The Art of Action - Chad Stahelski - Episode 9

[Music] how are you mate i'm good how about yourself i'm very well thanks thanks for doing this you have become a force to be reckoned with in hollywood in the in the realm of action so i'm going to be picking your brains about all sorts of things there's so much to choose from so much to talk about so we'll get right into it and chad can you tell everyone briefly because i know it's a long list i'm sure but what is uh briefly your martial arts background how did you get into it what was your first martial art how old were you when he started um i'm from palmer massachusetts a very small town on the east coast united states uh right above hartford connecticut where you can imagine there's not a lot of martial arts schools especially back in the early 70s um my dad was on the fire department and he there's another i kept talking to my dad about we'd watch uh bruce lee movies on sunday mornings or whatever you know i said i want to do martial arts i want to do martial arts i don't want to do baseball i like i want to punch and kick i think i was only 10 at the time and he's like all right and he had a friend on the fire department a guy named lee mcdonald that was a judo instructor and you know my dad trying to you know find something for me so i don't think he knew the difference between karate or punching kicking in judo and so i got stuck in judo for the next four or five years which is great which is you know obviously all the throwing and how old were you at this point i was about 10 10 11 when i started yeah so second started judo when i was 10 yeah so i think i was in that class all the way through high school to a senior in high school so five six years you know and it was a bit of a mix it had it was olympic judo mixed a little bit with some japanese jiu jitsu but it had a lot of fun had a lot of uh grappling as well you know he was a fairly i would say it was a 60 40 class 60 percent of the throwing but 40 spent a lot of time on grappling um so i guess that's even today i still obviously can tell by the choreography we do that i'm still a big judo fan oh yeah um and obviously i i still teach and coach and train i have a marcelo garcia sure but i still train as much brazilian and japanese jiu jitsu as i can throughout the week you know we have our facility where i have both teach and have several jiu jitsu coaches that i still work with every day um i guess from there i studied uh when i was 15 i got into karate as well as i was doing judo which was called kokondo which is uh closest thing i guess most people would know the kyokushinkai very close to kyokushinkaikadas the self-defense uh two-man sets and stuff and the way they would spar or or train for competition would be very very similar and then i went to college at usc in california in los angeles and i met up with one of dan and asano's instructors a guy named burt richardson that i trained with for a year as a freshman in college then got right into the innocent academy which if anybody knows is huge filipino malaysian indonesian martial arts where they specialize it was almost like a college you'd go for kali and jiu jitsu and penchak silat and thai kickboxing i met salem asleep in front of c which were like two of the biggest savat guys so i trained and competed in savant that's where we met yuri naga nakamura the other guy brought shoot wrestling or shuto to the united states so i got to compete with a guy named eric polson and you know one day we're fighting muay thai or competing in muay thai the next day we're doing savad the next day we're doing shoot wrestling then we're in a judo competition then we're in a kickboxing wka kickboxing competition um so you're cross training before people were really into cross training just the way he would train us i mean you know you'd stay for an hour and a half class of of uh you know kali and silat they were going mix between filipino malaysian indonesian martial arts and then you'd go right into a two-hour kickboxing class and then you'd go into a boxing class and then ted and kailakaya or you know luckily claude kai or edgar saludi when he was still alive or you know or the different filipino kali or srima masters or instructors would come when we do that then we'd have paula detroit or you know some of the other harimao or jumundi kind of see all these wacky styles of of indonesian sea lot would come in and then it'd be a sea lock class and then you know you know higgin or hicks and gracie would come in and we'd be exposed to that so it was like a wacky time you know it's still analog so there's still no internet yet we weren't it wasn't youtube it was like if you weren't learning from the guy you're going to the barn and at the same time we had our friends that later we'd go into stunts with you know like um tim connolly clay barber jj perry all these great you know taekwondo guys that were just literally down the street so you know on the off days if you weren't kickboxing we're learning how to kick paddles with these guys or rolling around with some of the jiu jitsu guys you know it's still stunts and choreography really hadn't hit yet martial art movies were still i guess lower budget you know they weren't the big budget shows they had made their way into mainstream you know it was all chop sake movies or it was big action movie [ __ ] you know well how did you get into the movies then uh it's funny a lot of stuntmen not a lot but there's a couple of fairly well-known stuntmen at the time uh and a son corey named jeff amada that was training at the innocent academy that was actually an instructor there and you know like i again i'm from the east coast i didn't know you could make a career i don't have a job in movies as a stunt guy i was like i'm going to be a doctor i'll be a businessman or something like that i was going to school for business and you know through conversations with jeff who's much older much more experienced was like yeah we work in movies and this is what you do and like okay what does a stunt guy do and this is what he does you know at the time in order to be a stun guy was more about driving or being a cowboy or being a high fall guy or a gymnast fights really hadn't funny enough other than borrowing brawls fights which today are what people think about the most when they think since back then it was a very very small part of mainstream stunt work so when he you know invited me to to kind of partake in or at least be exposed to the world it was 90 all these other skills how to how to rig and tie knots how to do a lot of deep diving scuba stuff how to do what they call air ramps or trampoline or how to set up the wire rigs that we do nowadays or a lot of driving and motorcycles and i had some background in some of those things so that at least got me into the business was this one of your first experience of stunt work of fighting on film yeah oh my god who's that guy that's me and daniel bernhardt oh my god yeah that is my real hair tube uh thank you for embarrassing me that's really i don't think it's embarrassing i think it's cool man well that i was talking to daniel the other day he was saying well this was the best fight of bloodsport too because you choreographed it uh that's very nice for him to say yeah obviously you can see the uh jet condo you know daniel sanso influence with the the trapping them you gotta remember choreography is like fashion too it's kind of what's hipping out back we hadn't quite figured out all the camera angles we hadn't quite figured out choreography is more like dancing martial arts so you know if you want a cap or a fight scene you'd hire a guy that's actually gonna cap where if you wanted a trapping fight scene you'd hire a guy that was good at john fun or wing chun if you wanted you know a gymnastic-y kind of fight you'd hire the the gymnast guy or if you wanted you know jiu-jitsu you had a jutsu guy so you kind of did it like that nowadays we know we can choreograph anything and teach or cast that and kind of chore if he's a little different nowadays but yeah uh this is one of the first times myself and some of the guys actually did choreography on screen i think i was only like 23 here or whatever well if anyone ever taught you at this