Hey boys and girls, LMD had a fab time with the stars of the new comic book adventure, The Green Hornet.  We had an exclusive chat with China’s most famous pop star, the new Kato, Jay Chou, and caught up with Seth Rogen during GH press.

Dig it!

The Green Hornet

Jay Chou

The Lady Miz Diva: Can you talk about joining The Green Hornet’s cast at the last minute after Stephen Chow left the production?

Jay Chou:  I was very excited.  I looked forward to Stephen Chow’s version and was very disappointed when he wasn’t making the film.  I think now it’s a different version, with different styles.

LMD: Did you have any hesitation in taking a role that was so synonymous with Asia’s biggest star, Bruce Lee?

JC:  Bruce Lee used to play Kato and it’s very hard to express the same role.  So I tried to do it differently.

LMD:  Did you watch any of the old episodes in preparation?

JC:  I tried to find some video clips on YouTube and there’s a video clip of when Bruce Lee was first auditioning for the Kato role.  I tried to understand Kato’s personality and tried to do his style.

LMD:  What was your first experience in Hollywood moviemaking like?  How is it different than in China?

JC:  It’s kind of relaxed here.  Making films here and shooting everything is very comfortable and luxurious.  In Asia, everything is in a very fast tempo, kind of rushed.  It’s quite different.  The biggest difference is the budget.

LMD:  What was your training like?

JC:  I spent a month car racing and learning fighting skills, but the hardest thing to learn was the English part of it!

LMD:  Was there a particular invention of Kato’s you’d like to have?  

JC:  If I could be like Kato, I’d like to build my own car like the Black Beauty.

LMD:  Jay, you are most famous as a musician and in The Green Hornet there is a scene where you start to play a little piano.  Were you approached to provide any music for the film?

JC:  I didn’t have enough time to provide music for the movie, however they picked a song of mine called “Nunchucks” to put in the end title of the movie.

LMD:  Were you worried that Seth Rogen’s humour might’ve been a little risqué for your very clean image in China?

JC:  Last time we were in Europe on a promotional tour and Seth came out with stuff that wasn’t really so … nice.  I was worried about that a little bit because if they play this in Asia, they would talk over his dirty words.

LMD:  How important is success in America to you?

JC:  It’s important to my music.

LMD:  As opposed to Asia, in the US there is a bias against actors who want to sing or singers who want to act, if you had to choose one or the other, which would you choose?

JC:  If I had to choose in the US, I would choose acting.

LMD:  Can you please give our readers a special message?

JC:  The message I’d like to give is that friendship is the most important in life and to appreciate the people around you.  Don’t regret after they leave and to appreciate them at this moment.

Seth Rogen

The Lady Miz Diva:  The Green Hornet has a very strong, vocal following, particularly for the 1960’s TV show, which was seen as the darker flipside to the campy Batman show.  Did you have any hesitation in making the film funny or how the balance of action and comedy would measure?

Seth Rogen:  Not really, I mean we just wanted to go for it.  I view comic book movies and comic books themselves as two completely different things, you know?  I mean as cool as The Dark Knight is, that’s really not how Batman is portrayed in a lot of comic books.  And if you’re a comic book purist -- then you probably wouldn’t make the argument today because you’d look stupid, cos the movie is so awesome -- but you could make the argument that The Dark Knight is actually completely unrepresentative of how Batman is portrayed in the comic books.  So, that was never really a fear of ours or a consideration that we took that much into.  We wanted to make the best movie possible, but at the same time include all the stuff that you expected from a Green Hornet movie whether you were really familiar with it or completely unfamiliar with it.  I think if you’re really familiar with it, there’s a hundred references that we put in that you should be able to find.  And if you’re completely unfamiliar with it, then hopefully every time one of those happen you don’t think, ‘Aw, it must be something from the TV show that’s why I don’t understand it.’  We really wanted to try and have it so if you knew nothing at all, it seemed funny and interesting and original, and if you knew everything it seemed like we were kind of honouring the source.

LMD:  Can you talk about Jay Chou coming on board?  He seemed like a last-minute addition after Stephen Chow left, so how did Jay affect or change the interpretation of Kato?  Also, what was it like to work with this star who’s so well known in Asia making his first Hollywood film?

SR:  We had quite a bit of time to reimagine it, I would say, me and Evan {Goldberg, screenplay co-writer} write pretty fast, so that’s helpful.  The age difference was the biggest thing; I mean Stephen is almost fifty years old and Jay’s around my age, so that was actually really helpful we thought because that made the relationship much more like a brother relationship rather than like a father/son relationship, which isn’t really what we wanted.  So it made us much more like peers, which was very helpful and good.  You know, Jay did not know much English when we started this.  It’s funny, while we were filming, I’ll be honest, every day we’d be like, “Can you understand him?”  “I didn’t understand him.”  “Did you understand him?” {Laughs} We had a lot of those conversations, “I understood that.  Did you understand that?” “Yeah, I understood that.”  “Okay, I hope people understand it.” And it was one of the most unbelievable reliefs of my life the first time we showed the movie to people and the lady asked the audience, “And who here understood Jay Chou?” and everyone raised their hand.  It almost seemed like it was preposterous that we were asking that you couldn’t understand him.  It was like, “He’s speaking English, you idiot!” And so that was a huge relief because when we first met him, he literally spoke no English whatsoever, and I think we kind of saw the evolution and it’s hard to make the judgment when you’re there all the time.

But he’s just unbelievably cool and funny and by the end was able to fully improvise and add tons of stuff into the movie.  Lots of the funny stuff he says in the movie, he totally made up on his own.  And it was really fun to work with him; he’s a really great guy.

~ The Lady Miz Diva

January 7^th, 2011

Click Here for our Exclusive Interview with Green Hornet fight choreographer, action movie legend, Jeff Imada.

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