Martial Artist Lewis Tan Breaks Down Fight Scenes from Movies & TV | GQ Sports

let's talk about ninjas for a second ninjas were supposed to be messengers that you know take a a message from one town to another town in the shadows and they don't get caught they're like freaking kung fu spies and that's why they make movies about them hey gq i'm louis tan and today we're going to be reviewing some fight scenes this is the breakdown [Music] first up kill bill volume one so yes this is arguably one of the greatest fight scenes of all times kill bill the crazy 88 uma thurman so the fighters here and kill bill seem very well trained some of the crazy eight seem a little crazy and a little messy i should say the way that they hold the katana they're kind of flustered they're scared and you know but that's part of the character that they're playing uma thurman on the other hand seems very focused very calculated and very precise her sword work is impeccable and a lot of the techniques that she uses could be used in real life definitely i don't know if she could fight this many guys at once but you know it's kill bill baby i studied katana for a long time with seven time world champion caitlin de shell and um there's only a few really basic moves that you can do with the katana the cuts they're straight cuts straight across the line straight down the shoulder the opposite and that's pretty much the basic you know eight different cuts so the fighting style of the katana is very unique in a way that for instance if i'm boxing i'm gonna i'm gonna slip a punch and i'm gonna throw another punch it's difficult to slip a katana so when you're when you're blocking with a katana let's say i'm blocking someone trying to slice me in the head i'm up blocking and as i'm moving the sword their sword away from me i'm going to strike so it's kind of like a a mixture of attacking and defending at the same time and what's very unique about this is when you hold a sword you want to hold it in this hand like this and you want to hold the bottom with your pinky at the very bottom of the sword like this and what you want to do is you want to do a push and pull motion so as you're pushing you're pulling at the same time that is what creates the power and in japan if you did something wrong or you disrespected your clan they'd cut your pinky off everybody knows about the the you know the yakuza losing their pinkies right well the reason why they were losing their pinkies is because they needed the pinky to hold at the bottom of the sword and without that you can't generate as much power so then they would be essentially defenseless and in japan they would test the katanas with prisoners to see if they could cut through you or not and if it could cut all the way through you in a slice then they would get a stamp of approval to fight multiple people at once especially when they're surrounding you in a circle with swords yeah it's not likely that that's gonna happen unless you're uma thurman next up paul w s anderson's 1995 mortal kombat that was awesome all right so this move you see quite a lot i don't know what the move is called to be honest with you i think it's like a mix of judo and wrestling but i don't really know too many people that could do that but still very impressive classic liu kang bicycle kick i mean come on i've been doing martial arts a long time my father is a national champion and i have never seen a bicycle kick work in real life the thing is about torque and force so once you're up in the air you can maybe only get about two kicks in before you're gonna start gravity's gonna start you know pulling you down and uh that's gonna be a problem how are you gonna generate the torque so yeah the bicycle kick maybe you can do two papa and that's it so if anybody out there i don't recommend this but if anybody out there is flying through the air and doing a kick like a bicycle kick and you're going to fall to the floor you know you're going to fall there are ways to break your fall so there's a lot of different styles of martial arts kempo is one of them where they teach you specifically about how to fall how to break your fall and how to land on the floor properly using your arms to slap the ground to absorb some of the momentum or landing on a certain part of your back where it's not going to you know break your back so yes there are ways to fall and that's a very good thing to learn this movie means a lot to me personally not just because you know i'm in the new mortal kombat but it just represented an asian american you know in a leading role that was very unique at the time i don't think that there was many of those that i could really look up to as a kid obviously we have bruce lee and jackie chan and you know but even even bruce lee had to go to hong kong just to get noticed before he came back to america those things are discouraging when you're young to not be able to look and see yourself on screen and it was one of those things where i always wanted to make a change and make a difference now i get an opportunity to do that so i'm very proud of that and this movie was one of those big inspirations for me next up yip man three okay i gotta stop it right there i just wanna say i just got to work and fight with this guy named simon cook who is fighting donnie yen in this elevator and that dude is a beast so let me just start there so simon is from thailand and i was just filming there with him like i said and he's a great muay thai fighter so you can see a lot of the muay thai techniques that he's using with the elbows and