point oh this is how you sell a punch for a camera or was it just obvious for you it was there's a few of us at the innocent academy that it's funny enough we admit brandon lee started training over there and this is when brandon was still trying to get his career off the ground as well so like on weekends on saturday afternoons or sundays we'd all get together and try to figure out movie punches and watch old jackie chan movies on vhs and try to frame by frame and go oh we'll just try this i mean our understanding was like yeah try not to kill the guy you know just him trying not to hit his ribs and there's there's times in that bloodsport fight and bloodsport three where i can see that you've got the camera awareness you know what i mean you're you're opening up to cameron to throw the punch which is the mistake that most green people make right my 22nd birthday my great-grandmother uh in a in a big act of generosity bought me a vhs video camera the thing was like this this big a big suitcase looking thing um we put the actual whole vhs tape in it and i got it and i think it was only a freshman in college then yeah he's probably a freshman um and me and like two or three of the guys from the academy would get together on sundays with brandon and one or two of his friends and we just hold the camera and go oh we can't see anything step to the left zero schooling just all trial and error at least for that is messing about with brandon lee trying to figure out how to make kung fu movies with the the son of bruce lee yeah pretty pretty much so that was a pretty cool start but like you know even before we met brandon we were already kind of messing around i had friend like this guy who's still a really good stunt guy choreographer and damon carr rich citron and damon carl were two other instructors in the academy they're now doing their own thing and they're they're doing really well and stunt work and choreography and i think damon's even doing a bunch of second unit now too for some of the dc universe yeah we had a good education we had dan and asano which is an incredible thinker and coach and we exposed some pretty decent sun guys from jeff amada on that we're just really breaching the gap from smaller budget to bigger budget martial art choreography stuff jeff amada was doing the bourne films right yeah exactly he had started doing some of the bourne and then we had started building up our own like the academy worked on like team structure you try to become a good member of the kickboxing team or the calling team or the demo team and then you got to instruct and then you built up your guy so we had a pretty good structure system with more than eager and talented guys in different disciplines that wanted to be in the movie thing today we still use johnny sabio he's john depalero there's still i think i have three three or four guys that actually came through the academy system that have a real martial art basis that transferred into movie stuff you can remember choreography is a lot more like dance than actual fighting so even professional fighters have to go through i mean the best example i can make is if you look at a professional ballerina whether it's a lead ballerina or one of the chorus line they go through an hour and 45 minute performance and don't make a mistake with over a thousand moves that's the minimal we expect from our team now is like you can't just be a good kicker puncher you got to be able to go three minutes memorizing 300 moves that's how you get on our team like you need right you need the precision you need repeatability and you need to be smart enough good enough not to get hurt or hurt anybody else that's where you become of value to us and i'm sure we'll talk about that later but yeah yeah well do you mind just talking about brandon lee briefly because i think he would have been as big as keanu reeves i mean he was already getting there wasn't he by the time he totally died again uh you know it's funny uh one day you know dennis uh there's different levels of classes like the the advanced level classes dennis on the counter day hey guys i just want to let you know a good family friend of mine is going to start class he's pretty good he's been away for a while he's come back just you know understand that like and he said who it was brandon he's like look he's not bruce like he's not coming here to kick ass and fight like you know he's this guy and we're all like okay cool what do you expect from you know remember this is before the end before anybody knew anything brandon shows up the next night and nothing like you would expect the most open he was just a very happy guy um he was there because he actually wanted to learn martial arts he wasn't trying to do it's not like the actor thing or he's just trying to get the street creds of being in the academy or anything like that he actually gave a [ __ ] he loved martial arts he wanted to come in and not do just square feet but he wanted to practice thai boxing he wanted to spar he wanted to get on and he had already done a considerable amount of training with other people before he'd come in including dan um honestly i i think he was one of the happier people there i i was a real curmudgeon but like i was like who's this guy and so that's right and brandon was just like the happiest hey guys what are we doing and like let's work out he was always gung-ho and happy and fun and just loved being an actor loved being an athlete and he was very talented i mean he picked up very quick you know six months later he's just one of the guys you know in the advanced class in the gym doing his thing i mean he was always a you know fun guy but to that note like you know he was trying to do his things we're trying we're trying to get started his stunt man he's trying to get work as an actor i think he'd done some of the smaller stuff um you work on any any of his films not the crow because i know you did the crow but before that no but that's actually the thing you know he was kind of on his path and even though we'd see each other during the week and we train together on weekends there's small clickers we get together and he'd say like hey i'm doing um in this movie i want to practice some and he would use this to practice that we just weren't in that realm yet or very established as something we were even below the level to even work on one of his beginning shows it's just you know we weren't there yet we were just so fresh this was like we didn't really work on any of his shows you know he was just he was a little ahead of us progressing up the ranks and we couldn't even get a job as a you know as a guy walking across the street at the time but we did train together we didn't you know uh practice a lot together and then you know the obviously the crow came up um i wasn't on that it wasn't until after you know the accident that jeff and mata who was a sunglasses said hey you know you're aware of what happened it's a tragedy but the powers that be have decided we're gonna move forward the project um would you be interested in not only doing some of the stunts but would you you know because of our body type we look very similar would you the you know whatever you want to call it the photo double or the acting double the the standing double for it is this you chad or is it uh i will neither confirm nor deny but uh this was during some of the research oh okay we just had very similar body types and uh brandon had gone through the process of but it was about my size maybe like a half inch shorter but to get ready for the crow he literally dropped down like i think 155 pounds from 175 to really lean up and go that kind of stuff so uh he was already laying anyway and you were laying in that blood spool clip yeah and then you know just the work he had put in was you know i again i wasn't there for the accident i wasn't there you know when they made the decision continue it had been months after the accident where they called and yeah he asked if i'd be interested and i went and met with alex pro as the director and it was literally like a week in this small studio basement with the director watching uh all the behind the scenes footage and the rehearsals of brandon and watching the actual what they call