For those who "ve been paying attention, it doesn "t seem so strange that RZA ("RIZZ-a"), a rap musician, has created and directed a made-in-China martial-arts movie, "The Man With the Iron Fists," which opens Nov. 2.

As a Staten Island teenager then known as Robert Diggs in the late "70s and "80s, RZA spent countless hours in Times Square movie theaters watching dubbed kung fu flicks, imagining that the stories of vengeance and brotherhood in those Asian costume dramas related to his own experience, even to the African-American civil-rights struggle. They were tales of the oppressed battling oppressors. He felt kung fu shared something with hip-hop, too. Both were learned arts for expressing aggression and both depended on a series of quick physical moves expertly executed. In his music with the Wu-Tang Clan, RZA exposed a generation of rap listeners to titles and themes and audio clips snatched from those chopsocky films.

"Kung fu, the flow of it, the skill it takes to become a master, the repetition, the confrontation. That "s how it is in hip-hop," he says. "Hip-hop started as a street-battle art form. DJs battling to see who "s the best. Break dancers would battle each other. MCs would battle."

"Iron Fists" is a $20 million homage to those low-budget classics that Hong Kong "s prolific Shaw Brothers studio released from the 1960s through the "80s, films such "Flying Guillotine" and "The 36th Chamber of Shaolin." Russell Crowe, Lucy Liu and RZA (in the title role) star. Filming took the cast to Shanghai—and the sets for many of the martial-arts films that inspired RZA. The film also is a bit of a homage to RZA "s cinematic mentor, Quentin Tarantino, who hired RZA to write soundtracks for some of his movies.

"When Quentin did "Kill Bill " 1 and 2, I was right there with him as his student and the guy he brought in to help with the music," RZA says. Mr. Tarantino moved on to other genres, but RZA believed there remained a market for Westernized martial-arts cinema. "I said to Quentin, "Let me fill that void. " "

Mr. Tarantino offered guidance and endorsement—and, indirectly, a screenwriter: Eli Roth, known as a torture-porn filmmaker ("Hostel") and the guy who killed Hitler while playing "The Bear Jew" in Mr. Tarantino "s "Inglourious Basterds."

"I look at Eli as my classmate," RZA says. "I met Eli at Quentin "s house, watching movies and teaching us about things." The two disciples from the School of Quentin bonded after being snowed in at Boston "s Logan Airport and detouring to a posh suburb to visit Mr. Roth "s parents, who, it turned out, came from Brooklyn neighborhoods RZA knew well.

"Iron Fists" is hip-hop more in sensibility than sound, given that its soundtrack is "70s-style urban swank. As it begins, RZA describes a feudal-era Chinese village "where dangerous men will meet on narrow streets."

If that weren "t a line from a new kung fu movie, it could easily be an old-school rap lyric.

Wall Street Journal
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