Parkour Expert Breaks Down Parkour Scenes from Movies & TV | GQ Sports

he's jumping from the top of one crane almost straight down boom on to this other crane and all he does is compact and absorb his momentum and continue moving it's so impractical that his shin bones aren't just sticking out of his knees or something because the amount of impact that that would have taken on a straight drop is just crazy to me agq my name is Jesse la flair I'm a professional parkour athlete and you're watching the breakdown first clip up classic Casino Royale this has introduced millions of people to sort of the level of movement that parkour athletes do and the athlete in this one is a legend let's check it out alright mom Falls are right there so what's beautiful about this interim scene is that I know that a lot of the background stuff is actually happening in real time so like him running as the truck slammed into that dirt is real he strides up and once he gets onto that red beam if you were willing to back a little bit here this is a climbing technique he is putting pressure into his feet he's using his hands and he's climbing up a lot of this sequence is done at height so I know that they had safety lines on the actor but it isn't like he's being supported it's actually just in case he falls off so he has to deal with the real sequence I think what's really cool about this crane shot is one those three strips you're seeing is actually grip tape so coming from someone who has done this particular stunt it helps you from not slipping and falling off so production had to put grip tape all along that thing I'm gonna pause it right there he's on a safety wire for Shore especially this particular shot where you can see that the actor is actually faced in whether they cheated this down below or not I'm not sure but the actors and stunt person they're gonna be on wires once you get to a certain height I'm gonna scrub through this real quick it's a really legit looking jump the problem is when he gets that the height of that cream because you've been at this incline for so long you're really out of steam so he had to step off of the edge of it and really launch arms first which to be honest with you at that height there's no real way to save yourself one of the scariest things to do while you're doing parkour is jump to something with an under hang which this has because if your fingers peel off the only thing he's reaching for is his hands his legs can't really do much if his fingers peeled there's no way to save this so usually when we jump to something we tend to try to lead with our feet cushion that momentum but but this particular jump he really just didn't have an option so he risked his life for this one before we go to this jump I should probably break down who the actor is in this sequence sebastian fukan is iconic in the sport he's actually one of the first practitioners tre Soares if you want to call it that to start parkour with his friend and teammate David Bell what's funny is that they kind of had a falling-out about what the core values of the parkour space is so Sebastian kind of went on to to create and start free running right now parkour is the most fast and efficient movement going over under or through any obstacle that's in your path and freerunning is more about the self-expression right it's the flips and tricks the way that you creatively interact with any environment around you to sort of express yourself this is one of my favorite jumps because it's very practical it's very real he's running on this beam that's only 12 inches wide he is at height maybe not as high as they're depicting it but they're up there right now he is on a safety wire causing it so what's really sketchy about this particular jump that they used and I'm sure that he did this more than once if you look at this point his feet go through the structure his hands are holding onto the top we call this a running stride cat hang thankfully his hands did grab where they needed to grab good job for the safety wire okay that definitely deserves a pause this is ideal this is how you would do this movement you'd run you'd step off you would drive your arms up into the air this is one of those things that we often do to allow our power and our strength to help us travel up and over what we don't ever do is this next couple frames this weird back arch with both legs behind us maybe it's a long jumping technique I'm not really sure but it's nothing that I would ever do especially while going to an obstacle that is in front of me and with a huge drop under me because I need my feet to help absorb that momentum I have to guess that no matter what happened next this performer stunt double whoever it is he ended up slipping and the safety wire had to catch him or he hit his butt or grabbed onto that wire and probably hurt his hand so much what we would have done is called a precision where you actually land precisely on the edge of something the reason why we do that is because it actually allows us to control our body and save us in many different ways if I had a little bit too much power I can absorb that momentum through my legs by landing on the edge and the balls of my feet which is right in the front part of your foot let's skip ahead to one of the most iconic parts of this scene up on the cranes alright I'm gonna pause it right there I love this fall so much Sebastian just being this very veteran practitioner of movement to be able to do this fall naturally and