daily as the footage of the film and alex was i mean i hadn't done any acting even close to that whether it's physical or with alliance not not to that level or double work for that matter i'd only been in just a very beginning stunt guy so alex proess the director spent a lot of time with me walking and trying to mimic uh brandon you know a couple hours a day and what you see is a resulting film obviously you know we're all saddened by the accent we're all very proud of the work that we put into it well we all wanted to see what he'd done i mean he did such an amazing job with the crow you know it needed to be finished so we could all enjoy the work that he put into it so you know it needed to be done but obviously it was a terrible thing that happened i remember it vividly because it was uh april fool's day and i was at school and everyone said uh brandon lee's died i thought that was you know it was an april fool's joke it was it's terrible sucked um i had just done a car hit and that's when you know i was doubling a a cast member on a tv show you get hit by a car you get spun off and i think i had hit my head a couple times after three tanks i was in torn up jeans and a bleeding bleeding from my head and i had gotten this call to go to the audition in burbank i think i was downtown and it was to double or potentially double or addition to double keanu reeves for a sci-fi action movie and i was like yeah i kind of landed on my head on that last one i don't know if i'm going to make this audition and my boss at the time was like no no you should go should go you know you know kiana is this you know big action you should go maybe you know you look like you should go try it out i had no idea what it was so i drive all the way to burbank i think i'm still bleeding when i show up and then in the corner of the room i i go through i meet the producer i meet the two directors at the time the wachowskis and um you know there's all this stuff going on in the background it's a big workout area with like a dozen you know the hong kong chinese stunt team and keanu reeves and i was like oh well this looks a little different i see they're doing some kung fu forms like oh this doesn't look like a sci-fi movie yeah yeah what you want and they kind of look at me and i take one look at them we both thinking like who are these guys they're looking training with young ping at this point or not well that's that then i got introduced and no one had told me anything about this i didn't know anything other than just i was showing up so i'm in jeans and a white t-shirt with some of my own blood on it still trying to stop the bleeding and they're like oh boy there's a human being and having you know been an adamant you know just a huge hong kong and chinese kung fu fan knew exactly who that was and there's three or four guys on the stun team that trust me if you're anything into kung fu movies you'd recognize you know things other brothers like she you know you'd be like you know chen yeah and you're like i know every one of these faces and i'm like something's clicking in my head going what did i just get myself into what am i doing i thought i was just coming i'm like okay good warm up i'm like i'm gonna pair of blue jeans and a tj okay i guess i'll take off my shoes and warm up the audition lasted about an hour and i think i threw every flip every stretch every kick every piece of choreography i knew what i was doing and then i had to jump in and learn their choreography and do their kung fu hardcore was it it was most auditions were breaking from the head from the front four minute audition and that's the most you got you know you showed off a couple done this is an hour long of try everything try everything and then like okay thank you i was like okay okay drove back home a couple weeks later one of the producers gives me a call and says hey you know okay you know uh you did good can you come back in and i swear to god i went back absolutely love to go back in did the exact same audition again like exactly every flip every almost in the exact same order and then just okay thank you the same people or more people i guess just to make sure it wasn't a flute yeah and i get a call a couple weeks later going okay well hey you know we'd like you to go to australia and do this movie and you know i'd already committed to a tv show so i actually turned down the matrix i said i can't go i'm going to double this guy on tv till february and they're like okay and hang out never hear from anybody cut to two months later it's now february unbeknownst to us keanu had a neck injury where he had a little surgery so they had to push all the action the movie to the later part of yeah it's funny to watch him do the kung fu forms with the neck brace on yeah exactly where you've seen the behind the scenes footage so they called back again i guess they still hadn't gotten a martial art double phone by that point and they said hey would you be going to go and i was like yeah sure i'm available let's go and still even at that point again you don't know what it is and there's a couple kung fu moves so i get to australia i'd go to the sound stage [ __ ] stages on i mean the fox lot on in sydney australia first day i get out of the van i go warm up i go into the training hall and it's the same deal there's wire rigs up where there's all this stuff and at the time we're rehearsing the government lobby fight which is you know i got to do a cartwheel over at the time it was a pistol pick it up shoot a bunch of people triple kick in the wire come back down and it was literally uh you know 50 reps on everything just get it right get it right have you done much wire work before that no none really i mean we had i mean ratchets what you consider like but not like kung fu in china no never and that's what it takes a little bit i had a fairly decent trampoline and gymnastic background that definitely helped i had a good my flexibility was very good my strength was pretty good so that definitely helped but it was definitely a trial by fire you could say yeah um and they were you know it was big breakout in the hollywood they really cared it was a big deal the wachowskis are obviously perfectionists so the first two three weeks of training was like it it made it very clear what we were in and it was until that point you realize wow you're on something special but we all kind of knew it even back in the training you got a bit busted up on that didn't you uh just on the last uh second to last stunt i think it was very much yeah it's uh i mean all the all the ratchets are cool i mean the stun team everybody was great you know it looks a lot worse than it is when he does the uh the hit up into the uh the ceiling with a a another segmented call on my back we all went up and then on the way back down it was about i think 28 feet or whatever uh the cable system had a small glitch in it when we came back down we didn't stop so uh most of my right leg got a little messed up i would say i got a little shorter for a little while busted my knee my hip my ankle uh feel the little things in there so i was lumping for a while but uh came back strong took a couple months but all good you don't even messing with your knees too much do you if you're doing martial arts um yeah no it was a really shitty injury uh you know i thought i'm done you know the knee was my knee had turned around the kneecap it dislocated two or three of my ligaments i needed surgery uh couldn't fly back from australia to do it back here so i had to sit till the swelling until i could actually move my leg a little bit to get on the plane but the good thing is the wachowskis you know they felt bad and you know they had set up a lot of their post house so they're editing as they went on the fox studios in sydney and like well since you're a little busted up would you like to come into editing and again remember at the time it's still a lot of analog you know they're just starting to get into offline editing digital editing so i guess to sit in the edit room and work on the avid a little bit and like still only being 25 years old and still somewhat new i got to sit in with zach the the editor who later won the oscar for the movie um and that got me i got really interested