the knees and close range that is your best weapon elbows and knees at close range are the most devastating thing that you can use so this is all very realistic whereas don yan is using wing chun and wing chun is known for the intercepting fist the chain hand the chain punches it's very rapid fire it's very linear and it's very direct so what's cool about yip man and the film yet man is yip man is the t uh one of the teachers of bruce lee and what yip man would do is yip man would hold these sparring matches i wouldn't call them sparring matches they're just fighting on top of the rooftops in hong kong so he would teach his techniques to the students and in order to learn these techniques properly he would you would actually fight another person and as the legend goes you know there would be different dojos that would come and they would challenge them and they would have these real fights not to the death but somebody gets knocked out then that's that but yeah yep man is one of the grand masters who taught the great bruce lee next up batman stop right there okay many things to say about this i'm very giddy to talk about batman because batman is a very unique film for me this is where my father got his big break my father who is a martial artist and a stunt man and a fight choreographer he taught me the love of this game this is one of his first films so there's a move where batman punches with the back of his his fist right i think that batman has some sort of gauntlets um on his hands on on his wrists at least that's what it looks like and sounds like when the swords were clashing and he was blocking and that's a real move so he's defending and then he's offended so it looked pretty cool so there's there's moments in this fight where they're throwing a punch and he's kind of like stopping and blocking it with his hand that's not really a realistic technique i would say that gets used very often i think that's more along the lines of trying to create something creative in the choreography but it's batman i mean who am i i can't critique that man what am i even saying just delete that delete it next up we have marvel's daredevil i'm gonna stop it right there this scene is phenomenal it's very difficult to do what these guys are doing which is creating a long piece of fight choreography that's almost like a play in order to get this done you have to memorize every move and everybody has to be perfectly on point every single time that's classic muay thai sweep classic muay thai catch the leg kick the other leg very embarrassing it hurts it's not fun so in this fight scene they use quite a bit of different things i saw some judo throws i saw some jiu-jitsu chokes that turned you know he got slammed against the wall while he was trying to guillotine somebody we have some muay thai techniques we have a muay thai trip we have a front flip onto someone's back that's i don't even know what that is that's just that's just crazy badass there's many different styles involved in this fight and i think that's what makes it kind of unique but also there was just kind of like that brawling energy where just people are just throwing right hands and he's tired and he's he gets blocks and just another right hand and he's tired i saw him jump off the wall and do a superman punch that has been done before in the ufc and in real life and that would work so the bad guys get whooped in this scene and the protagonist daredevil himself although he's very tired takes everybody out i would recommend for these bad guys in the future to attack him maybe at the same time try to overwhelm him try to put him in a position where he can't defend himself from all angles hit him in the back of the head maybe somebody grab his legs while the other person is striking you got to use your brain man you got to be smart about this you're fighting daredevil here he's blind he's blind come on you could do better do better next up lethal weapon four this is a situation that could be very realistic and could happen in real life where someone especially with women you know they get grabbed from behind or they're being held by someone who's stronger than them like a man who's stronger than them physically and they need to get out of the situation she kind of uses a little bit of a jiu jitsu judo technique to get away and then she's gone and i think that's something that it's very good to learn not just for women for everyone so he took the barrel off of his gun that's how fast he was that's insane um i don't think that that's very realistic but it looked it looked really it looked really good it looked really believable so when doing martial arts in real life and fighting in real life a lot of people don't even know what it feels like to get hit in the face it's a interesting feeling it's obviously not a good feeling but it's interesting in a sense i'm talking about in the ring it's interesting in a sense where you feel empowered because you understand that you're not gonna die and you're it's not the end of the world to get hit obviously it depends how you get hit and where you get hit but let's say for instance for me when i was fighting kickboxing matches one time i was in a match finding a guy who was older than me and more experience and he did a spinning back fist and it just connected clean clean and i just saw white and i heard a bead and i just covered up into like a ball and tried not to show that i was too injured but he knew he knew he rocked me and next thing you know he was jumping on me and he was trying to end the fight which he didn't but