Reviews
quVHo’urA‘ PADDLE (12A) 99min .0
HE’S NO CRY BABY He‘s Asia‘s answer to Johnny Depp. Miles Fielder meets TAKESHI KANESHIRO, star of the latest highbrow martial arts adventure, HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS.
There’s more to Kaneshiro than his pretty face. True, he began his showbiz career as a pop star and became an idol in China. But when he turned 20 in 1993, Kaneshiro stopped singing and started acting, making his big screen debut in the crime thriller Executioners (1993). During the course of the ten years or so he’s been acting, Kaneshiro’s made almost thirty films, and for every genre movie or commercial vehicle — the time travel/alien invasion flick Returner (2002), the interstellar crime capers of Space Travellers (2000) - there‘s an arthouse gem such as Wong Kar-wai‘s Chungking Express (1994) (in which film Kaneshiro plays a tinned pineapple-eating cop), or indeed House of Flying Daggers.
‘I always try to find something I haven’t done before,’ says Kaneshiro, sat in the swanky suite in the Dorchester where he stayed last October while Daggers showed at the London Film Festival. Of balancing commercial and art films, he says it‘s never a conscious decision. ‘It depends on the movie. It is the script and the director that attract me.‘
It's unsurprising, then, that Kaneshiro should want to work with Yimou, the Fifth Generationer whose post-Cultural Revolution films include Raise the Red Lantern and To Live. ‘Working with Zhang Yimou,’ says Kaneshiro, ‘was the greatest experience for me. He’s so passionate. He doesn’t use many words, but they are very strong. He teaches you how to act; he leads you into the emotion.’
Handy, given Kaneshiro has no formal acting training. Initially, he says, ‘some things were very difficult for me, such as crying. Maybe it was because I didn’t train. I didn‘t have the method to train my emotions.’
House of Flying Daggers posed other challenges. Kaneshiro had to learn to fight with a sword, and improvise the film’s complex combat sequences - he has no formal martial arts training, either. It was also the first time Kaneshiro had worked in Mainland China. But then the half Taiwanese, half Japanese actor (who speaks Manadarin and Cantonese, as well as Taiwanese, Japanese and English) lives and works between Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong, territories in which he’s equally famous.
Kaneshiro is also famously reticent, on screen and off. Of his future career, he says, ‘I never think about it.’ Of his posterity, he says, ‘Just forget me.’
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