Stuntmen React To Bad & Great Hollywood Sword Fights

what what what oh he's grabbing my rapier let it go jackass is there any practicality to a lightsaber staff one of the reasons why this fight is so seamless it's not the editing this episode of stuntmen react is brought to you by raycon stick around to the end to see how you can get 15 off your first pair hey everyone welcome back to another episode of stuntmen react we're joined here by luke lafontaine who specializes in sword and weapon choreography for film among other things luke can you tell us a little bit about yourself my career started back in the late 80s i was fortunate enough to work on army of darkness hook i'm sick beowulf my job as a choreographer is to make sure that i choreograph the fight make sure that it's realistic make sure that everybody who's working on it is happy and keeping all the actors and stunt people perfectly safe luke the last time i saw you i was in full orc makeup in the middle of utah you were sweating in blue man it was good to see you so guys we got a lot of exciting clips to talk about so let's jump right in dude young tom cruise this is a nice bit it's a nice touch with his hands coming down the coat sleeves and his foot going back he's preparing he's getting ready one of the reasons why this fight is so seamless it's not the editing this fight took months these guys ran this whole fight over and over and over because there's so many subtle timing bits that it would have been almost impossible to accomplish this fight with less rehearsal and it's not holy editing that's tom doing it he's a master of dedication everything that i've heard is that he is just a workhorse he's two thousand percent dedicated and he just never stops there are things that are incorrect in this fight in terms of the gripping of the swords their hands aren't quite spaced apart as much as they need to be there are a couple of cuts where they're coming way back behind their head and then cutting forward where you cut from is equal to time so all this time back here you could be cutting me so until my sword breaks the plane i'm not a danger till here but again there are also a lot of period correct sword techniques in here him bracing with the back hand that's an actual japanese battlefield technique where when you wanted to brace the blade you'd brace the katana on your forearm because the moon a the back edge wasn't sharp tom's got his hand open and flat which is also realistic you know he wouldn't be gripping the blade oh god that's something you want to do with a sharp object that's three and a half feet long one of the things you have to give these guys credit for is a hand to hand fight is a hell of a lot easier to do than a sword fight why you're only responsible for the length of your arm try adding three feet so you've got to pay attention out here where the point of the sword is i could stop from poking you in the eye i don't know that i can stop from poking you with a sword if i'm not used to wielding a sword how often do accidents happen on set i'm not just talking like banging fingers like more serious accidents with sword fights they happen if you get the opportunity to really train your actors they don't there's only one thing that you can do to injure somebody in a sword fight if you ruin your distancing that's how somebody gets hit with a sword if i screw the timing up if i'm in my correct distance the blade will still pass through and miss you by two inches but it happens it happens i think how they have you break down and just give me your impression on probably the most iconic sword fight saber fight if you will in media which is the lightsaber fight from episode one the phantom menace [Applause] this fight is incredibly complicated and it was choreographed by ray park initially with another czechoslovakian stunt guy that's how ray got the part ray is really giving 200 in this fight and it's why no one else will ever be darth maul is there any practicality to a lightsaber staff no your opinion no no no and i'm going to tell you why the problem is you've now created the simplest and most complex weapon in the history of films do you ever notice when these guys all swing really hard they make these power swings the blade's made out of light it doesn't weigh anything why would you have to swing it hard the bottom line is it's a lightsaber it's a laser it's made out of light it wouldn't weigh anything you could fence these weapons the problem with that is now you're locked into a very very specific sword fight style that doesn't always depict drama initially before all of the weird subsets the jedi were samurai that's what they were meant as the influence for star wars comes from kurosawa films it comes from tashira mafuni george lucas wanted to cast mifune as obi-wan wow man initially that was his first choice man this is a good sword fight there's a lot of techniques in here they're doing 8 10 12 moves at a time there's a perry i disagree with the behind the back perry is that's sort of just nonsense but it's okay because again it's choreography but if you look at the way ray moves look at when ray turns his back ray turns his back but ray's got a blade moving the entire time you've got to deal with ray's blade before you can get a chance to cut him across the back so right here there's a lot of criticism about how their swords are meeting in the space between their bodies versus like blocking the blade in front of his body and sword fighting are you fighting