like i thought this is well this is something i want to get into so literally every penny the most fun i would say the the most fun part of filmmaking is the editing process and you know any good director is good in editing you know you have to be acquired for you don't understand editing you're not going to be able to put or create the character or the characterization of the movements that you want so i literally took every penny i made on the matrix went home and bought like i think you know mac 2ci at the time had like half a gig of memory on it um and the original original original adobe premiere 1.0 which you could like 15 seconds of video on before it crashed and just started learning to edit so you didn't need your big vhs camcorder anymore it was literally running off that actually i still use it the output um but that's so like i would say since the inception of you know what everyone would consider the offline editing now like i would like to think i was in the first wave of people that kind of got into it at the whole at the home level how important is is it to understand editing because i get quite frustrated when i'm on a film set and i know that they're just filming all the fight from various different angles and i know so much of my hard work is going to end up on the cutting room floor if you don't mind i'll attack your question from the other side of things which is going on this is my famous rant or my infamous rant like look this goes out to everybody and i know like look i know exactly i'm not the greatest i'm anything like that i have so much more to learn i still try things but my perspective on things if you want to be a director and i've worked as a second unit guy with some of the best directors on the planet and i've had these conversations and i've been very fortunate the first unit directors i was working for as an action director were exceptional i've had that great career as a second unit action guy where i would say 75 percent of the other directors and movies i've worked on were incredibly good directors incredibly good you know um and then we all have the other ones but like out of those directors directing is directing if it's in front of that camera and if it requires anything behind the camera to set up for what's in front of that is directed so we got so many times you get either the studio the producer thing or the director going i don't do action the second unit i will do it okay like i get that thank god i bought a house based on that that's helped my career but like then what are you doing directing if half the movie is action and you don't do action or you don't say like every director out there likes to talk about story and i get like when you go and do from second unit to first unit they're gonna go look we know you can do the action but can you direct actors and i'm you know obviously we're egotistical so you wanna go yes i can do action i wanna ask the other guys i know you can film a guy walking talking but can you do 45 minutes of interesting action that will be in every trailer and sell your movie the answer most time is no if you want to be a director you want to be an action director you want to be a regular director action is blocking action is filming action is editing actually this angle's action is storytelling it is no [ __ ] different than doing a scene talking it is no different if you're gonna put all that time into getting the story and doing read-throughs and spending two weeks working your actors in the room you know you're doing 12 angry men and it's just in a room and you got to get everyone's performance you want it okay that's action if you put that much time into the acting part why wouldn't you put that much time into something that's okay could be dangerous one but two is really going to sell your movie if half your movie if you're doing an action film and you don't study action why did you take that job or even why did they hire you why are you not like it's not that hard i didn't know how to do it just because i was a stunt guy doesn't make doesn't mean sh doesn't mean anything like it doesn't mean you can operate a camera it doesn't mean you know how to edit it doesn't mean you're not a choreographer it doesn't it doesn't mean any of that i'm i'm starting from the same ground level as say a writer that wants to be a director that has no physical attributes behind just an average human we both have i had to go and dissect every jackie chan zatoichi you know kurosawa spielberg raiders of the lost ark you know to to anybody else's work you dissect it you learn how to edit you go back and you shoot like it's trial and error like it's practice yeah if i have to rehearse how to do okay i gotta get scott i gotta get a chance i'm gonna set you down this is where you're gonna sit this is where you're gonna smoke the cigarette this is where you're gonna do these lines right here and go okay that's blocking and how i flow the camera you know watch adventure film watch a spielberg from the camera talks and how we block it okay there's no difference of you walking than it is you kicking or punching you still have to create a flow yourself to tell the story yourself to do that and it's not rocket science you you you try to get the angles that show off and tell the story you want to do like so much now it's because they don't want to spend time in prep or not everybody's scott atkins or bruce lee or something like that so you get cast members and action editing and actually filming now is more about either the director doesn't know what he's doing so you're going to shoot it from everywhere and because you didn't practice or rehearse there's no energy or it's not good enough to see wide so you try to shake the cam around to infuse energy that wasn't in the choreography to begin with or you're trying to hide people get lucky yes or you're trying to hide something because your cast member didn't have the training and we'll talk about that in a sec you're trying to hide the fact that they can't touch your toes and you get that in superhero movies or when you know you have a really high level cast member who's supposed to do either a comedy act do the splits or something like that i know nowadays we can do face replacements and we do really good things with doubles and digital work but you have to hide the fact that you're not good at it and that's become the excuse for not putting time into action and that's like look you don't need 15 weeks of training you need smart people to do things like if i have a cast member and that's like a whole 8711 thing like look it's my job you're the director you're coming to me as a query for going look we've got this cast member we love him he's great he's got two bad hips he's had a hip replacement great actor just can't touch his toes he's got a bad shoulder and he can't turn his head to the left all right so do you think i'm gonna choreograph taekwondo for this guy maybe double every single moment like that's a fail that the probability of success is zero but if i teach him how to do a pressure point thing with uh you know an ice pick and he's gonna do close quarter gun work my probability of success is i probably won't need as much of a double if any i'm gonna do something really cool i'm gonna be creative i'm gonna film in a way that you're going to know this is the guy that's doing it you just have to you're going to play to the strengths of the performer exactly you have to be creative in the obstacles presented to you we were sitting on the set of speed racer we're shooting in battlesburg in germany um and dave dave leach was over there i was over there some of our guys were over there and you know we just want to work with the wachowskis again it was a big uh whether you like speed racer or not the uh the techniques or the technology behind speed racer was pretty epic and we want to be a part of it and on that movie uh you know who you see in ninja assassin rain or b rain was uh you know korean you know pop star with you know a lot of notoriety in the asian market um the wachowskis loved him and cast him as a as a character and speed racer and he had one little piece in a fight scene um like okay cool um you know during filming you know uh rain had come into