RZA
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RZA Doles Out One Spoon of Chocolate
RZA, born Robert Diggs, is most well-known as The Abbot, or leader, of the Wu-Tang Clan. Beyond his musical pursuits, however, he has been building an eclectic body of work in cinema for going on three decades. RZA’s cinematic beginnings can be traced to Jim Jarmusch’s elegant, and elegiac, urban samurai riff Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), for which he composed the score and played a minor role. He then appeared as himself in a trio of early aughts comedies: Coffee and Cigarettes (2003), which re-teamed him with Jarmusch; Scary Movie 3 (2003) alongside fellow Wu-Tang members Method Man, U-God, and Raekwon; and Be […]
by Justin LaLiberty on Apr 29, 2026 -
Brief Encounters: Director Jim Jarmusch on the Poetic Downtime of Coffee and Cigarettes
The following interview with Jim Jarmusch was originally published as our Spring, 2004 cover story, and it is appearing here online for the first time. — Editor “Why do people go to the cinema?” Andrei Tarkovsky writes in a book of essays, Sculpting in Time. “I think that what a person normally goes to the cinema for,” he goes on, “is time: time lost or spent or not yet had.” Time lost, spent or not yet had is the stuff of Jim Jarmusch’s new feature, his ninth, Coffee and Cigarettes. Consisting of 11 short vignettes, all featuring two or three people […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 24, 2019 -
RZA on The Man with the Iron Fists
What do you get when you hand RZA the keys to his own film project? As fans of the multi-tasking Wu-Tang Clan leader will be thrilled to know, you get a balls-out, rap-infused martial arts spectacle, filled with the mad love of a lifelong kung fu fan. A project nine years in the making, RZA’s directorial debut, The Man with the Iron Fists, sees the 43-year-old artist star alongside Lucy Liu and Russell Crowe, bringing to life a mashed-up actioner that blends Chinese mysticism with the U.S. slave trade and more. The impetus for the film’s production came when RZA […]
by R. Kurt Osenlund on Nov 7, 2012