make it feel aggressive get that turnout where he's like looking down at the ground I think's incredible right when you get into that 20 30 feet up you feel that adrenaline your body is telling you to like do everything to save yourself so if I asked you to go walk on a curb or run on a curb you could do it comfortably because you know if you'd step off you're okay but if I put that same width of a curb up 20 30 feet all of a sudden your body goes into like safety mode and your brain is telling you to do everything you can to like not get hurt that is where parkour training actually comes into play a lot of people can jump to something and kind of land safe but it's when something goes wrong that we see are our top pros save themself in this like really beautiful efficient way okay this crane the crane shot looks like it's like a 30-foot drop he's jumping from the top of one crane almost straight down boom on to this other crane and all he does is compact and absorb his momentum and continue moving it's so impractical that his shin bones aren't just sticking out of his knees or something because the amount of impact that that would have taken on a straight drop is just crazy to me the reason why this is more practical is because one the sand is gonna help dissipate like so much of the energy that would have been into the ground that is gonna save as heels as knees as ankles one thing that we do see him do almost immediately is go into a roll probably one of the most important elements in parkour is understanding how to dissipate your momentum by rolling we're taking energy that normally would have been like straight down and then like this where there's all this impacts happening and we're actually going down and across the ground which is actually helping all of that momentum that would have went through our body and dissipating it across the ground which is gonna make life wait applause that that fall is pretty gnarly it feels like this would definitely fracture a rib especially if it was practically done from the height in which they're depicting it from that impact to your chest would have been like oh I love the way Daniel Craig perfect role and then overshoots the edge down onto some structure that just happens to be kind of soft enough to cave in and bump them on to the ground me for effort for sure so overall Casino Royale Chase is easily one of the best chases ever made for TV or movies it's referenced every time I show up on set and they ask me to do something like to thumbs up 100% Sebastian pecan did an incredible job which really did help grow the sport of parkour freerunning world wide next clip we're gonna watch is um Bach I've never seen this film I'm excited just in this first few frames of the comedic vibe that I'm feeling out of it [Music] I feel like what's ridiculous about it is the structures that they're going through seem to very like weirdly like who carries something like that very rarely do we just like alright I'm gonna go on a one-mile run and jump on things I've never tested or never saw that's in my path but in a lot of these chase scenes were kind of trying to depict that right so one thing you we try to be aware of is trying to make it feel real and the more realistic that you make that feel it makes it feel a little less comedic in a practical sense if I was running away from something or someone and I had never been in that environment before you have to deal with the elements that are in front of you and that's where like yes your training and your ability to adapt is really gonna come into play and allow you to to get past and continue to get away from whatever it is that's chasing you he doesn't want to knock these kids down and so he he jumps over them in this like really insane looking like piked position so a pike is anytime your hands and your body comes down to your legs when they're straight it pretty much looks like he could have just like scooted through them real quick yeah and kept running but I guess this works - oh yeah they got through any of the stuff at this running and jumping off of somebody for someone to unexpectedly get stepped on their entire body especially in a little plastic chair would probably go flying forward and just smash into that table both for whatever reason this guy is like super strong and sturdy and allows him to like boost off of his shoulder to get a little bit of height to clear the rest of the gang here it's like just sometimes in the middle of street we have a set of spikes and weapons for no particular reason one of those gardening tools I don't know what's going on what good thing our man here is flexible enough to hit a solid split a little V kick breakdancing in the air straight over all of the obstacles I mean I guess it's parkour because it's fast and efficient I personally have never done a full split the air to get over a set of metal spikes but like I said it works I love that they have this like expectations like the guy that's like super talented and then like reality people like trying to do it and it just doesn't work but I got a back up real quick just to see this like jump approach this guy is hitting some sort of like trampoline or something because the way that he's setting into the ground he's leaping up a little bit and then putting his momentum downward which obviously shows me that he's trying to create some sort of reaction on whatever surface that he's leaving off of whether or not it's a little mini [ __ ] or something clearly he