town and i was in charge of training him and kind of choreographing for him i literally finished a workout with him i went right to the which houses went hey you guys got to check this guy out like he's he's a real deal like he's a dancer in memory he's good-looking dude he's got talent such a nice guy remembers moves got attitude super a lot of talent like he comes from a martial art background and they didn't know any of that he did come from a martial arts background then he had i mean he never said he did he's like no i only maybe take a couple you know a couple less he had a serious taekwondo hapkido fight base to him like he was a good good when i say i mean that's me saying he's a good kicker and he was a good good movement guy like the ability like you could tell he had come from a legitimate professional dance background he picked up moves faster than literally anyone i've worked with so far yeah well that's it's just choreography isn't it yeah exactly so we went back to the challenges and they're like really and they came and they watched and we started talking it's like and they asked dave and i well what would you always do it's like oh let's do a ninja movie and they're great and they went and literally wrote ninja assassin you know asked james you know who's a you know one of their i think closest friends if you'd like to direct and if we'd like to choreograph it and just kind of go crazy and do uh you know a lower budget ninja movie in berlin we're all like ah of course who doesn't want to do a ninja week that sequence there is amazing incredible stuff that's all practical blood we actually took we did the conan we put you know these big blood bags we velcro them on the stun guys and we actually hit them with aluminum swords to get that splatter and then we digitally erase them before they hit that's just working that's crazy i was looking at some of that thinking oh that's a visual effect john wick it's almost all digital blood in ninja assassin it is 98 practical blood oh that must have been a [ __ ] to reset but at least everyone's wearing black do you think what helped you immensely was of course 87 11 was known for creating three visits of action and giving it to studio and said this is what we can create for you obviously making those pre-businesses in the gym on the camcorders i mean that's filmmaking and so obviously you're doing a lot of that do you think that helped you become the director you are today i think it's definitely an aspect of it like you know like look we can go off on previous all day we started doing them for practice because it's the only way we know how to do it it was out of necessity because we came at it from that okay because i had so much time with the with the with the chinese teams and knew how they did it their level of prep blew ours away it was a cast member train like look a lot of stunts here's the thing with lettuce a lot of stump teams will hire 10 choreographers for 10 weeks and then they'll train the actor for two weeks how do you think that's gonna work out you can do the greatest choreography with the greatest ideas all you want you have your stunt doubles all you want at the end of the day when you're bitching about you can know how to edit like these some teams know how to edit they know how to shoot but what's the systemic problem million dollars on this actor you want the actor to be they're going to cut they're going to put his face in there they're going to do it if you don't anticipate that and choreograph your entire fight to be this kung fu wushu extravaganza wire work thing and your actor does three shots in it how do you think it's going to work out but also in hong kong they're tough on the actors that don't care their actors are trained they're either the deal like look we'll go i'll use the first john wick as an example keanu had come from like two years of doing stuff that didn't require a lot of physicality he wasn't in john wick's shape he didn't have any of the martial art training that he had in that film we had you know we went to go look this is the deal we don't have time it wasn't just we wanted to show no i didn't we just didn't have time we didn't have a second unit we were going to shoot first unit all the action we were going to get these big long takes done because you know they were cheaper we didn't have time for all the setups and relight so we told you we're going to get you in shape we don't want to risk punching and kicking because it's going to take you a year to get your splits back we're going to do all grappling jiu jitsu graphics so no matter what angle we're at it's going to be a cell we don't have to sell hits we don't have to worry about a miss we don't have to do any of that stuff we're going to train in close quarter gun work so we can keep the camera wide and still see everything we're going to block it so that we tie all the bad guys in and we're gonna roll whether you whether the gun jams whether you have to reload we're just gonna see it all on camera and everything's gonna be contact and that's kind of how we we worked it out but the caveat was we need you to commit to train with us for the 15 weeks for the three months you got it he had already gone through the matrix so he knew what was expected of him what he needed to do he's like five days a week i'm in and that's what you need so it's not so much about spending 15 weeks of queer queer you know choreographing it's 15 weeks of getting our actor so that he can have the memory so that he can have a skill set all the guys you're seeing in this sequence are the guys that train with them for 15 weeks they know everything about like he's used to and they don't like it's not training with one group of guys and hiring another group of guys in a different country like it's just we took the dance routine just like a professional dance crew or a dance uh troop would do it they train together they live together they work together rehearse together every single day so that they're working you know he's training in the shoes in the jacket with the holster with the real gun like oh really training in the jacket in the suit yeah like you get all these guys that will stay in rehearse and they'll choreograph in shorts and tank tops and then all of a sudden your entire camera self-included and you're wondering why the actor can't move because he's got a you know tactical vest on and the gun is actually holstered and you know it's not rubber or made out of cardboard like if you're not if you're not doing dress rehearsals and the real stuff with the real props you're not rehearsing like you know we have that big joke the only real rehearsal is the first take this sums it up this bit here all the legitimate techniques and the struggle and the fact that it's just simple angle and it's absolutely brilliant and very violent uh again i have a certain choreography theory i try to treat everything like a live performance i try to keep your eyes centered i try to keep it based like if you saw john wick the broadway show and you're sitting in the middle seat what would you see and this is what you would see you know the camera is meant to focus your eye but the performance is really the guys or the girls it's the stunt team and the cast members i need to own up to something uh so i managed to see some previous stuff from eight seven eleven uh back in the day i guess it was around two thousand and ten and it was basically what we're now calling gunjitsu or gun food was it gunfu or ganjutsu it seems like gunjitsu to me whatever you like but anyway i was like man i cannot unsee that now now that i've seen that i cannot and see it was absolutely brilliant because we didn't get um john wick for quite a few years after that so i simply ripped you guys off when i did el gringo tiny little movie and i'm basically doing the john wick style because it's like when you see that you can you can't see it you have to do gun fights that way you changed the way people did gun fights when john woo came along that changed it michael mann came along with heat that changed it john wick comes along that changed it you've got to do it the john wick way until somebody comes up with something else good or better and they would they will this i mean like