Before he masterminded the Wu-Tang Clan, RZA owned a video store in Ohio.
Though the hip-hop collective is most closely associated with Staten Island, the Brooklyn-born Robert Fitzgerald Diggs spent a short period in the early ’90s living in Steubenville, Ohio. He had found some success as a solo artist, recording under the name Prince Rakeem. But life was getting hectic in New York, so he went to live with his mother in Steubenville, where he opened a video store in a former hair salon.
“There was a place in Staten Island known as Bay Video, and the owner I’d always rent from, I told him, ‘Yo, I want to open up a store in Ohio.’ And he gave me access to buy from him and other people,” RZA recalls. ”And I just got thousands of VHS tapes, and I went for it. Mind you, it only lasted about two months. I ended up just losing the store, but keeping all the videos.”
The reason it only lasted two months, he says, is that he was “too split.” That’s a self-effacting way of saying he was in the process of moving back to New York, taking on the RZA name, and assembling one of the greatest hip-hop groups of all time. In 1993, the Wu-Tang Clan released “Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers),” which was famously inspired by martial arts films like the 1983 Shaolin and Wu Tang and peppered with samples from kung-fu classics.
RZA expanded into acting in films like Jim Jarmusch’s 1999 Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai and 2003 Coffee and Cigarettes, Ridley Scott’s 2007 American Gangster, Judd Apatow’s 2009 Funny People, Todd Phillips’ 2010 Due Date, and the two Nobody films, in which he plays the adopted brother of Bob Odenkirk’s ex-assassin character. He also composed music for films including Kill Bill.
RZA has mentored countless others in music — the recent Sundance doc The Disciple tracks the fascinating path of one of his pupils — but he considers Kill Bill director Quentin Tarantino his filmmaking mentor. He traveled to China and Mexico to observe Tarantino shooting Kill Bill, and later cast Kill Bill actress Lucy Liu in his own debut as a writer-director, 2012’s The Man With the Iron Fists, which RZA co-wrote with Eli Roth.
RZA went on to direct projects including the 2017 musical drama Love Beats Rhymes, the 2020 heist film Cut Throat City, and episodes of Hulu’s Wu-Tang: An American Saga, which he co-created and which recounts the rise of his group.
He returns to writing and directing with his latest film, One Spoon of Chocolate, which reunites him with Cut Throat City and Wu-Tang: An American Saga star Shameik Moore, and with Tarantino, who signed on as the film’s presenter. One Spoon of Chocolate follows a man named Unique (Moore) who travels to a small Ohio town in search of a fresh start.
Unfortunately, that town is the ominously named Karensville, where many in the local white population are unwelcoming. After doing his best to avoid violence, Unique has no choice but to fight back. The action thriller features inspired needle drops, crisp fight scenes, and a nod to the No. 1 smokes in the Tarantinoverse.
For our latest Things I’ve Learned a Moviemaker, RZA spoke with us about finding the right notes.—M.M.
One Spoon of Chocolate Director RZA: Things I’ve Learned as a Moviemaker
1. I didn’t go to college to learn how to make films. My classroom is watching cinema. My classroom is the movie theater. My classroom is my VHS tapes, and my classroom is sitting beside other great filmmakers and learning as an apprentice. Other people went to NYU or UCLA or wherever they went and learned the craft and the technique.
I had a chance to meet one of Ryan Coogler’s professors and he gave me some insight on the kind of student that he was — a good student, of course, right? Great student. And that’s his process. But then someone like my mentor, Quentin Tarantino, and myself, we both were video-store guys. Besides my wife, and maybe my younger brothers in my formative years, if there’s any person that I’ve watched the most movies with, it was him.
2. The strongest advice he gave about making a film was to write it myself. And that really changed my perspective. Because at one point I was thinking about remaking, remaking, remaking. But when he brought to my attention that I could write my own story from all the information and everything I’ve accumulated, it clicked in my mind that I could be in a hip-hop mindset while filmmaking.
In hip-hop, we sample songs or sounds from records that existed already, or from films that existed, and we put that collage together and make our new song. You can actually do that in film. I realized that Quentin was actually a hip-hop director.
3. On The Man With the Iron Fists, my first film, I think that I took everything very technically, very pragmatically, and actually took it too seriously. Because I was trying to blow the music through the horn. I tried to make it happen, versus letting it flow, like a freestyle lyric. And it took me to my new film,One Spoon of Chocolate, to let the energy flow. And there’s a reason why I think I was able to let it flow.
When I started my first feature, it was written and directed by me, but I was still a novice. The next two films that I did weren’t written by me. I was telling someone else’s story. I feel good on all my films — I feel that I did a good job. But this new one, I feel super graduated, because I feel like not only is it written and directed by me, but I let it flow. Any situation that arrived, that arose, that wasn’t part of the script, there was always a solution that the energy of filmmaking offered me.
Herbie Hancock once said he was playing with Miles Davis, and he played a bad chord that made him cringe. He said Miles Davis just paused for one second and then played notes that made the chord make sense. I feel like I’m at that point right now as a filmmaker.
4. I was blessed to be an actor, and I was blessed to be in films with some of the best directors: Todd Phillips, Ridley Scott, Judd Apatow, Jarmusch. All these great luminaries shared their knowledge.
I’ll never forget sitting beside Ridley Scott in the video village during American Gangster. I loved hanging out and talking to him. And I realized that certain brains have to have what he had — what I call multi-vision. He’s able to actually see six, seven monitors at the same time and always know what’s going on.
In fact, if you think about my main teacher, Tarantino, he uses one camera, mostly. But Ridley, at the time I was talking to him, his record was 18. But then when he did Robin Hood, he had more than 18 cameras.
I’m more of a two-camera guy, but we’ve done three or four at times on this film.
5. To film good action, that’s technique. You should know the basic technique, and then you should also be able to have a freestyle. When they do the pre-vis, they’re doing that in some type of studio or gym. But when you’re on set — with breakable things, or more confinement, or even more openness, depending on the situation — you’ve got to be able to follow the technique so nobody gets hurt. You’ve also got to be able to have an improvisational camera. For this particular film, I didn’t want it to be kung fu, but kung fu is the root of it.
6. I make my movies for the cinema. That’s my mission. Brothers might be looking inside their phone, whether they’re on a plane or in their living room, but it’s like a video game you play at home. Eventually you’re up in the arcade spending 10 or 20 dollars because there’s nothing like the real thing. Cinema is the real thing. Everything else is a variation or a distillation of it.
One Spoon of Chocolate is now in theaters from 36 Cinema Distribution. Photo courtesy of 36 Cinema Distribution