Kitao Sakurai’s “Street Fighter” (based on the video game that first appeared in 1987) is a strange film. That’s by design, as the filmmaker told us during a recent interview.
The film is not conventional and may not be what audiences are expecting from a big screen take on “Street Fighter.” As we spoke on Thursday, reviews for the film were just starting to be published, and I saw one which questioned how involved Mountain Dew was involved in this production, which I read to Sakuari. He corrected the record: it was actually Jolt.
Speaking of Jolt, a staple of ‘90s offshoot cola brands, the first act of “Street Fighter” acts as both a spoof of and love letter to the early 1990s (and there is even Jolt reference) before shifting gears to the setting of the second World Warrior tournament. Ryu (Andrew Koji), the greatest fighter in the world, has been missing since winning the 1987 World Warrior tournament. His adopted brother, Ken Masters (Noah Centineo) has devolved into a party machine who often winds up on MTV’s spring break coverage. The evil M. Bison (David Dastmalchian) has put together a new World Warrior tournament with the hopes of capturing Ryu and stealing his powers.
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Ahead, Sakurai, best known for his work on projects like “The Eric Andre Show” and “Beef,” explains how he wound up directing “Street Fighter” after the Philippou brothers left the project in 2024. And, yes, why it was so important his version of “Street Fighter” not be conventional, which even includes the ending of the film, which happens at a very unusual moment.
IndieWire: How did you wind up getting this? You’re not the first filmmaker I think of when I think of “Street Fighter.”
Kitao Sakurai: Yeah…
But it’s one of those that I also don’t think of anyone else right away. So it makes sense, but it’s also surprising…
Well, the Philippou brothers were on it originally and couldn’t do it because they were doing their second movie, although they do have a cameo in “Street Fighter.”
Where are they at?
So when you transition to Metrolao, before the Guile-Dan-Ken hallway scene? When you’re panning up the cityscape, there’s these two guys fighting on a car, just beating the shit out of each other. Those are the Philippou brothers. So, basically, what happened was Legendary was looking for a filmmaker and I think that, to [producer] Cale Boyter’s credit, he knew that the movie wanted a tone and an approach that didn’t feel conventional, for lack of better words.
And it’s not conventional.
And obviously coming from having done Eric Andre’s show and “Beef” and “Dave,” what I like to do are things that feel tonally weird and strange [and that] work on an emotional level, but also work on a level that is very distinctive and strange and bring something else. I think that’s what they wanted out of “Street Fighter,” an approach that wasn’t conventional.
Not only that, having been born in Japan and, in my childhood, raised between Japan and America, I had a very deep cultural connection to the material that was I think unique and which they appreciated. I could speak to the backgrounds of the characters in a way that felt informed by this different cultural layer.
I think if you look at my work, I love things that do have a kind of gonzo, a bit of a crazy energy that comes not just from the writing per se, but also from how we approach the production and doing prank things or things that are a bit more reality-based. There was an interest in that.
You mentioned the energy. The reviews are coming out right, as we are talking, and I see one right now asking how much Mountain Dew played a factor in directing this movie…
[Laughs]
See, you like that…
It wasn’t Mountain Dew, it was Jolt.
Do they still make Jolt?
They’re bringing it back.
Are they really?
Yeah.
In the ’90s, it was hard to find. You couldn’t find it just anywhere.
No, no, no. It was illicit.
You also mentioned the tone. The first act of the movie is basically a great ’90s spoof. In the second act, it becomes more of what people are expecting from a “Street Fighter” movie, maybe. Was there ever a thought that maybe the whole movie should just be a ’90s spoof?
No, I think you have to set the table. I mean, there’s also natural reasons for why that shift happens. It’s the characters together, and they’re in this different city, which has a little bit more of a heightened world-building element, whereas the first act does take place in Miami in the early ’90s. I think that shift is organic. But, yeah, I definitely really did want to set the table. And I’m sure you could tell, not only is the movie set in the ’90s, but I wanted the movie to feel like it was made in the ’90s. That came forth from the ’90s and that a lot of the choices were almost in character.
If this were actually made in 1993, effects-wise, people would have a lot of questions like, “Holy shit, how’d they do these effects?” But the first third, yes, there are a lot of cathode ray tube TV screens.
