guard a Japanese politician named Chung visiting San Francisco. The deal sweetener is that Hansen (along with a shit ton of yakuza) has been hired to assassinate Chung, and fuck yes does Locken ever want the job. Within hours Locke enlists Burt Young and Bo Hopkins to help guard Chung and the bullets and blood starts fucking flying.

  The story is solid stuff, with Peckinpah establishing a cool world of jaded soldiers for hire with no illusions of national pride or any other childish bullshit, the highest bidder the only institution that holds any water. Peck’s San Francisco is a groovy place where chicks are down for whatever and people practice karate in public plazas and on rooftops. But fuck, let’s be real: the main draw here is the climactic battle. Locken and his crew wait on an old naval ship for Chung’s transport to arrive only to be ambushed by a bunch of ninjas in full gear with samurai swords. Locken does his crazy-looking judo-with-a-cane shit but a great deal of the fighting is Peckinpah’s classic multiple-speeds action

  editing as ninjas fly out at our heroes to be met with a fucking shotgun blast to the stomach, sending them toppling in slo-mo into the fucking Pacific. It’s nuts, it’s thrilling, it’s fucking awesome.

  After the battle subsides some, Chung’s rival challenges him to a traditional yakuza sword fight, a gesture of old world honor. Locken opposes such theater, insists Chung just let him shoot the guy and then they’ll be done with it. While the two Japanese men fight, Caan and Young crack jokes and take bets on the winner, driving home the point that in their world nothing is sacred but money. As a counterpoint to this hilarious scene comes our next film, The Yakuza, which treats the traditions of the yakuza far more reverentially than Killer Elite.

  San Francisco PI Harry Kilmer (Robert Mitchum in a top five performance) is hired by his old buddy George Tanner (the great Brian Keith in a fucking terrible rug) to get his daughter back from yakuza crime boss Tono, a fearsome man who Tanner fudged a gunrunning deal with. Kilmer goes to Japan to call on Tanaka Ken (Ken Takakura), an ex-yakuza who owes him a debt from their association in the Occupation following WWII. Turns out Ken can’t use his old connections to get her out, but he does his duty to Kilmer and help him steal the girl back. When two yakuza die during their rescue, both Kilmer and Ken become targets of Tono, and the only way out is for Ken to kill Tono and his men the traditional way: with a fucking awesome katana. Of course, Kilmer not being a yakuza, he’s free to help out with a semi-automatic and a shotgun...

  The two greatest screenwriters of the seventies, Robert Towne and Paul Schrader (a team that makes the Nerd fantasize what would have happened if Budd Schulberg and Paddy Chayefsky had written together in the fifties), teamed up for this script that is endlessly fascinated with the rules and traditions of the yakuza. But while there are plenty of informative scenes about what this philosophy means and that tattoo represents, I like to imagine that they secretly put all that shit in there just to justify the final shootout - that they wrote backwards from the climax, if you will.

  Because no fucking fooling, dear reader, the scene is a fucking beaut. Sydney Pollack, amazing talent that he was, is not remembered as a great action director, but here he proves that he could hold his own with Peckinpah, Walter Hill, and Tarantino. The pacing, the suspense, the gravity, the shot choices - it’s all fucking breathtaking. You’ve got big clumsy Bob Mitchum stumbling through paper walls and blowing chunks out of motherfuckers with a monster shotgun while Ken Takakura carefully and deliberately cuts down dude after dude with their arterial spray soaking the tatami mats. It’s one of the all-time climaxes, and one that’s followed by a heartbreakingly perfect denouement that I wouldn’t dare ruin here.

  Even without the balls-out guns and swords finales featured in this pairing, the Nerd would still be able to recommend The Yakuza and Killer Elite with no qualms. These are two gloriously off-beat offerings from American directors that have given us some of the greatest films in the last half century - essential viewing no matter what. But, you know, shotguns vs. katanas doesn’t exactly hurt either.

  "I can't beat him..."

  the dark science: rocky as noir by addam duke

  If boxing is a sport it is the most tragic of all sports because more than any other human activity it consumes the very excellence it displays - Joyce Carol Oates

  Boxing is a dark and glorious sport. No activity demands as much or takes as much from the individual as boxing does; it is a world of lies, a world of hard truths, of victory, defeat and pain and it is for this reason that the art of pugilism is a sport perfectly suited to the world of noir.

  Boxing has appeared in the works of authors such as James Ellroy, David Goodis, Eddie Muller and F.X Toole (pseudonym of cut-man Jerry Boyd). Boxing movies abound with films such as John Houston’s Fat City (1972), based on the Leonard Gardner novel of the same name, or Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962) starring Jackie Gleason and Anthony Quinn.

  Though arguably the most popular film of the twentieth century on boxing is Rocky which, when released in 1976, was nominated for ten academy awards in nine categories, winning three for best film, best director and best editing. Rocky constantly tops the list of best boxing movies; it recently ranked number two on the AFI top ten sports movies of all time beaten only by another boxing movie; Sco
rcese’s Raging Bull. It is also regarded as one of the most inspirational films of all time and is looked upon as a classic rags to riches tale of an underdog given a once in a lifetime chance.

  Yet if you look beyond the sentimentality (and remove the uplifting strains of Bill Conti’s hit Gonna Fly Now) the film takes on a darker tone and conveys all the elements of a classic noir tale. Filmed on location amongst the docks, abattoirs and dilapidated tenements of Philadelphia, Rocky conveys a film noir aesthetic. The exterior shots are composed of washed-out colours and long camera angles which amplify the bitter chill of winter and set Balboa against the industrial and urban backdrop of Philadelphia. Those scenes shot in daylight emphasise the bleak, grey winter while those at night display wet streets littered with the detritus of urban decay. The interiors of Balboa’s world; his apartment, the gym in which he trains and the arenas he fights in are filmed with tight, restrictive camera work and dark lighting which accentuates the confines of the world in which he exists.