in front of yourself are you fighting around yourself both some martial disciplines trained to meet in front of you on center line but in combat you'll see people parrying too soon certain fights got guilty of this later on in william hobbs career he had to enact safety protocol and if you look at rob roy there's an instance where you can see the safety protocol in the choreography where they go to the parry first this is a really difficult piece of choreo and the only other problem that you see here is those were all cuts made by tim there's two thrusts all the rest of these are cuts a transitional rapier is not a super effective cutting weapon in terms of if liam hadn't paired that he would have gotten a very superficial cut on the arm or the chest whereas if those had all been thrusts he would have been in a lot more trouble here liam's bracing his wrist now would he really do that more than likely not because you won't come to on guard if you don't have to what is on guard for those of us who don't speak french let me get a prop a prop sword real quick so i can actually illustrate this better this might be a little long but that's okay so if we were sword fighting in chairs i'm not in on guard right now i'm also not in on guard right now if you're going to come on guard in a sword fight it's generally putting the blade in between you and your opponent he's playing the weight of the sword a lot the sword did weigh more than the rapier but you'd keep that sword center guard of your body even if you didn't have the tip up is that just like it takes a lot of energy to always be holding your sword up yeah let me tell you something when you go full out you're tired every time i do this i'm using all the muscles in my forearms and my shoulders and it's why sword fights like this are brilliant it depicts the drama of the reality of what a sword fight is he was already out of position he wasn't even in danger of being cut there look he's not getting cut there he cut four feet off his body so at what point do you balance the visual effect the dramatic effects to the realism that the audience can't quite pick up on you know that has a lot to do with the director and the actors if the director and the actors have fallen in love with something there's not much you can do about it as a choreographer rob roy would not be sword fighting in this manner see that giant swipe and stumbles forward they're making them like a caveman here that's not the way they fence those swords there's a problem with this moment [Music] drop your sword it's real simple oh he's grabbing my rapier let it go jackass then he's not going to cleave your entire chest open and leave a giant 11 inch gaping wound could you just yank it out no no really no it's very strange because if i grip your blade my arm can move too and it takes three or four yanks and more or less most of the time you're wearing gloves so if you yank and i go with it i can still hold on to your blade i can't believe you're not subscribed this is like your 12th video you've been watching what the hell's the matter with you look i've been in the film industry for over 38 years this channel and these guys are brilliant the creativity and the amount of work that they put in you're never gonna go wrong watching this channel there's always awesome content so subscribe trust me you'll be glad you did [Music] this is [Music] hold on my number's only you did the fight choreography for avengement and you actually are up for a taurus award yeah i was working under a stunt coordinator in england by the name of dan stiles dan had choreographed the fights yes i was brought in to tweak and fix and change some things that scott adkins wanted changed and added this fight scene we should have had eight or nine days to shoot it yeah we had two oh shoot we shot this whole fight scene in two days these were hard rubber and balsa wood weapons about 96 of the hits in this are all real scots making contact with all these guys we doubled scott for one tiny thing in this entire fight because i kind of demanded it that slam was that a double there or was he still taking that stuff no that was scott really scott took that hit [Music] that's the only spot where we doubled scott the flip that fall over the table could scott do that hell yeah scott could do that but you know it's my job to make sure that scott did this he's got another really dangerous [ __ ] scott wound up doing anyway we just doubled him for that roll over the table that was it to do this in two days is really insane do you think having the eight nine days what would you have changed i think quite honestly within eight or nine days the fight would have actually got a teeny bit longer because scott's famous for that when scott says something you go with it because he knows better but we would have taken our time i think the fight is shot brilliantly i think it all works great the end product may have been kind of the same because like you guys clearly knocked it out in two days here well i'll tell you why we knocked this out in two days we knocked this out in two days because of scott any other actor could not have done this in two days they just couldn't he just turns the energy on every time he just turns the energy on to 200 and he just keeps going take after take after take you know i'm assuming you want to avoid just slipping and getting a knife in your eye so is it mostly scott that's actually holding the wrist and the other guy's just basically it's a lot of