Keanu Reeves Reveales Plot Details for his Samurai Film 47 RONIN
I’m really excited for the upcoming Keanu Reeves movie 47 Ronin. I've seen a lot of people complaining about Reeves starring in this samurai movie, but the fact of the matter is, the film has got an extremely talented director by the name of Carl Erik Rinish, who is a commercial director responsible for the short film The Gift. 47 Ronin will be his first feature film, and I can’t wait to see what he does with it. As for Reeves, you can't deny that the man has got some fighting skills.
Reeves recently did a interview with MTV in which he went on to excitedly talk about some of the plot details for the film saying,
I call it a story of revenge and impossible love. The samurai become outcast and decide to enact revenge on the person who is responsible for the death of their lord.
He goes on to describe the film as kind of a western. He plays a character Kai, who he explains as...
...an outsider, a kind of half-breed with a mysterious past, who's in love with the princess and she's in love with me, but we can't be together. But, during this journey and revenge, things change.
Reeves siad in the beginning of the interview that he had a sword fight with an actor by the name of Hiroyuki Sanada (The Last Samurai, Sunshine, Lost).
[I] just finished a sword fight a couple of weeks ago with a great actor named Hiroyuki Sanada...He's fantastic.
This is going to be such an awesome film. Just the story alone is completely badass. Honestly, I think Reeves is going to be great in it.
Here's a rundown of the historical story:
The revenge of the forty-seven Ronin took place in Japan at the start of the eighteenth century. The story tells of a group of samurai who were left leaderless and became ronin after their daimyo (feudal lord) was forced to commit seppuku (ritual suicide) for assaulting a court official named Kira Yoshinaka, whose title was Kōzukeno suke. The ronin avenged their master's honor after patiently waiting and planning for over a year to kill Kira. In turn, the ronin were themselves forced to commit seppuku, as they had known they would be, for committing the crime of murder. This true story was popularized in Japanese culture as emblematic of the loyalty, sacrifice, persistence, and honor that all good people should preserve in their daily lives.
The movie is scheduled to be released on November 21, 2012.
Watch the video interview with Reeves below: