A Conversation with Dave Callaham is now available to watch at OnStory.tv! Here are just a few of the highlights from our chat-
- Be the Change You Want to See in the Industry
“I watch enough movies that I am very adept at fantasizing about being a hero and about what it must be like to have doors open for you and to have just the privilege of being that type of personality on screen. But I don’t have any sort of life experience like that whatsoever. And because I wasn’t seeing it on screen as a kid, I couldn’t even fathom what an Asian guy would look like as a hero. And then Shang-Chi comes along and it was a very emotional process for me.”
- Mysticism in Movies: An Escape from this World
“I’m not that interested at this point in my career in writing stories about regular people going to regular jobs and then the movie ends. I love watching movies like that. But for me, especially in the last 18 months as, things have been pretty crazy and hard and depressing. I’ve found that the escapism of being able to write these big movies where you’re just talking about magic and about really crazy big ideas, I find that to be a lot more soothing personally.”
- Remember It’s Not Just an Action Scene
“The real truth is the key to action sequences is the one thing you have to have is you have to go in knowing what the emotional journey of the action scene is. You know? So in Shang-Chi for example, that bus sequence that people seem to really like, which I like too. It’s really cool action. But what’s important about that scene is, it is Shang-Chi being unmasked. Now, he’s not wearing a mask literally, but he’s been hiding behind this fake identity and code switching into an American lifestyle. And he is threatened in a way that he cannot tolerate and the proverbial mask comes off and he becomes Shang-Chi in that moment.”
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