"At first I thought the concept of a motorcycle movie was really dumb and thin, but then I realized that my job is kind of dumb and thin," explains Kahn. "You take a very thin concept [and] through filmmaking, beef it up. On just one simple level, this motorcycle movie, if you figure out the goal of it, is to overwhelm you with action scenes, and I just realized that I can make really cool motorcycle action scenes."
Somewhere amidst those action scenes is a story line that follows Cary (Martin Henderson), a biker framed for murder, who must run from the FBI, as well as a rival gang led by Trey (Ice Cube). Along for the ride are Cary's buddies, Dalton (Jay Hernandez) and Val (Lee).
When it came to casting for the movie, it was the character of lover boy Val that had Kahn looking to turn the social construct of the Asian man on its head.
"I knew that Val should be Asian," says Kahn. "This role ... I felt like if you gave it to any other person, it'd come off cheesy. |
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So you needed to flip it and define this sort of stock character in a brand new way with a twist. And I thought an Asian guy playing this is something that we have never seen before.
"When I was trying to figure out who should play this role I was thinking, 'I need to put [in] that guy who was in that sushi restaurant. I think his name was Will Yun Lee.'"
But, like Kahn, Lee was hesitant to attach himself to "Torque."
"I was in Canada at the time shooting 'Witchblade,' and I got the script sent to me. And I read it, and I was like,'Uh, I don't know if this is something I want to do right now," recalls Lee. "My agents called again, 'You should really take a look at it,' and I just wasn't into it, so I told them I didn't want to go in and do it. ... They said, 'Joseph Kahn's directing,' and then, it was weird, the next day, his video popped up when I was on the phone talking about going in to read for 'Torque. |
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