needed a little bit of help get in this height and luckily he just rips his pants and nothing else happened in this scene could have been worse flexibility is one of those things were like there are certain athletes in our sport that are like way more flexible because they train it they work on it every day I myself am flexible in a lot of ways but it's almost like this active flexibility right so if you wanted to see me do a full split right now I can't do it but when I'm in the air the way that I can Pike down or Cork and swing my leg and recatch myself in these interesting positions while in movement I feel like I'm almost more flexible because of this sort of kinetics of it all happening and allowing my body's sort of react and twist and active flexibility is important [Music] all right this is both amazing and ridiculous this is very much like a Cirque du Soleil circus ring art to maneuver you don't see it happen very much in parkour but it's incredible and it's really cool that he was able to do this I'm sure that's not real barbed wire even if it was he barely touches it so that's kind of cool if this was me approaching this obstacle I definitely wouldn't have hiked through it odds are I literally just would have ducked under it or if you know I had to go through it for some other reason I would have did a dive roll so literally just diving through it rolling on the ground and allowing myself to pop back up and continue my momentum forward [Music] all right I just want to see something the first guy does this vault and clears like a bat of boiling oil and then the second guy if you actually slow it down I'm pretty sure his head would have just dipped deep into that oil and fried his entire brain before doing this role but let's just keep watching I mean that's sick that's a really beautiful aerial which is like a cartwheel with no hands through a very narrow space I would have just ran through it but okay all right let's fast-forward a bit yeah so that was sick what's cool about this is you can use a tire as a trampoline I've actually trained with a bunch of parkour athletes in Mexico that have built their entire course out of like crates and tires I've done many a front flips off of the edge of a tire but for him to launch that double front flip over these guys that's sick again practical I don't know but it works and it was very efficient so there's many ways to get over a fence there's actually one of our bolts is literally called a gate vault where you kind of pop up onto it with your hips and then you flip over it and it's a super controlled fast maneuver he chooses to actually do what we call a tic tac in this scene watch him step off of the wall well that's super interesting you know I just was gonna pause this to slow down what he's doing and I know it's a tic-tac but what's really interesting I'm noticing is he he came in with his left foot if this was me I would have came at a sort of steeper angle and stepped off with my right foot which would have popped me right onto the fence but I can see as we scrub forward that what he was trying to do was get high enough to put his right foot on top of the fence so that he can control it and vault over a little additional 360 again he's maybe he's just dissipating that extra momentum he had from twisting off of the wall and it gave him a good view of the people that were chasing him so good work little flashy but I liked it so as a performer I always question like are there wires involved if I look at this I don't think so I think they just practice this I think they all actually did it as a I scrub through do you feel the weight of every step you watch these guys just kind of taking this foot cuz they don't know if it's gonna hit him in the face or where it's gonna hit him he's giving him full weight so I think this is a practical gag they probably had to do multiple times to get it right one of the cool things about parkour is that it has sourced all of these different elements from different sports and lifestyles things like break dancing gymnastics martial arts it really at its core is movement I am constantly looking at different action sports and things that I can pull from to create something that is rooted a bit differently in the sport itself as time goes on it's almost like free running and parkour continues to evolve into its own thing and that's something I find super interesting so for a scene that is like definitely funny the movement in it is like super legit it might feel a little ridiculous but what's happening is like serious control I'd be very curious to see this entire film I think I have to watch this after this especially cuz we're quarantine I got nothing better to do next up I know this clip pretty well 7 episode 1 a whole y5o I had a little guest star role and unofficially the longest parkour chase scene in television history so the way that I got involved with this scene is they knew they wanted to do a parkour chase they knew that they wanted to use a professional parkour athletes just based on I guess my creepy look and I guess my ability this to act they decided to pick me so I got the dream job of choreographing the best chasing I could possibly come up with in the streets and buildings of Hawaii and Honolulu all right so first off that was my first time ever going through glass it's real glass it's tempered glass what they do is if you look to the very bottom corners of the door there's actually a little pyrotechnic that pops it right as I'm