RZA on the three things films should do

0:00KCRW sponsors include Netflix presenting Nobody Wants This. Emmy nominee Kristen Bell and Critics' Choice Award winner Adam Brody return in the beloved comedy series. Decider declares it's on track to be one of the best rom-coms in TV history. Emmy eligible. From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.

0:28Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. You may know him from co-starring with the Minions, or maybe as Bobby Digital, or more than likely as the founder of the Wu-Tang Clan. But Theriza is equally formidable in the movie world. He's acted for directors from Jim Jarmusch to Ridley Scott. As a writer and director and actor, he has given us The Man with the Iron Fists, in which he co-starred with Russell Crowe. His newest as writer-director is the horror film One Spoon of Chocolate, which drops on VOD on June 5th. It had its premiere at the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival. I spoke to Rizzo there before a live audience.

1:11There's a dream come true about the origins of his movie. One of the first things I said to you backstage is that I thought about that old Grave Digger song, Diary of a Madman.

1:21RZA:Yeah. If anybody knows the group Grave Diggers, which is horror offshoot for like the 20th century. And that song is really about getting inside somebody's head who's going through something just like this, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, you think about the darkness of the Grave Diggers or the lyricalness of Wu-Tang and the brightness of something like the Gravel Pit, all those different elements. I think when I'm creating, they all find their way into my art, you know what I mean? But I think what's really interesting, too, is watching this is that by the end of it, you've taken us through so many places.

1:59First of all, you're such a great audience yourself, and this is a real audience movie, isn't it?

2:05RZA:Yes, definitely an audience movie. To me, I think a film, it should do three things. It should entertain you, right? And it should then also be provocative, like provoke you into emotions. And then it should be also inspiring. You know what I mean? So those three elements come together. And that's what I was striving to do, whether through the action or through the acting of the actors, through the different music cues. Everything was to try to get that balance between entertainment, provoking ideas and inspiration. First of all, the fights that we were just talking about staged were really staged like fights and not like clean John Wick type action sequences.

2:49But we sort of feel him trying to sort of figure out how to get through the fight as it's happening instead of knowing how to fight as he walks into a room, don't we?

2:57RZA:Yeah, the plan was like for the action to try to, you know, ground it as much as we can. Of course, I'm so inspired by Asian cinema, whether it's Larkar Long, John Woo, Sue Hawk. Those are inspirations for me. But I didn't want this to have that spillover. Of course, if you watch movies like Old Boy, you see, I threw a homage back to that. When I say one spoon of chocolate as a filmmaker, it's a spoon of all my inspirations from other films kind of coming together. It's like hip hop is known for sampling, right? You know, that's how me and Quentin became cool. I realized he was a hip hop director because he would sample ideas to make his idea.

3:44And I learned that that's a best language is to study film, knowledge it and absorb it, let it go through your system, and then you digest it back like sampling.

3:55RZA:And so there's a spoonful of all my favorite directors in this film. But I also feel if there's a lot of you in this, I mean, there's something I was noticing that the young black men who are getting killed are both wearing black, they're wearing red when we meet them. The young man we see at the beginning of the movie, he's got that red jacket on. Yes. When we first meet his cousin, he's wearing that red shirt and he's driving the red car. So you're marking these guys as targets that way, aren't you? You know, to be honest, everything has a subtone and a subtext. And I guess as a filmmaker, I try to, like, put a lot of different lines together.

4:25RZA:Like, even though this is pretty weird and probably pretty just creatively bugged out, right? When you meet Imari's character, she comes in with the lubrication, right? And she puts it down. you see that this is what she used, but her friend said she gets it from her mother's job. And then when we see, the last time we see the dead body of Ramsey, you see the lubrication still in the frame, you know what I mean? And that's just the way of me thinking creatively how does everything tie together? How did this world tie together? How does one thing that someone else do eventually leads to another thing that's in your life as a character?

5:08That was part of my gags. It's funny, too, because you mentioned that, talking about her mother. We meet her mother. She's selling tickets to the bus station. And then we see her laughing wherever that sitcom is. So we get a sense of who she is, even before we heard about the lubricant from her. So you're really trying to help. You make a real small-town feel out of this. You make sure we know who everybody is. And I think that's really interesting, because it's all really clear who and what everybody is. With respect.

5:34RZA:I've spent some time in some small towns. I rode that bus. They won't be letting you back to Ohio anytime soon. I just left Ohio last month. But I was thinking, too, there's an old film. First of all, there's so many quotes in here, but I was thinking about this old movie, Gordon's War. Do you remember that movie? Yes, yes. For you guys who don't know, it's about a bunch of black Vietnam veterans who come back and clean up their neighborhood by using the skills they learned in the army to fight these drug dealers. In fact, there's a scene from that movie where these women are seen cutting together heroin without tops.

6:08And it's been quoted probably a hundred times, including American Gangster.

6:11RZA:Yes, including in American Gangster and Cut Road City. That's the beauty of film. Like those that come before us, they pioneer ideas. And then those who come after, we get to take ideas and try to build upon them. But Gordon's War was a classic. Jonathan earlier, he mentioned Three the Hard Way, which, yeah, it had to find its way into this film. But then there's even, you know, films. The Warriors is one of those. The Warriors, or even when Jimmy Dean comes to that small town. You know, he rides that train on the top, and all those different things find their way to blend into your story. I want to talk to you, too, again, because this theme of Black men who really seem to have a future, I was thinking about seeing how that great job Shemeek does in Cutthroat City, where he goes in with his drawings and it looks like he's got his whole life ahead of him.

7:04And he's squashed. And the same thing kind of happens to him here. And that's something you revisit in your movies in a lot of ways.

7:11RZA:Well, when you think about being Black in America, right, so our experience is going to end up in our art. And there's so many times that, you know, doors are closed just because of the surface, you know, skin tone or judging the book by the cover. but then there's so much more that we got to offer you know and we've we've offered so much more our character says at the end of the film and not to get like there was this was a big political film but at the end he said there's so many stories of the greatness of what we bring to the country not just our bodies right of course we could be leaders in sports we could be leaders in entertainment but we've done great in science medicine engineering there's so many other elements that we bring.

7:59This is also literally the metaphor of how black bodies are commodified in there, isn't it? That's what I mean. It's like our bodies, like beyond it, you know, the, the B story of it being, um, you know, the organs and everything. Yeah. But it's like, no, sometimes it's our physical is, is what people want. Now realizing our mental, uh, is just as vast or even more, you know? And so we get talking on face value. Then you won't even to learn how many great things that we've done mentally or spiritually. And so it was cool that our character tapped on it. And then another thing that I thought he tapped on that's important to me as an American citizen, because when I travel around the world, I travel as an American citizen.

8:42That's my passport. And if America is looked upon as the a**hole of the world, that's how they treat me. When America is looked upon as the light of the world, that's how they treat me. So I've been and different president administrations. When Obama was president, they was opening the door like this, yo. They was hooking me up, you know what I mean? But when Bush was president, it was deep, you know what I mean? So those type of things, once again, find a way into our art. I mean, but I think it's a really complex movie because, you know, he takes care to clean the blood off that painting of the flag on the wall.

9:17So we see his loyalty and his basic addition there too, don't we?

9:21RZA:Yeah, like he said to the... to the villain, he said, uh, it's self-evident. That's a big word. When we say self-evident, that means nobody got to tell you, uh, you don't got to write it. You ain't got to say it. It's self-evident that water is wet. That's it. And so when the forefathers wrote that document, they weren't kids. You know what I mean? They weren't, you know, a bunch of people trying to find themselves, these were mature men who've lived and did protest things in life as well as did good things in life and then get to a point to where, okay, let's form a document to represent what the goodness could be and declare, right?

10:06Declare the independence of life of every man, you know what I mean? So that's written. People can practice it how they want to practice it, right? You can tell me 5 plus 5 is 15, all you want, and you can fooled the whole audience, but it's still 10. And so that self-evident line I thought was important. I think when Shami Moore, when he delivered it, like every time I watch it, and I've seen it a hundred times or a thousand times, I always feel the reality of it. It's self-evident. You know what I mean? We don't need no proof of it. The proof don't need truth. It's the lie you got to try to prove.

10:44It's the treatment and more to come with my conversation with rap legend and filmmaker Theriza on his new film, One Spoon of Chocolate. After this. KCRW sponsors include Netflix presenting Stranger Things. The beloved hit and 12-time Emmy Award winner that spanned a decade comes to a close with its fifth and final season. The rap raves the Duffer Brothers achieved the impossible with an epic ending, calling the series a magnum opus and an absorbing cultural phenomenon. IGN raves there will never be another show like it. For your final Emmy consideration in all categories, including Outstanding Drama Series.

11:28It's the treatment and, as promised, the continuation of my conversation from the Tribeca Film Festival with master musician and filmmaker Theriza, whose horror film, One Spoon of Chocolate, played there. I also want to talk to you about how important the women are in this. I mean, Randy's girlfriend's mother is an important part of the plot. Again, that for me, this is about this being a community, that the Black community is kind of its own underground that keeps messages alive, that tries to keep itself alive. And first of all, I hope you talk about that because you said it's not political, but I think in addition to being a really satisfying action film, it is political.

12:06There is an element in this film that's old school generation, new school generation. And I think that the sheriff and even Mr. Lindsay, I think they represent some of the old school ideas. But when you get to Imari's character, Paris' character, Shamik's character, and RJ' character, they represent the new ideas. You know what I mean? They're already best friends. They're already living the vision of what equality can be. They're not looking at each other in no funny ways. So they represent the new. And sometimes the old ways just continue to be permeated upon us. but as an artist I was conscious to be like yo this group of kids you could see them right outside right now if you go outside you'll see that's the friend group right there but that old group where everybody was kind of tribal and to their own and you could still see that too but I think that's dwindling more than the new way well your wife and co-producer who gave up a house to make this movie was telling me that you've been working on this in one way or another since 2012.

13:16Yeah, this was this movie is 13 years in the making. Yeah. So I have to ask hearing that you like put it down and came back to it because it feels like it's a tough thing to write because there's a lot of hard truths in it.

13:28RZA:Yeah, it was tough to write. I got writer's block on it a few times and even tough to make. We was making it or when me and Paul Hall, our producer, when we got ready to do it, we looked at it and it was pretty ambitious for the budget that we had allocated. And so it was like, we can't do it for that budget. So then I had to call another executive producer, my brother Devon Diggs in the building. And Devon had to, he had to put that other boat on hold, go into the safe and uncrack the lock. And he came to the table and he believed in the vision as well, which is great. Like, it's nothing better than having people to believe in your vision.

14:12at the time we did this film, I want to share, was like the writer's strike had just ended. A lot of people actually wasn't working, right? A lot of the crew and the industry was in a tough time, but we was like, yo, we love this industry. We love this art form. We want to take economics and bring it to some city. We thought New York first, New Jersey. We thought Ohio, Pittsburgh. We ended up going to the beautiful city of Atlanta, which I think was the best bang for our dollar to be reality. So thank you, Atlanta. And we just went, you know, and they say it takes a village. It took a village and the village bank account.

14:54Well, one of the things I was noticing too, again, talking about the politics that we know who everybody is by the way they dress. At one point when those guys are beating people, they're wearing polo shirts and khakis. And I couldn't help but think about, you know, good people on both sides kind of the argument. And this feels like an especially necessary time for this movie right now to me. Our costume designer, Lorraine, who's in the building. Hey, Lorraine. As we was designing the costumes, she was smart to, like, choose, like, the various imagery that our villains would have. So in one capacity, we both was like, they got to be different.

15:30We don't want the normal plaid shirt, which we actually show you when we get to Palago, who's the guy behind the counter. Yes. He's the classic thing you would see if you watch the black exploitation films of the 80s or the 70s, right? But then when our boys came out, they was looking like they had bars. You know what I mean? They had all of the lawsuits and this s***. Looked like a lot of Tommy Hilfiger. Yeah, they had the Hilfiger. But also, though, she pointed out that there's also this undertone, traditional, non-traditional. You know what I mean by that is like the person who you don't think is feeling that way about you.

16:08That's the white polo shirts. And I was like, you know what? OK, I'm going to move on with you on this. And I think it turned out great, especially in the scene when they're beating Ramsey, which I decided to use the shadows for that scene. I felt like there was enough brutality in the movie of that particular style of violence. And so for that, I just wanted to show an artistic way of watching Ramsay be killed. It's such a powerful film. And one of the things that I really find alluring about it is I can feel your confidence as a director. I mean, you really take your time with a lot of it. And also, too, there's that trust of introducing.