again queer use like fashion it changes it rolls people's eye changes they want performance but one thing that will never change is like look it's [Music] why performance the cameraman chad do you get your caravan to come into the rehearsal process and film it as you're rehearsing it you spent 15 weeks worth of paychecks like look just to prep 10 guys with a cast you're looking at anywhere from 300 to half a million dollars to prep pre-prep and you still got to rehearse as you go you guys that's that's a lot of money in prep um i spend almost triple that for all the my budgets aren't that huge i just know that i want to control where i spend the money when i rehearse again i don't need 20 stun guys to choreograph i need my five best guys to query that concept what i need is my five best training guys to get the cast member to do the moves i'm gonna do if i'm not training the cast member to do where i'm at i'm wasting my time my little stunt choreography team is not gonna be on the poster they're not doing the fights they may be in the fights but if i'm you know what i'm saying without training counter reefs i'm spinning my wheels like i need that guy to do it that's why the money's got to go in a cast push back from the studio all the time they just now after you know the wic franchise doing the very well but i still have to explain it it's like okay so let me get this right we've just spent millions of dollars getting keanu reeves and the stunt team and the script to this place okay great great we've rehearsed the stunt guys there's two other cast members we're we're in the millions now of prep and now even though we got two decent camera guys you want him to come in the day of the fight and nail it and then you want the director who's never been to any of the rehearsals to call out the angles and just me not if they're okay yeah okay great and then you want a guy that's never edited a fine scene to put this together in his special way so he has authorship and you think that's gonna work you think that's good money yeah when i put it like that people are going oh maybe you're right yeah okay you bring your camera guys in maybe the maybe a week before maybe just to go through the camera box and make sure the gear most of the times you bring the camera guys are seeing the sets really kind of for the first time when you shoot or the day before my camera guys are coming a month out at least and if they can't do it i replace it guys i can i use the same two three camera guys i love them these are guys that i do all around the guys that are steady cam guys as long as as well as the wheels as long as as well as handheld they're very successful camera guys i require they have to be i don't care how much my camera guys are at the rehearsals they are actually doing that we give them a little video from then i'll bring in the real alexas and they will practice if you're shooting all your previews on an iphone or this little camera and you're doing this stuff and you're not pulling focus and you you're doing yourself a disservice you're actually it's good to show the moves great it's good to impress the director and show them how great you guys are that's awesome but that's not how it's going to be if you are choreographing these multiple guide battle sequences and you're not using something the size or weight of a real alexa with a focus puller standing by again you're not doing a real rehearsal i'm going to challenge scott adkins right now give me five moves out of the matrix five moves in sequence of any sequence of any fights in exact moves five in a row movie you've seen a hundred times and you are one of the best fight guys out there give me five exact moves in a row there's something like this not something that goes no i'm not gonna be able to do it no i can't remember those specific movements so now you're telling me you want me to show two camera guys i've never seen a fight scene on the day of and you want them to nail it yeah no no you're asking an impossible story of my life chad story of my life so like well we all know it if it's us why why doesn't somebody fix it yeah okay well they won't give me the extra money either well they're giving you the extra money think about it and i look at it like this i did all the john wicks in under 55 days every single one of them so you haven't increased the amount of shooting days number two and number three is much bigger it is one day less than number two why is that because i spend all my time in prep because when i'm on set i know what i'm doing my team my crew knows what i'm doing i spent yeah i spent three times as much as prep but i saved three times as much because i didn't go over i didn't pay the overtime i didn't have the extra days wow i mean go figure preparation works so when you're talking to someone like halle berry or common or some of the actors that come into the wic franchise is the the main thing you're talking to them about first is look you're gonna have to train for this and it's gonna be uh six months of your life or whatever i mean how long did halle berry train for john wick three um we had a hiatus but hallie was every bit of five months plus some change and again that's she was training a little bit more before that you gotta remember she was and that when i see training that's not like three or four hours hallie had to do because she has doesn't have a martial or background or had done a lot of fight scenes before so there's the choreography the physical training just to get her in shape and to to take the train like you just can't start training eight hours a day you know like yeah yeah it's a half part of this day and then the next week it's an hour that is that so we have to build up without hurting somebody yeah she's got to spend at least minimal three hours a day with the dogs even if it's just plain frisbee with them for the dogs to get to know her and listen to her are these dogs basically growing up with her yeah we've bought the five belgian manual one that we're stationed here in l.a so we brought in the trainers and dogs and five days a week how was with these dogs she'd bring some home she'd rotate them she'd be with these dogs then it was you know four times a week three hours a day of firearms and then the rest was all choreography work in memory and obviously the martial arts skill and how did you have the idea or want dogs in it where did that come from brilliant idea never seen it before dogs throwing people with aikido moves i just love dogs and we had this idea i don't know it's always i have two rescues i love my dogs so much and my dogs can do all these things um they're littler dogs but they're they're very they're very clever and when i wrestle with them i'm like you know we bring them to the jujitsu gym and all that stuff and they start playing around so we're like oh we should do this with dogs and they carry the velocity that they get when they jump and they're they're 75 pounds each they're the real deal the trick is you gotta you gotta you know train the dogs so they know it's play time and it's not actually trying to hurt somebody yeah you know i talked to a bunch of trainers and the idea wasn't well received because of you know well that wasn't the norm finally i bumped into a guy named andrew jackson who had trained all the wolves for game of thrones and i told him that i just wanted to train dogs and martial arts but to make it fun and to make it playful um and he's like well the caveat is well you just can't there's a reason your dogs don't do this or you know when you own a dog you don't want your dog being that aggressive with your children with your friends with yourself so you're always you know smacking or disciplining them to the point where like don't do that don't do that no that's bad dog we had to encourage that now the issue with that is once the movie's over what what do you do with the dog you can't let the dogs go back out and find a different owner or something you know they're being trained a certain way so we kind of had made the deal with like look each of the trainers five trainers were going to adopt the dogs afterwards so we want to make sure the dogs are completely taken care of if we do train an animal this way that we're not ruining