about to hit it scary part is if they don't pop it in time I'm probably not going through it and I'm gonna boom slam my face and arm and shoulder and fall back and then glass will just kind of rain on me because they popped it late so in parkour we practice everything right in stunts a lot of times especially for television you don't represent you talked about it with your stunt coordinator you work it out and you do it and if there's something that you don't think you can do it's your responsibility to step up and say it it really does rely on you just to be honest with yourself and be practical with your your own life and your own safety pause it real quick so that's actually called the descent it's something that is happening more and more in the sport people are getting more comfortable with going down the outside of buildings and controlling their momentum as they drop down from one platform to another I don't recommend that anyone ever does it because this is probably one of the most dangerous maneuvers in the parkour space I myself am on a wire they have to do that for insurance reasons I tried to get them to give me as much slack as possible to make it feel the most realistic so you can feel that impact and it doesn't feel floaty at all and you can tell that that's a real why one of the times where my feet slips and my body comes kind of slamming into the ledge so throughout this whole sequence there's a lot of moments where we only did it once because either it was too dangerous the setup was too wild there are other sequences and we we did it many times you know running up cranes 9 times the descent sequence I definitely did multiple times because they want to film it in different ways so the actor definitely has a stunt double one of the craziest things for you to keep in mind throughout this sequence is that for many of the shots his stunt double his name is Justin Sundquist he had to wear this mask of the actors face for everything that I'm doing he's also doing most of it but also in the restriction of this like weird prosthetic mask one of the little elements we battle every time we show up on set to do one of these scenes is what are we wearing a lot of the times it's like oh you're the businessman so they want you to be these like business shoes with heels on them and like jumping to a rail with a leather-soled shoe becomes a lot more slippery in a lot of ways being in these sequences for television really tests our ability to adapt which is a very parkour concept we got a positive - shout out the super commonly used POV angle for parkour is actually a GoPro mouth mount we hold it some people actually just bite the GoPro it literally it stick the GoPro in their mouth there's companies that make a little like scuba diving mouthguard pieces that you put on and put it upside down so it's on your chin and the reason we do that is because it's the most sort of realistic practical angle that you can get in this POV style you don't really get to see it in this shot but this text he comes sliding in as I turn the corner I'm actually getting up on the hood I have to step down onto the curb blind and then lift myself up right as he's hitting his brakes to help not get hit by a car and continue this chase the best part about working in film and television is it's this giant collaborative process everyone has the same responsibility to make this one thing happen in the right way in particular for that scene we had drivers that had to come in and go either a certain speed or stop at a certain point or turn their car to block me on top of that me and Justin were running through the street have to have a certain cadence and a camera that's in a camera car riding past all these other cars going the opposite direction down the street to get the shot that it just really does take a lot of coordination and understanding of everyone's action on the day I don't remember exactly how I was written on paper but I I believe the way it was written is one-line singular kind of paint the picture of where it's happening but not exactly what's happening certain shots like you know I think they wanted to do the car stuff I know they wanted to do a crane shot obviously is direct reference from the Casino Royale clip we've seen so some of those elements are painted in there and then it's just figuring out how to do it probably one of the most technical and scariest stunts I've had to do in my career so this was one of those shots where the director and stunt coordinator were like we want to do the Bourne Ultimatum shot and if you're not familiar with that there's this moment where he jumps off a roof into a window of an apartment this particular shot it worked out incredibly but it was also terrifying because there was no way to practice it I'm going through sugar glass which can still cut you wide open and ended up slicing my wrist but you have to remember oh I need to break the the window with my elbow so that my face is protected and I'm not cutting my face open so there's that moment right before I hit where you go okay that's working get that elbow up boom but that's what parkour is like knowing your current limit and trying to push past it just ever so slightly right it's about progression and that's actually how you get further than the guys that try to skip the steps and go too far too soon the director for the sequence Brian Spicer he was like your character is like terminator I don't you don't get tired and I was like okay that's interesting