Kaiketsu | movie | 2021 | Official Featurette - video Dailymotion

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A samurai travels to America to seek revenge for the death of his master. | dG1fc0NvMDJYSjZORTQ

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00:00Hi, my name is Joseph Cusick.

00:07I am the director, co-writer, and producer of Kaetsu.

00:11Kaetsu is my senior project, and it's about a samurai who witnesses the death of his master

00:16and goes on a quest of revenge and hope to find inner peace, but it's in that quest to

00:20find inner peace that he realizes that mercy is one of the biggest lessons to be learned

00:24because being a samurai isn't necessarily an eye for an eye, but rather the idea of

00:29when to strike and when to show mercy.

00:31And so for me, it was just like, ever since I was a kid, I've been fascinated with history

00:35and the story of these people and stuff like that.

00:38And I've also always wanted to do a Western, and that's one of the biggest influences on

00:41this film is a Western.

00:43I've always liked the idea of a cowboy, and a cowboy and a samurai have so many things

00:48in common.

00:49A lot of the times they're loners, they come to a town that needs help, and they help out

00:53the town.

00:54I had this idea of like, what if my samurai protagonist meets my cowboy protagonist?

01:00And then that's where the story came from.

01:02I mentioned it to my buddy Ryan Thee about it, and he looked at me and he went, Joe,

01:08get out of my brain.

01:10And I was like, wait, what?

01:11And he was like, oh no, I've had the same idea.

01:14And we started talking about it, and the more and more we talked about Kurosawa, John Ford,

01:19and just ideas in general for how the story should be, it became more and more clear that

01:24we should write this together.

01:26We thought it'd be a cool matchup to mixed cultures, mixed American versus Japanese culture.

01:31Joe has the Bushido code in his house, and so we were just kind of skimming through it,

01:38looking for ideas.

01:39And the way how we went about writing it was that I wrote one page, Ryan would write another,

01:44and then I would write another.

01:45And so I wrote the first page, and Ryan read it, and he was like, oh, okay, mm-hmm, that's

01:51the film we're doing.

01:52Okay, I'll write the second page.

01:53And he wrote the second page, and it was like, oh, okay, okay, Ryan, that's the movie

01:56we're doing.

01:57And it all came from wanting to one-up each other and trying to make the best script that

02:00we possibly could.

02:02And that's why I think we'd gotten this far, was simply because the script that Ryan and

02:05I wrote was because we were trying 100% for each page.

02:09Going to the process before the pitch, it just came down to, am I passionate enough

02:14to sell this project?

02:16Because that's how it fundamentally is going to be.

02:18It's not about, like, why is your team capable enough to do this picture?

02:22It's why are you capable to do this?

02:25Are you confident in your abilities as a filmmaker, as a storyteller, in order to tell this story?

02:30And that's the biggest thing, too, is that we don't want to just make a samurai film

02:33on a student level and make it seem like a student film.

02:35The goal with this is to make it feel like a movie.

02:38And the thing I'm most excited about in the next few months is the possibility of nailing

02:42down a type of actor that we're looking for.

02:45And not just for the samurai, but for the master and the cowboy, and I can't wait to

02:49find out who those people are going to be.

02:51And so for me, that's what I'm most excited about, is actually being a director and working

02:55with actors to tailor a performance, and I can't wait to see what they do.

02:59So the next few months, it's all about finding those definitives of finding how much is this

03:03going to cost?

03:04Can we shoot here?

03:05Is this person on board?

03:07And that's what we're doing.

Kaiketsu | movie | 2021 | Official Featurette

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