BEVERLY HILLS, Calif., March 1, 2000 — He lives on a roof, communicates through pigeons and spins a saber better than a Jedi. At night, he hides in the shadows, pads about urban streets and eliminates targets with one muffled gunshot.
He is Ghost Dog, played by Forest Whitaker — a samurai who serves as an assassin for members of the Mafia. It is an obligation he fulfills after a small-time mobster (John Tormey) saves him from a gang of thugs. But when a hit goes awry, Ghost Dog finds he is the hunted and must defend himself while honoring the samurai code he lives by.
At first, “Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai” appears an unusual fit for a Gentle Ben such as Whitaker, an actor whose acclaimed career has teamed him with Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone and Neil Jordan. But the 38-year-old actor, who sports cornrows in the film and studied Kurosawa films to prepare for the role, says he was always interested in ideas of the East.
“I’d been reading Eastern philosophy since I was a kid. And I meditated. I did it on a daily basis. It’s the one thing I do with any consistency,” Whitaker says. He also increased his regular meditation to 2 to 3 hours a day, doing Egyptian mediations to the god of war. “Meditation gives you a different kind of mindset. It’s very powerful.”
It was kismet, then, that director Jim Jarmusch (“Stranger Than Paradise,” “Dead Man”) was piecing together an Eastern-flavored story with Whitaker in mind.
“I just sort of weave things together, there’s no real conceptual plan. … I didn’t start off with ‘I will mix an Italian gang culture with a black urban O.G. (original gangsta) guy and Eastern philosophy,'” Jarmusch says. “I almost always write with a specifc central character in mind. So the next step was, ‘Who can I imagine embodying that contradiction?’ And it was Forest Whitaker because to me, he embodies a certain contradiction in that he is very vulnerable and soft and sad and deep about him — just his presence. But he’s also very big and strong, both physically and his own spirit was very strong.”
The two finally ran into each other “at Super 8 Sound. I was messing with my camera, he was messing with his,” Whitaker says. They expressed mutual interest in collaborating, and a year later Jarmusch gave him a call.
“He said, ‘I have an idea,’ so we got together. … We sat there talking for three to four hours at a time, about four times, maybe. And he said, ‘OK, I’m gonna go write it, I think I got enough.'”
The title character is a hero, but like many others he is a loner as well, making friends only with a young girl (Camille Winbush) and an ice-cream vendor (Isaach de Bankolé) who speaks nothing but French. How he came to be a samurai is not known, but that’s what strengthens the mystery of Ghost Dog.
“He’s an urban myth,” Whitaker says. “He represents this thing in all of us, being able to live by a code. … That’s what he’s trying to create. He comes in with the wind, and he leaves by it. Most myth stories, the character seems like an orphan or someone — you don’t know his parents or his mother.
“We don’t think about Siddharta. … I don’t remember what the heck Gandhi’s path was, and I think that’s kind of why the myth was so strong. I don’t see anything else about him. … That’s the following of the myth.”
“Ghost Dog,” distributed by Artisan Entertainment, opens nationwide March 17.
