MTV.COM recently sat down with Keanu Reeves to discuss his newest project The Private Lives of Pippa Lee. It was during this discussion that the subject of Cowboy Bebop came up. Here is what Reeves had to say:
It seems that as great as this adaptation of the anime series is, there is still the bottom line for the studio, Fox, to think about.
“There’s a draft of the script, but the writer did such a great job [that] in order to make the movie, you would need half a billion dollars,” Reeves stated.
He went on to say:
“So the studio went, ‘This movie is fantastic and it would cost half a billion dollars so he’s doing a rewrite.”
One of the big titles in anime, Cowboy Bebop is set in a time where “astral gates” make interstellar travel possible. Humanity, decimated by a lunar explosion resulting from a gate accident, spread out across the solar system, as did crime, which gave rise to the use of bounty hunters.
“The only challenge was to make a satisfying western narrative out of the kind of storytelling that happens. There’s a great draft, so we’re just trying to pull it back a little bit now.”
Reeves would play Spike Spiegel, a bounty hunter and former member of a crime syndicate. Spiegel, along with Jet Black, a fellow bounty hunter and former cop, are the two pilots of the spaceship Bebop.
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The show, which first aired on Tokyo TV and satcaster Wowow during the late 1990s, was strongly influenced by American music, even featuring action sequences – both space battles and mano a mano – timed to U.S. melodies.
