'One Spoon of Chocolate' Xen Diagram Media Logo text Before making his fourth feature film, the action revenge thriller One Spoon of Chocolate, legendary rapper and music producer RZA was still, he confesses, unsure of himself as a filmmaker, feeling that he hadn't yet mastered the process, the "rhythms" as he calls it, of being a director, at least not to the same comfort level he had with music. After scaling the heights of hip hop as the de facto head of the Wu-Tang Clan, arguably the most influential rap group in history, RZA has found increasing success in film and television, firstly as an actor - he has starred in films like American Gangster (2007), G.I. Joe: Retaliation (2013) and Nobody (2021) and series like Californication - and more significantly with writing and directing. His directorial debut, 2012's The Man With the Iron Fists, starred Oscar-winner Russell Crowe, Dave Bautista and Lucy Lu. RZA followed that with Love Beats Rhymes, a musical drama starring Azelia Banks, in 2017 and the heist film Cut Throat City in 2020. Related Stories News Zohran Mamdani Links Up With Wu-Tang Clan in Viral Social Media Video TV 'Power Book III: Raising Kanan' to End With Season 5, Now Starring Shameik Moore RZA also served as an executive producer on Hulu's biographical series Wu-Tang: An American Saga, which documented the rise of his Staton Island rap crew, that gave the world the singular talents of himself, Raekwon, Method Man, GZA, Ol' Dirty Bastard, Ghostface Killah, Masta Killah, U-God and Inspectah Deck. Now comes RZA's fourth film as a director, One Spoon of Chocolate, which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival this year, and will, according to the filmmaker, have a theatrical release at a still to be confirmed date. One Spoon of Chocolate tells the story of Unique, a military veteran and former convict who is trying to get his life back together and travels to the small town of Karensville to live with his cousin Ramsey, only for both to be hounded by a gang of racists with connections to the town's corrupt cops. After a fatal incident, Unique seeks out the gang to exact brutal justice. The film stars Shameik Moore (Dope, Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-verse) as Unique and RJ Cyler (The Book of Clarence, The Harder They Fall) as Ramsey. The cast also includes Paris Jackson, Harry Goodwins, Johnell Young, Michael Harney, Rockmond Dunbar, E'myri Crutchfield, Blair Underwood, Jason Isbell and Isaiah Hill. The Hollywood Reporter caught up with the RZA over Zoom recently to discuss the making of One Spoon of Chocolate, how writing scripts mirrors his method for writing lyrics, his growth as a filmmaker and his future plans. Shameik Moore and RJ Cyler in 'One Spoon of Chocolate.' Xen Diagram Media Let's start with the film's title. Could you explain what One Spoon of Chocolate means? Is there a deeper significance? With the title, there's a deeper meaning in the sense of our character has to learn the way things need to be, the way things change. One spoon of chocolate can change a whole glass of milk, you know what I mean? That's the idea. A character has to realize that, first of all, he represents change and he has to make a change within himself. There's a scene in the film [where the character Unique is trying to make chocolate milk] and he's complaining that it's only one spoon of chocolate powder left. But an OG tells him 'one spoon could change the whole glass.' I know One Spoon of Chocolate is something you have been working on for a number of years, in terms of the story of the film, how did that come about? What inspired you to come up with the overarching themes? It came to me like, man, over the years. I mean, it was 13 years of getting to a point of finally having a screenplay that we could film. To be quite frank with you, the movie is like 100 pages of a 200 page story, and it came to me almost like how my lyrics come, not forced out of me, just flowed out of me. It was something that [I needed time] for me as an artist to create. When I tried to create it before, I was getting stuck. I got inspired to make it, [but then got stuck again]. But then doing the New York State of Mind Tour, traveling on a tour bus and traveling through the country during the writer's strike, I was like, 'I'm gonna write something.' I started writing something new and it just kept freezing and then I went back and started reading some of my old stuff and [One Spoon of Chocolate], I said, 'wow, this was the one!' I had about 40 pages. I said 'this one was gonna be good.' I had got to part in [Karensville, a fictional town in the film], basically, in the early draft, and then it just started flowing. I read that originally you were going to do a period piece, that it was going to be set earlier, like in the 70s or around that period, but actually you moved it forward to, I guess, it's the 90s, right? Well, actually, I made the time ambiguous. It was always going to be ambiguous, but for the audience it was going