16:49For the most part, these are actors that people don't know. So we really get to lean in and pay attention in a way that we don't with their movies with actors with stars in them. and I just thought that really gives us this kind of a folkloric feel something like Last House on the Left or one of those 70s movies where we didn't know the people and so we are really watching and we get invested in those people too don't we?

17:10RZA:Yeah definitely and whether I think whether we know the talent individually because we may have everybody have their own fans I think that what they did was they allowed the work to flow through them not to put her on the spot but think about Paris Jackson right Like she doesn't have to be an artist. Okay. So she's not doing it. Like some people do this as a job because it's a job you need. And some people just love art. And every day she came to work, she absorbed the work. She did the work. And she has, she has a talent, which I like to call the muscle memory of an actress. So some actress will pick up this like this, right.

17:49And put it down here. And the next take, put it here. The next take, put it here. She'll put it right there every time where it belongs. right and so as i'm watching each one of my my actors you know harry who comes in here the most sweetest spirit you know james i'm talking about these guys got they're not soft but they are sweet spirited people and they're the most ruthless mother you want to see when the camera comes on you know what i mean and so that means that they were willing to let the material flow through them. And that's what an actor should do. So whether it's a big name or just someone who's coming right out of Yale or Juilliard is like, yo, let the work go through you.

18:34You know what I mean? And my cast did that. But that's got to be part of the script too, because again, it feels like a real place. It's not just people saying things to say it. It felt like, I mean, I'm from Detroit. So unfortunately I've lived through that part of Ohio a lot. And it feels like that, that kind of small town thing. And I think that's a really hard thing to pull off. And big respect for you for this, because it really is an amazing movie.

18:56RZA:Thank you, brother. Thank you. Thank you. That sound mix, I mean, it's terrifying. Yeah, we had, you know who else helped us out when we got to the sound? I can't remember Greg's last name right now. Greg and Bobby. He's a master of sound. You watch movies like Straight Outta Compton and I mean, so many movies. And he did this our second movie together. And he's just meticulous with the sound. And And, you know, like my favorite scene is when the cars are chasing. Yes. We took the music out of that and said, let the sound go. And he had that rumbling in the theater. So I appreciate it. The filmmaking too.

19:33One of my favorite scenes is that scene where Unica's running through that field at night. It looks really ghost. It's almost like something out of Night of the Hunter. It's like something of a nightmare. It's a really powerful sequence in the film. Well, thank you. We talked about that with my DP, Brandon Cox. Brandon was my DP on Cutthroat City. If things go well for me, he'll be my DP on my next film. And if I could still afford him. But he got us the truck with the big crane on top. And so we was running through with it. And, you know, I'm in the backseat. In the backseat, you know, he let me steer the camera.

20:09He steer the camera. We like two guys in a video game. But what he did that really helped that shot was he said, let's smoke this whole field out. So that fog, you see, so when that started dripping and you got that wide shot, it's like, what the f*** this guy run into, you know what I mean? Yes. And what is he running from? And psychologically, what I hope creatively you would get, and I'm not sorry to say this, the idea of the runaway slave. Oh, 100%. That was the idea I wanted to give, you know what I mean? That's exactly what it felt like. And Ohio was part of the Underground Railroad, so I definitely thought about that for the reason too.

20:47but you're talking about I mean so many of these scenes for me have these moments that I mean I just one of these guys talks about give us those Jordans and we see Randy's Jordans in a in a jar and then the coroner's office I mean there's just so many notes like that that you just sort of take in and go this is a filmmaker who really knows how to achieve its effects and what he wants and again for me that's how much you've grown because I just I watched all yourself to get ready for this. And there's this kind of photo realist style in Cutthroat City that I really like. But this is like old-fashioned movie making.

21:21It's a big, wide screen. We know where we are all the time, especially in that last 10 minutes of action. That's really hard to do. You know this because you've made action movies before. So let us know exactly where we are. Have some idea how many people are still left to fight. How exhausted he is. I felt beat up by the end of the movie. That's astonishing to pull all this stuff off. Thank you, brother. Thank you.