the chances for the animal to have a home afterwards so two dogs are three of the dogs actually are still in the movie system and they're all happy home with two dogs are retired and just live out in a nice ranch the other three are still within the industry all with the trainers but it was just a different way to train it's like the different way to train your camera diff when you train stunt guys when you change we just train the dogs in a different way to be part of the fun and excitement of it john wick 3 is my favorite of all of them and probably that's because there's more martial arts and obviously my martial arts geek but it seemed like there was more martial arts than gunplay in this town even though it's still a lot of gunplay especially at the end but that sequence with all the glass the knife that's probably my favorite sequence um i had no idea that the glass was fake i mean did you get the idea of that on another movie or no no uh this is just look i have obviously i have a glass and apparently reflection fetish if you're watching oh yes or mirrors or i love breaking glass i think ever since i saw that james bond fight moonraker on their little glass factory i like breaking stuff yeah um as a stun guy obviously anybody that's done sequences will tell you like the more elements you put into a sequence knives props guns reloads breakaways the more chances you have of failure or problems we have to keep redoing takes so you know i'm pretty tight with a lot of the vfx guys and a lot of my friends who are like okay let's again we know the problems you know we know the problems on you know how did you reset glass does it break the right way are you gonna slip in the glass so we try to go okay where's the magical combination between us practical effects and vfx um so we did it we're like okay well it's easier for the vfx guys if the glass is a little less reflective if it's a little bit more cloudy and antiquey like it is here in an unsafe place yeah exactly and then we build the system back out like i love crazy lighting stuff so we'll put chandeliers in and i'm like okay you know in every movie we always see the hero no matter who he is or who she is picks up a knife throws it no matter what distance and it magically sticks into a lethal depth and we're like tiger chen sorry just got to point out tonight that's uh like this whole fight scene is a who's who of you know asian stunt guys beautiful sequence here in the one shot i love it how could you be certain that the glass would look real because you've done it before or you did a test we already do tests like we get real glass we do real breakaway and uh not all the glass i would say 30 of the glass throughout the sequence is real like we actually smashed uh like there's one of those that tiger goes through one of the ones that came out is actually real when piano elbows a glass that's actually real um but we do test and we match it up and again you get you get the right vfx guys and the right vfx supervisor who understands quality and subtlety uh they do you know there's really good guys out there now you just go i just ask you about this bit here when he sticks a knife in his head i mean is that just faking the knife and leaving his hand in the right place or was there something that he could like know he was in the right spot uh it's funny we had piano rehearse and rehearse rehearse with a rubber one that was very blunt that wouldn't hurt uh our man's head and then you know just discipline so you see as he goes up he reacts counts got a good stop again we do a lot of rehearsing as it's going to be so we know kian is using a digital knife so we practice as if he has ages so how did you get that knife there to line up perfectly with his eye just from watching and saying yeah that should work uh yeah i mean well we do it with again with a safety knife a super soft rubber nerf knife we line it up and then we give like the half knife and then we just digitally measure out and we'll do a couple things and we'll do a really on set we'll do a quick temp digital temp knife to make sure it's lined up so we can get it so that you can check with the digital to check that it's lined up dirty comp and just check it and try it out and why did you do that to roger at the end uh i find violence i guess i don't know i said a lot of dance like i'm a bob fosse freak i love and it's not about the moves or how he combined tap with ballet i took old school in his school it's his theory why a plie or why tap what it says to him again i'm not a dancer i don't understand all the terms but i get that he's trying to create funny he's trying to create motion he's trying to create attachment he's trying to keep detachment isolation a lot of directors talk about the lenses and what that says and how you create isolation or closeness or conflict or aggression or so you know the different subtleties of acting our emotion quarantine does the same thing and you know we have that holy trinity of what the moves are what you know how we shoot it and then how we cut it for pacing if you have a plan before you walk into a fight scene uh knowing how to rise people up like you're trying to entertain see suspense pace surprise uh i love the term subversive or subversion where i want to show you and like in the script it says knife fight that's all antique knife that's all it says yes the knife fight is one of my best examples of subversion like look it all came from this idea i came up i have two younger brothers we grew up we had snowball fights it was just whip snowballs as fast as you can each other whoever throws the most the soonest i can see it about 10 of them hit the other ones fall apart in the air and we all grew up throwing knives and like honestly on your best day when you maybe get seven out of ten and your mom's kicking knives into the tree how many times did it bounce back and hit you in the head how many times did it kind of stick and fall down i'm like but nobody ever does that in movies it's like the gun thing we have like guns run out of bullets i don't know why it took us one of the things that made john wick better than the rest in all the bullets all the time all the time yeah i think there's only once in the movies that we were off because i had to cut a piece out so well on the day we did count in the movie it looks a little off challenging to find it um but like look guns jammed the point is back in the day the hollywood con let me put it this way 95 of what everyone knows of fighting gun worker car chases is from movies yes 98 of that 95 percent is incorrect it's [ __ ] like no one breaks their arm gets back up and keeps fighting no one gets hit in the nose spits blood sugarpins does uh you know but i'm just saying like so if you put a little reality back in your fight scenes of like look i get like we stretch it with gentlemen i know that nobody could survive a week of john no one gets hit by cars and gets back up and fighting no one can do a three-minute fight scene and not want to plummet their you know lunch up we get that but that's what's fun about choreography so that's what i'd say to other choreographers out there is put some of that back in have the stuff have the gunfight but you know hollywood didn't want it because i thought it was goofy to watch guys you know put a bullet back in a revolver it makes it more realistic doesn't it it makes you believe it more and then so john wick does something completely fantastic that could never happen in real life but then when you have the reality on top of it those moments i'll do all this aikido jiu jitsu stuff but i'm gonna do head shots and that kind of equals it out if you just saw the aikido be like yeah it looks a little soft yeah and if you saw just headshot she's like yeah it's a little rough you're buying my favorite headshot was when he was tugging on that guy's beard at the same time but like it's like with the knife we're like okay what can we do versus here well the first thing out of your mouth is well every time we throw a knife it never sticks in all right well that's going in okay like you had it like sometimes it sticks sometimes it doesn't and do you i'm sure you understand anybody out there i don't know if there's a human alive they can throw a