The "Dragonball" Team Tells All!

Maybe you played with the action toys or watched the cartoon series growing up. Dragonball is a world-wide phenomenon based on Japanese Manga, graphic novels and videogames. Now, the fanciful story about a powerful warrior protecting the Earth from the bad guys comes to the big screen as Dragonball: Evolution.

In Beverly Hills, we cornered some of the major young players in this action "quest" film to talk about their own interest in the fantasy story, their martial arts training, costumes and style and thoughts about their colorful characters. Emmy Rossum (Phantom of the Opera, Poseidon, The Day After Tomorrow) plays Bulma, a gorgeous, fast-moving scientist, inventor and engineer who happens to be able to kick major butt. Hot Jamie Chung ("Samurai Girl" on ABC Family) is Chi Chi, feisty lady love to lead warrior Goku, played by Justin Chatwin (War of the Worlds, The Invisible, The Chumscrubber).

On the style scene, we have beautiful brunette Emmy wearing an off-white Monique Lhuillier silk sleeveless dress, accessorizing with gold chains, a cameo necklace and very high, matching heels. Exotic Jamie is in a gorgeous black chiffon top with silver beading and dark pants. Justin... hey, he's a young guy.. he's sporting jeans and a tee! As the trio enters our interview room, they are excitedly talking about the toys for their movie characters appearing at Toys-R-Us!

TeenHollywood: Why do you think so many people are attracted to Dragonball?

Justin: I went to the Manga museum when I was in Kyoto, Japan. They had a library and it was like three floors, like a giant natural history museum-sized building full of Manga and there are so many different kinds of Manga out there. I asked myself that same question. Why is Dragonball so big and there's all these other ones out there that haven't become popular? I think it comes down to the story. It's the values. These stories are like these Greek epics. They're about virtue and honor and fighting evil and becoming a man and serving your country and serving a greater cause. For me, what's important is to carry on those stories, evolve it and keep those stories alive because if we don't adapt them, they'll just drift away.

TeenHollywood: Emmy, what is your take on the graphic novel, the Manga and bringing some of the many characters to the screen?

Emmy: I loved the Manga because it was a little more R rated, and I thought that the relationship between Bulma and [Master] Roshi [played by Chow Yun-Fat] always was very funny, and I really enjoyed that in my studies of her. And I think we kind of took everything we could from the Manga and understood that some things are going to be changed. Just by virtue of the fact that you're a live actor playing it live action, it can't be exactly like the Manga, but you try to bring the spirit and the energy of the characters, and the backstory that you learn from the Manga and you bring it to this story, which is really an introduction of those characters.

TeenHollywood: Justin, do you think that longtime fans of Dragonball as well as those not familiar with it will appreciate the movie?

Justin: The original fans are like 20 or 30 years old now. There's a whole generation of 6 to 18-year-olds that Dragonball wasn't introduced to because they have Batman and they have all these other animated shows. This is for the new generation, people that have no idea, to get more involved with Dragonball and also for the fans. I hope they like it.

TeenHollywood: Justin, what is your own background with the Dragonball universe?

Justin: There are so many people who have an idea of who this iconic figure is. So I knew it would be a challenging part but I was definitely honored to have been given this part. As a kid, I would always go over to this friend's house. His little brothers and sisters would be talking about Dragonball, like it was the Grail and [they were] so passionate about it. I watched it later. I think I was like 18 when I watched it. I was like 'wow, this is crazy. I really like this'. But it wasn't until I got the part that I actually sat down with "Dragonball" and "Dragonball Z" and "Dragonball GT" and actually started studying the character.

TeenHollywood: So, that was your research?

Justin: That was the first thing I did. I was like, 'I've got to understand this character and understand the qualities, understand all the episodes and the family tree and all that.' And then, 'I have to get rid of all those ideas and bring those qualities out of Justin' because I didn't want to play an idea of the character. I think would have been the biggest pitfall of the movie; actors playing ideas of what these characters are as opposed to genuinely bringing forth qualities of themselves.

TeenHollywood: Can you all talk about your martial arts training and Justin, some of your fights in the film? Jamie, you just did "Samurai Girl" so you already had a martial arts base, right?

Jamie: "Samurai Girl" was the perfect foundation to prepare me for the conditioning and physical challenges of 87Eleven, which is the stunt group that trained us [to fight]. It was a whole different level. We're talking a cable show training to motion picture training, and it was very different and it required a month prior to filming, we trained every day, physical conditioning, martial arts, wire-work, fight choreography, and the days that I wasn't filming while we were on location, it was physical training.

