News Round-up: Fusco interviewed! Also, soundtrack and website news!

Only 12 days to go until two kung fu masters and superstars meet together on screen for the first time! Jackie Chan, returning to form as the Drunken Immortal – a play on his great breakout film The Drunken Master – and Jet Li, the zen wushu master, playing the coiled Silent Monk and living his dream to play Sun Wukong, the Monkey King!

As the April 18 release gets closer, news is starting to hit the nets every day, so here’s our first news round-up with a new John Fusco interview, soundtrack info, and official site news! Start reading after the cut!

John Fusco talks martial arts!
Screenwriter John Fusco talked to the Burlington Free Press about how he came up with the story for The Forbidden Kingdom (it was a bedtime story he told his son) and why he wrote the screenplay (producer Casey Silver immediately saw it as a movie).

Fusco, 49, has built a reputation in Hollywood for writing scripts for films based in the American West such as “Young Guns,” “Thunderheart” and “Hidalgo.” “The Forbidden Kingdom” represents his first film foray into kung fu, though the Connecticut native says the new film isn’t much of a departure from his earlier ones.

“In a lot of ways,” Fusco said, “it’s kind of a ‘spaghetti Eastern’” as opposed to a spaghetti Western a la Sergio Leone’s “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” In “The Forbidden Kingdom,” Li portrays a silent monk not unlike Clint Eastwood’s taciturn gunslinger in Leone’s films. Also like Leone’s films, according to Fusco, “The Forbidden Kingdom” blends action with philosophy, which in the case of Fusco’s script emphasizes the honor, culture and discipline above the violence of martial arts.

“It’s not just fighting on the screen,” Fusco said.

He also goes into how Jackie Chan and Jet Li’s involvement helped shape what the movie ultimately became.

Fusco went on his own quest to bring “The Forbidden Kingdom” to life. He had no trouble winning Li over to portray the silent monk, but Chan was hesitant, telling Fusco he wrote too many words for his part, as if it were Shakespeare. According to Fusco, Chan said his favorite movie-set lines are “Go!” and “Run!” and jokingly threatened to kill everyone on the set before pointing at Fusco and saying, “You first.”

Fusco also had to maneuver his script through various changes, though he welcomed those contributed by kung fu experts such as Li, Chan, the film’s choreographer, Yuen Woo-Ping, and Oscar-winning cinematographer Peter Pau, who filmed “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.”

“It changed a lot from the original screenplay, but it was all part of a collaboration that I encouraged,” according to Fusco. “The essence is there, and that’s always what matters.”

Read the whole thing at the Burlington Free Press!

The Forbidden Kingdom Soundtrack is Coming to iTunes!

THE FORBIDDEN KINGDOM, composed by DAVID BUCKLEY, will get an initial release on iTunes. So you “tuners” rejoice!

Looks as though there will be some 19 tracks released, so that bodes well that the most important themes and sequences will be covered. No other details were available.

More at Tracksounds!

Official Site upgraded!

If you haven’t checked out the Forbidden Kingdom official site, you should click over there because it has just been upgraded. In addition to the environment section with character backgrounds and stats, it’s now got a bunch of new tricks in the “features” section – MySpace and Facebook profiles and widgets, an embeddable Mandolin Warrior game, and a backgrounder on the Monkey King marked “coming soon”! Click the screenshot below to go there!