For me, the ’90s served a few different purposes. On the one hand, it’s this fun, nostalgic kind of thing that just adds a layer of fun to the film. But also I wanted to do this almost subversive take on it where in “traditional IP movies” or video game movies, oftentimes what can happen is that the weirder elements and the stranger elements that don’t feel like they translate to film are softened. You’ll round off the sharp edges of the more bizarre qualities of a video game.
For me, I was like, I want to take an approach where we’re almost underlining those strange qualities: be it Guile’s hair or all of what the characters are wearing in, especially, “Street Fighter II.” But, to do that, I needed a world that supported that, so that was also a big idea behind the ’90s as an alternate world. My approach wasn’t to say, “This movie takes place on October 3rd, 1993.” It was more like we’re in a slightly different world, which is the early ’90s, but is also a little bit its own thing.
And also [to] set the movie in a period that I knew that was interesting to a Gen Z audience. Because the ’90s is cool, the ’90s music and fashion, and there’s an energy there that I think people are digging.
We hear “2 Legit 2 Quit.”
Yeah, exactly.
You mentioned the freedom. How would this have differed from the Philippou brothers? Did you come in with this idea for the first act?
It was kind of more like that. I came in and reworked it significantly. We went through a significant number of drafts to get where we are now from the nascent seed that I came in on.
Because I feel like you didn’t have a ton of time to do that.
Screen time-wise?
No, actual human time, to do that work.
Yeah, it was the hustle. Also, it was this really insane kind of thing, because I got it and we started developing it. And then Sonny [Lee Sung Jin] from “Beef” called me and he was like, “Hey… Jake Schreier, the director on Season 1, was off doing ‘Thunderbolts,’ I need somebody to do what Jake was doing Season 1.” And so, the first part of the year, I was doing Season 2 of “Beef,” and then immediately got on a plane and went to Australia to do “Street Fighter.” I
t was this weird brain split where half of my brain was trying to develop this insane gonzo totally wacky “Street Fighter” kind of thing, and the other half of my brain was this very heady Oscar Isaac-Carey Mulligan dramatic piece.
Did you want more time?
I think, in a weird way, that’s where I do my best work. If I’m doing a couple things at the same time, it allows me to focus on one thing for a beat, and then my subconscious is doing deeper work in the background. And then when I come back to it after a couple days, there’s new thoughts on it that I might not have had if I was just consciously pushing really hard on that one thing.
But with “Street Fighter,” it’s something that I, just from the onset, was just so passionate about — and because it connected so much to my childhood and a sense of nostalgia. I love movies that have an ensemble where the energy of the ensemble means something. This is such a weird reference for what we’re talking about, but I think about “Nashville.”
The Robert Altman movie?
Yeah, he’s my hero. Senior year of high school — a little aside — I was supposed to study for the finals to get into college, but at the Cleveland Cinematheque where I grew up, and I’m here now, they were doing this incredible Altman in the ’70s retrospective where they’d gotten prints of every single movie that he’d made in the ’70s.
Oh, wow.
So instead of studying for the finals all that month, I just lived at the Cinematheque and saw every single Altman movie. But, yeah, Altman’s ensembles, that spoke to me, and I just love groups of people that are weird and don’t seem like they belong together, being together, and the energy that that creates. Something special about that.
[Editor’s note: Some light spoilers follow for the ending of “Street Fighter.”]
This is a movie that seems very confident it’s getting a sequel. It ends mid-scene.
Obviously, I want to leave the film open to the story unfolding further.
You succeeded. It certainly does.
But also, it’s a little bit tongue in cheek in that Marvel movies or whatever, superhero movies, they always do this sort of sequel-bait-y thing. And I was like, “Let’s just do that.”
They usually do it in a post-credit scene, you bypassed that.
Well, we also have a post-credit scene. I think, more so than making fun of sequel-bait-y things, what I wanted to leave the audience with was the feeling of family finding each other. And that to me is really within the spirit of “Street Fighter,” that this feeling of this ensemble being together.
“Street Fighter” as a franchise, it’s almost 40 years old. There’s so many stories. So how could you make a movie where it feels like it all wraps up? That doesn’t feel true to the franchise either. So it wasn’t so much, “Yes, we’re absolutely getting a sequel,” but more like, “Look, if we’re going to tell a ‘Street Fighter’ story, it needs to be a story that is at the beginning of where the franchise starts and just leaves room for the story to continue.” Just by definition, I mean, “Street Fighter,” it can’t just end.
A Paramount release, “Street Fighter” is in theaters now.