By Mark Schilling
Back in 2003 Edward Zwick cast a Japanese star, Ken Watanabe, in his big-budget Hollywood movie, The Last Samurai -- and ended up grossing more than $130 million in Japan alone. Now, in 2005, Zhang Yimou is casting another Ken -- Ken Takakura -- in his big-budget Chinese movie, Riding Alone for 1,000 Ri -- the box office result could be much the same.
Hyperbole? Perhaps. Zwick had something Zhang does not -- Tom Cruise. But Zhang's track record in Japan is outstanding: Hero grossed Y4.05 ($39 million), The House of Flying Daggers, Y2.25 million ($21.6 million) -- both highs for non-Hollywood foreign films for the year.
Meanwhile, Takakura, with 202 film credits, many of them in starring roles, is the nearest the Japanese film industry has come to Clint Eastwood. Best known as a young actor for his gangster movies, Takakura has become, in his later years, not just a screen icon but a national symbol. His last film, the 2001 Hotaru, in which he played a former kamikaze pilot bound on a journey of remembrance and redemption, grossed Y2.33 billion ($22.4 million) -- not bad for an actor then just past his 70th birthday.
Zhang and Takakura first met fifteen years ago, at the introduction of former industry eminence Yasuyoshi Tokuma. At a Tokyo press conference announcing the production of Riding, Zhang reminisced that he had been a Takakura fan since seeing him in the 1976 Junya Sato film Walk the River of Rage. Working with the actor, he enthused, "I feel as though I am living in a dream."
Zhang has yet another Takakura connection: Yasuo Furuhata, who directed the actor in Hotaru and the 1999 hit Railroad Man is shooting his film's Japanese scenes, until the end of February. Release in China is scheduled for the end of 2005, in Japan, in 2006, with Toho distributing. The story, about an elderly man embarking a research trip in China for his dying son, may not sound like blockbuster material -- but in Japan Takakura can draw legions of loyal fans just by showing up -- an ambulant Mount Rushmore -- and Zhang promises to put on the ultimate son et lumiere show.
