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