it was still very painful and shocking but what it does teach you is that you can come back from these things and you can overcome these moments and you can come back stronger that's something that i've used in my life a lot whether it be just as a man or in my work as an actor or in my work fighting it's teaching me how to overcome next up wu assassins familiar face so when i disarm the guy with the gun his arm is over my shoulder i put him in what is called a kimura lock it's a shoulder lock where you're trying to rip the person's shoulder out of the socket the kimura is used very often in the ufc and a lot of people have lost fights to kimura it's a real move it's from jiu jitsu it's it's a it's a fantastic um type of armbar we tried to just put a little spin on it so we're trying to shoot as well as put someone in a kimura and that is how you take down two people at once realistically and this platform that we were fighting on was an old wood like a wood mill it is not a fake set this is a real set if you got hurt on this set you had to go straight to the hospital get a tetanus shot there was a few of us that got cuts and there's just like old rust everything you don't want in a fight scene was here in this location but it looks fantastic okay so here's a really interesting thing so now the fight has changed from this long stick that he had to now this small knife do you see how i'm evading the knife do you see how when i tried to block he cut my hand then then he cut my face that's very realistic that's how you want to fight with a knife whatever's in the closest limb in front of you you're going to take and i think that was done really well in this scene the knife fighting when he's when i'm moving around the knife all that stuff i think is very authentic once the knife is in his stomach and i knee it in his stomach that was just a little flare for fun and finally we have the new mortal kombat i'm just gonna stop it right off the bat and say that this sand if this scent gets in your eyes it's gonna be a problem and it got in my eyes a few times and man my eyes swelled up like will smith and hitch it's not fun it's dirty okay so in this scene i am fighting max huang max huang is playing a character named kung lao he's a shaolin monk who does a lot of wushu that is the style that he does max huang is part of the jackie chan stunt team one of the most famous stunt teams of all times you ain't just walking into that team you have to earn your place there everyone on that team is top martial artists stunned people in the world that move right there is part of cole young's mma training it's a wrestling move it's a single leg takedown he caught a kick and he took him down i put a little spin on it but that's that's what that is so now we have a wushu fighter who threw a kick and he got taken down by a wrestling move so now cole thinks that he thinks that he has this in the bag let's continue when you see kung lao do that with his hat you know it's about to go down the poses that we take in the middle of these fights are very different my my pose my style was just kind of straight up muay thai boxing you know mma guard style my hands are like up guarding my chin this hand is here so i could throw a nice clean jab and this one is here so i could protect my face as i'm fighting when it comes to max's style or kung lao is more of a wushu fighter he's more long and wider range this is just an attribute to these different techniques in different styles sometimes you'll see muay thai fighters with a long guard as they call it which is my hand is stretched out a lot further to keep my opponent you can jab a little bit quicker but you're not going to generate as much power obviously boxers want to keep their hands super close to their face and tight so they can guard their chin and they can generate those massive hooks so funny story there this hat is is a pretty heavy hat i think it's like maybe 12 pounds 13 pounds so max is doing all these tricks with the hat and it's very strenuous on his neck now here's this move where i'm throwing kicks just normal kind of like roundhouse kicks and he's blocking it with the hat but the hat is really hard it's like made of wood i broke my foot before kicking a piece of wood another long story so when i was kicking that hat all i was thinking about was i gotta make this look as real as possible but if i break my freaking foot again i'm gonna be pissed you don't really want to kick someone with the toe that's that's kind of like where i i went wrong it was obviously an accident toes are weak you want to kick someone with your shin or you want to kick a little lower than your shin and try to get on the top of your foot and that's that the hat wins that's a really cool training sequence that's mma kickboxing and wrestling versus wu shu and a magic hat you know who won all right well that's a wrap hope you guys learned something i had a lot of fun thanks for watching with me till next time

Channel: GQ Sports

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Keywords: best fight scene, best fight scenes, breakdown, breakdown gq sports, fight scene, fight scene break down, gq, gq sports, lewis tan, lewis tan 2021, lewis tan breaks down, lewis tan fight scene, lewis tan interview, lewis tan martial arts, lewis tan mortal kombat, lewis tan movie, martial art scene, martial art scenes, martial arts, martial arts movie, martial arts movies, mortal kombat breakdown, sports, the breakdown, the breakdown gq sports

Id: qpxOLbFk1co

Length: 18min 42sec (1122 seconds)

Published: Mon May 24 2021