so throughout this sequence you never see me like breathing heavy or having like this kind of realistic tiredness to me was i Jesse la flair tired after all this honestly I don't even know how I was so good after we wrapped I'd go home I'd roll out my muscles I drink all these recovery shakes but besides that know for some reason I was pretty good you don't I got home after shooting I was like surprised about how healthy and happy I was with my physical shape I'm gonna pause right here again dreams do come true right like I watched Casino Royale I thought that was amazing he's running on pack rain I hope I get to do that one day the production did griptape my crane as well it is clearly not as high but it's 100% real and practical with no wires but where I'm paused right now if you look closely at my mouth that is the GoPro mouth mount in I don't know why the editors chose to use this shot because I'm definitely did this crane run like multiple times and maybe they just missed it but I think it's very funny that it's in there again no wires jumping over a real gap there's a real drop below me so if I scrub through I'm stepping off of this wobbly little rail and jumping feet first to this other rail and then I continue on by going rail the rail to rail all the way up again every sequence like this I just tried to build in as much technicalities as I can whether the audience can see that I'm stepping off rails right now didn't really matter it was just about trying to show like the efficiency of being in control while being chased so next up we have the classic scene from the office the reason people shout at a hardcore parkour every time we're out training I love this clip because they explain what parkour is this is parkour the goal is to get from point A to point B as creatively as possible well at the same time creating a whole ridiculous image of what people think it is YouTube started to really make parkour popular because of all the viewership that it was getting so people's interpretation of trying to create their own parkour clips to get views looked a lot like this parkour parkour it was people just trying to do stuff and making an ass of them you know what I do love is just like how excited and how much of a good time they're having cuz that is kind of like parkour man we have a great time out there well we definitely don't do leapfrog one of the biggest things that this captures really well is the fact that they are making a video not every day I go out and train do I have a video camera recording me but I usually have one with me and I usually am trying to film clips at this point it's become essential right because we have Instagram we have social media we have YouTube we have all these different elements that are allowing us to be seen and build followings which is getting us paid campaigns and cool projects really the the growth of parkour and freerunning came out of people filming and releasing those videos what started in the forums before YouTube of getting these really digitally bad quality clips of someone in Russia doing a new trick that you've never seen before truck to refrigerator's to dumpster 360 spin onto the palace backflip gainer into the trash what I love about this piece is this is actually part of what we do when we go out especially when we're training with friends we'll look at a thing and go like can you do this can you run vault off of this step there a lot of the stuff he's saying is actually real but what happens next I guess is real too so for those of you guys who don't know what a gainer is he's actually saying what the last trick in this sequence is gonna be is to stand on the pallets and do a forward moving backflip and landing somehow in that trash can that's already filled with garbage what went wrong here is that he did not check his surfaces one of the most common things that injures people is they don't test something they don't know if a brick wall is sturdy enough or a rail isn't wobbly or welded properly he just thought it's got a fridge inside of it and it clearly didn't fart car I'll never really know the positive or negative impact that this seam has had because I think what they were trying to say socially was like that this isn't what it's not right he literally goes this is what it is this is what it's not but what most people took away from it is like just saying parkour and kicking things it's kind of funny so whatever this next clip is super iconic it is district b13 and the creator of parkour David Bell all right let's stop it here this is super iconic the maneuver he's doing is called an underbar he actually steps off the heater grabs a bar and then shoots his feet and body through a pretty tiny window this is real I mean he's doing it through sugar glass he goes all the way through and it's a pretty legit drop on the other side a lot of this sequence is efficient a lot of it seems really practical even when he's stepping off of people in that first clip like it's about speed and getting away and that's why I love about this is it just feels so like real like yeah that was way faster than checking to see if the door was open a lot of this stuff I've watched I've tried to figure out is he wearing a wire in any of it you might be like well he's got no shirt on so clearly he's not wearing like a harness or a vest but there is something called a Hong Kong harness which is more like a belt it looks more like a climbing harness and I found a sequence that we'll talk about