what's called reverse tension the actor with the knife is actually pulling away and the other actor is holding them there so if the actor holding him slips the knife goes away from you not towards you but you get all the like the muscles you get all the muscles shaky and everything yeah it's super cool yeah [Music] all right comment request time here's what i'm looking for from you guys i want all of you to suggest the best vehicle stunts that you can think of car chases plane chases train chases you name it leave a comment down below with your favorite vehicle-based stunt and we're gonna take those and build a compilation for our next stuntman react i'm very proud of this fight now we all worked really hard on this fight again this bite should have had three or four or five days this was one day it wasn't even one full day it was a three-quarter day that we had to do this whole fight that's insane i faced you with the exception of display i feel like it's like jake's knife and that is a cold steel xlr spotter that we dulled and made up a stunt weapon for but you see as a bladed weapons fight i'm really trying to get that line where it looks like they're really trying to cut each other these boys are really close dude that stab so sketchy so he was offline he was offline slightly but this is also scott's movement scott stayed there yeah he might have gotten scraped there's the catch there's the homage that was stolen for game of thrones dude that camera work was solid too one of the things that helped with this fight scene was that we had almost 360 degrees that we could shoot that's nice in terms of what we were looking at we could use almost all of it but you know we had to maintain continuity and had to stay on the right side of the line you know i really liked it when we went into the really wide shots scott was always really instrumental in terms of talking about camera scott is brilliant in terms of knowing how he should come across in a movie he should direct i think it's a matter of time it is just a matter of time before scott will direct a whole loan from it scott knows what works and what doesn't these fights would not have come out this way it wasn't for scott you know when you work with the man you see that he makes anything work this fight's not brilliant because of me this fight's brilliant because of scott and marco their physical performance and their acting here really tells this story but the thing that's brilliant about these guys is they know themselves on camera they know what works there's a coup de grace coming up thanks to the director jesse johnson not done yet what what what you just cut out his liver and he's going to feed it to him wow watch me oh he's going to eat it he's not he's being interested himself what [Laughter] jesse johnson came up with this and it was a moment of brilliance because it shocks audiences it stays with you hey everybody i'd like to thank raycon for sponsoring this video you might remember in the last sponsor segment with raycon i mentioned that i was sending a pair to my dad he got back to me and he's like nico i'm really enjoying these everyday e25s in fact here's the things i'm enjoying about them i'm enjoying the fact that they have a seamless bluetooth connection i'm enjoying their sleek and stylish design i'm enjoying their sound quality with the extra great sounding bass that they have he also really likes the fact that you can recharge the earbuds up to four times within their carrying case which is really cool and you know i sent him a blue pair he didn't have any say in the matter but if you go online and buy yourself a pair you can pick a bunch of different colors so you can pick one that suits your personality go to buy your acon.com corridor crew to get 15 off of your order these earbuds are about half the price of other top audio brands while achieving the same level of quality it's good stuff so we would love for you guys to leave a comment down below of your favorite sword scene and we're gonna bring luke back on hopefully i'm saying this without asking luke but i'm assuming you'd be down to come back on and we'll break it down because there are a lot of good sword fights that just need to be talked about luke that was super super super cool for you to share these stories i loved having perspective of someone who can actually speak to weapon-based fighting on the show thank you so much for joining us as always i had a great time it's great seeing you guys and thank you for having me i hope you know i didn't bag on anybody too hard i don't think but i know again i had a great time thanks for being here if you guys would like to check out more of luke's work you can head on over to his website at war studios.com there's a link down in the description below as well as to a couple other things that luke has worked on so go check it out send him some love thank you so much for being on the show we'll see you hopefully at some point in the future i'll see you guys soon

Channel: Corridor Crew

Views: 1,646,803

Rating: 4.9639473 out of 5

Keywords: stunts, breakdown, react, vfx, behind the scenes, hollywood, movies, analysis, stunt double, vfx artists react, Tom Cruise, Samurai, Sword, Liam Neeson, Star Wars, Darth Maul, Phantom Menace, Scott Adkins

Id: DEXEKq7qTlA

Length: 17min 24sec (1044 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 15 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/jchill001]

I don’t watch plinkett, what was the criticism they referred to?