knife fast and hard enough to go through a leather jacket to actually elicit an immediate demise of the bad guy the chances of hitting dead center aorta shot or cervical like c2 c3 to shut the brainstem off is pretty weak you can get stuck with a knife yell out pull it back out and throw it back at the guy so we thought that would be funny like how you know so as crazy as this world is let's ground it a little bit and then we'll do the perfect shot with a hatchet at the end well has you still got the bulletproof suit on or not yes but it's not knife proof apparently so you know and that's people ask me why i keep doing john wicks it's like look i get to work with my crew that is barn on the best i get to make up or break any rules that i want um i have great casting choices i have great location choices i get to do everything i love from westerns to samurai film to kung fu movies i've read every good and bad review i can from whether it's a fan base thing or a critic thing like i want to know what people think about it because at the end of the day remember i'm not trying to create john wick is just an art thing i i'm a fanboy like i i'm doing it to say thank you to leonie and kurosawa to all the great you know from anything from transporters to you know to you know lupus movie to life nikita or taxi or anything he's done so you know what what the fans say means a lot to me too and like you know they like if i if i put in joe wicks because i love it and if you guys like sword fights and you're going to love john wick 3 if you like car chase you you know if you like the 70 stuff you know bullet you're going to like john wick too if you you know so you try to listen to what they say and you know if they love conan if they love blood if they love the sword fights then i want to know i want to know what you're listening to what the fans say but are you ever going to do what you think the fans want or are you always going to do what you want see that's that's you know and you can theorize and philosophize about all you want to you're actually directing and doing your own thing it's very easy and again it's it's you know after the first movie you're like oh my god well pulled that one off second one when i got a third one that's when you because now you're starting to question ideas do i bring back this character do i duplicate myself they come up with something new and you you do you get i mean i'm not going to lie to you there's not a day i don't walk sometimes myself yeah and i'm not scared shitless like i i have a plan and i have to be confident in front of my crew and say this is gonna but in the back of my mind yeah i'm [ __ ] myself i'm like well i i just want to say because i remember before john wick came out you'd filmed it he'd edited it i think and we were in south africa working on the grimsby movie i think it's gonna i think i'm screwed i may never direct again yeah i can't did you really believe that yeah oh no absolutely that's why i took the jazz so i started outside after i was like but the question is like look i i don't look at it like that i don't look at like well fans of it i you can't think like it's two different entities i'm just gonna go we write a cool story like if you saw my office it's nothing but pictures and notebooks and ideas of things i love i write all these down i sit in my writing team and we start writing i i don't i don't try to let what expectations are guide me i'm hopefully thinking the gut instinct i have of oh that's cool let's put that in the movie you know i i just try to love the same things that everyone else out there loves and if i make a movie based on what i love that means it's what they love and hopefully you know it aligns yeah exactly just don't go don't i don't ever want to go well you know somebody think i don't want to go down that route if a certain fan base goes it'd be great to see this person like that's cool i think that would be fun too i'm just not feeling it so i'm going to go with this part and again they call it the curse of the sequel it's like okay take take matrix or john wick or born or anything so you get this cool character that you really haven't you've seen assassin a thousand times you just haven't seen into john wickway or neo way or a jason bourne way so that's a little different and the action's a little different and then it's done with a little bit more attitude or swagger that's a little different in the choreography everything's just different enough to make you go that was cool i like that i didn't see that before but you have seen it before just not in that way so now you've seen john wick you've seen gunfu you've seen the longer takes you're like okay and part of that wow was you hadn't seen that so by definition in a sequel you want that and other people have copied it as well now i'm going into john with four and everybody out there you've all seen gun fuel you want it back but what you really want is gun foo not too different but different you want it to know it's gun food but you want something else you haven't seen yeah you know you just don't know what it is yet right and you want keanu to be the badass guy but you want them a little different and you just don't want another bad guy you want a bad guy that's doing something a little different and that's always the the trick of it is you want to give them what you want in a way they didn't see coming yeah that's always the trick with sequels or reinventions or remakes and i think that's a challenge on every department's level from writing to the look to the vibe to the field to the attitude to the acting to the action and that's where you have to go so if you're always worried about that about how do i progress how do i go forward where do i take it how do i do that that helps answer the question of what do the fans want what they want is more of the same only better and newer and like that sounds wacky but that's where my head's always at like okay how do i do this how do i get out of the safe zone of just doing what i've already done and do something that even i haven't thought of yet and don't get me wrong we're writing for right as we speak literally that's what i'm in the middle of as we're talking and it's i'll start going down this route with the writers and yeah that's really cool to me like is that even going to work i mean can you imagine what the studio says when i pass in the script that says and john wick rides a horse and fights guys on motorcycles down brooklyn like that doesn't go over well you know like that is either the greatest or the dumbest idea we've ever heard i'm like no trust me it's gonna be great it's gonna be john wick's suit horse because true lies only better and i'm bullshitting out of my i have no idea i'm hoping it looks good you just have to believe in it that that you know you have a good idea and if it sounds cool to and i i don't have a i have a great team around me that if they think it's dumb they kind of tell me they think it's really cool they're gonna tell me and you just you know you can't second guess your gut otherwise it's chasing the tail of the dragon you're always trying to chase what someone else thinks and that's the quickest way to lose your true north you gotta go with what you believe and what you feel that's it yeah stick with that chad because it's done very well so far on me at least for now and i will see listen we all can't wait for john week four and um whatever you come out with and 87-11 in general it's amazing mate you've done incredible job and uh you're right at the top of hollywood good for you chad no thanks uh again pleasure dude anything you need any time you can always call [Music] you

Channel: Scott Adkins

Views: 91,844

Rating: 4.9697633 out of 5

Keywords: scott adkins, Undisputed, Martial Arts, chad stahelski, The Matrix, John Wick, Keanu Reeves, Ninja Assassin, art of action, stunts, fight scenes

Id: 5m3sW94zjXM

Length: 62min 32sec (3752 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 13 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/trebud69]

I just thought it's cool that no wonder this guy is so good with Zack's fights, he came from the best of the best. Oh, and the fact he brings up Richard Cetrone, too. Stunt double for Batman.