later on where he was wearing a safety wire and I have to imagine that he has one on for this but I don't think so I mean he comes in from so deep in the door that if there was a wire going out it would be breaking on the roof which means touching the roof as he's getting pulled into this I love this just top slide all the way down again almost like using that underbar technique to get into the window below him what seems a bit fake in this piece of this Chase is his trust in a rope that he somehow sees at a window that has no shutters or anything on it we don't know if that's attached to like an antenna personally wouldn't go jumping out of a super high building to a rope at full speed and just hope had it safe to my life I love that he just likes now swinging completely on the outside of this building and kicking people in the face as he whips around the building this was the scene that I did see that he was on a safety line for it makes sense to me I mean again he is part of a major motion picture and they can't risk him dying because they did actually do it pretty high up I don't know if you guys have ever climbed a ladder before it's kind of difficult right you got I like to wear my hands and feet going he's just like shoots up that ladder so efficiently I love this I love this shot there's clearly some like random boxes there that made it easier for him to step off of over this corner gap but I love the angle of this shot because the elements are being shown to the viewer right there's this like spike fence it's at this crazy height if we back up to David Bill approaching this and just kind of scrub through it what we get to see is like this really nice foot placement kind of hurls over the wall he's clearing the gap he's spotting his landing and the reason why I don't think there is a wire and that this was practical is that we we get to see him go almost all the way through until he does this role he ends up not doing a perfect shoulder roll the reason is because he was cutting across this angle and if he rolled the way that his momentum was going or wanting to take him he would have hit the other wall that was on the outside of that structure that he jumped to he's almost going what we call a gymnastics role which you don't want to do outside on concrete because it literally goes over your spine the point of doing a shoulder roll is like you're trying to go like a rounded shoulder where it goes across your back and then just makes as minimal contact with your spine as possible so not a great roll David but I see how it was necessary to to do that and that made it the more efficient route to go what makes this drop different from a lot of the drops we're seeing is one this is substantially higher than most of them he's hitting his feet engaging obviously our strongest muscles in our body legs then he puts his hands down and lets it kind of kick him forward so that he can continue and because you're having four points of contact on the ground it's actually dissipating it by a large percentage I love that and this we're getting to see some of the vaults right we just saw David build us a speed vault where his hand hits and his legs kind of sliced through and he goes over the obstacle and then the guy chasing him does that classic Kahn vault where we see both of those hands hit and pulls his legs through and continues with all that speed all right definitely worth a pause right here so this gap is in France and it's called the manpower gap people have actually flipped this gap they've actually put up a fence that makes the gap harder because they didn't want people jumping it but I believe people are still now jumping it and they have to clear the fence as well which is a new element and challenge what's worth noting and it doesn't necessarily make sense in the seam there's not much run-up right so if you were to back it up right before the shot cuts out he's just stepping from one side of this thing to another when we get to the wide it doesn't make sense of where he's coming from all of a sudden he's just like on this 10-foot platform how did they get there from this big slide we don't see I don't know either way this is real when we hit play just watch how much the rocks kind of take that impact and shoot out as he goes into his role district b13 really it is one of the most realistic portrayals of parkour I mean there's very little in it that seems either unnecessary or flashy and that is part of David Belle's history right like he was at the core the creator of Park Horace so much of what he trained wasn't even just about being fast and efficient and incapable of overcoming anything that got in his way it was also about challenging themselves beyond what you could imagine the sport is now which is more of like an action sport and a lifestyle alright guys well that's it for today thank you so much for watching I hope you guys had as much fun as I did peace out everybody

Channel: GQ Sports

Views: 1,086,200

Rating: 4.8537226 out of 5

Keywords: the breakdown, breakdown, parkour, parkour expert, parkour movie, parkour movies, parkour breakdown, parkour break down, parkour tv, parkour tv show, parkour casino royale, ong bak parkour, hawaii five 0 parkour, the office parkour, parkour the office, district b13 parkour, parkour movie breakdown, parkour scene breakdown, parkour scene, parkour scenes, parkour video, parkour videos, sports, gq sports, gq

Id: kudQ9ejpVI0

Length: 34min 47sec (2087 seconds)

Published: Wed May 06 2020