Emmy: This completely kicked my a**! [laughter]. I had never done anything like this before, I grew up loving Jean-Claude Van Damme movies and I've always kind of wanted to do a film like that. I always wanted to play a tougher, more independent, woman character and this was the perfect opportunity to shoot three guns, learn how to ride a motorcycle and dye part of my hair blue.

TeenHollywood: Yeah, that was some wild, big hair, gurl!!

Emmy: It's actually really good padding for any kind of somersaults or kicks to the head. It was fun for whipping your head around. I got kind of a whiplash but it was fun to look pretty and then fight real tough. I can only imagine [the training] kind of like how women describe childbirth, like 'it's really awful when you're doing it and like two years later you're like, 'Oh, it was amazing, it's great,' but when you're in it it's really awful. But also fun, because we were doing it as a team.

TeenHollywood: Justin, speaking of hair, Goku has a pretty wild, spikey do. If you were a fan of the Manga, did you want your hair to look like that to match?

Justin: That was one of the first questions that I asked. What are we going to do with the hair? All these animes have crazy hair and I was like, 'am I going to be wearing a wig? Oh my God, this is going to be wacky. This is going to either be really interesting because it's my first anime film or this is going to be the last film I ever do'. You know, like orange Ninja suit and two-foot hair [he laughs]. So I was like a bit of a freak in it. I think my hair has an arc of its own in this movie because I was such a freak every day. I'd say 'okay, this is the high school look. Okay, this is the post-Goku look. This is the journey look'. And I kept on changing it because I honestly don't know if I ever got to a place where I was like 'this is Goku from the Manga'. I felt a big responsibility to the Manga and to the fans and just to everything that had been done so the hair I guess was a challenge for me.

TeenHollywood: Justin, some of the fights are at as slower speed. Is it tough to keep your acting concentration when you're fighting at a speed that you would not fight at if you were angry?

Justin: Yeah. It was like repetition because I'm not that coordinated and I'm not really much of a fighter to be honest with you. We practiced that bully fight [Goku is picked on by a bunch of school bullies] for five weeks. I got it down and I just remembered it. You just get to the point where it just gets in your head.

TeenHollywood: Emmy and Jamie, did either of you have dance training in your past and, if so, did that help with the training for fight sequences?

Emmy: I was a ballerina when I was little. A lot of [fight choreography] is kind of similar to a dance, as it's a choreographed motion, but Justin tells this story really well. Stunt guys have a thing they call 'the box', which is kind of like a ballet move when you're in first position, your hands are like eight inches from your bellybutton. There's like a box that you're not supposed to hit out of when actors are fighting each other so that they don't hurt each other. So there is a lot of coordination and dance combinations that come in handy. It's rehearsed in a similar kind of way, but when actors get all 'method' and really emotional in fight scenes, people bust their lips and break their toes and all of a sudden 'the box' is like a whole big circle.

TeenHollywood: Ouch! Jamie?

Jamie: I'm sorry, I don't dance.

Emmy: That's actually not true, she can dance. She was also the best fighter.

Jamie: It's repetition, repetition, and you get familiar with the movements and it's lots of training and it's to look sharp, but I'm not a very good dancer, no.

Emmy: She does dance, give her a beer, she'll dance.

Justin: She's far from uncoordinated, she kicked a**!

Jamie: [blushing] No karaoke and dancing.

TeenHollywood: Humm, why do I feel that there is some hot party story here that we're not getting? Okay, lets just ask your director why he picked you for your roles Emmy and Jamie.

James Wong [director]: For Emmy, we literally read hundreds of people, and I think Emmy just stood out because Bulma to me is like a diva. Bulma has this confidence about herself and this intelligence and the feeling that she knows what's best, and that she knows everything, and I think that's part of who Emmy is, that's why she's so great.

Emmy: I'm a diva?

James: Well, she exudes that confidence that Bulma has and rightly so, because she's very talented. She just has that feeling about her. And Jamie was I think the last person we cast in the movie, and we were looking at lots of different combinations of people, because I wanted this to be a multi-cultural cast, and so we were just looking at different races. I wanted to Chi Chi to be not Caucasian, and not just because of that, but Jamie came in and she's obviously gorgeous, and she's a great actress, but she also had the martial arts foundation from "Samurai Girl".