The Art of Action - Jude Poyer - Episode 15

[Music] okay welcome back to another episode of the art of action today we are with jude poya say hello jude hello jude dude i bet you've never heard that one i've never heard that before thank you for having me it's great to be here pleasure to have you on me um we go back a long way don't we yeah i think about 18 19 years something like that we work together on the mcdonald's yeah the medallion yeah jackie chan's the medallion you're under arrest great movie yeah um and that was what 2001 it was something like that wasn't it 2001 2002 i get confused but that was a great film to work on because obviously we're working with jackie chan and samuel hung but also it's a load of british lads out in thailand having a real good time [Laughter] yeah there were some adventures but jude has gone on to be uh stunt coordinator fight director in his own right most successfully so far i would say for the gangs of london which was absolutely superb mate i mean thank you much stuff incredible thank you very much never seen action like that in a tv series ever of course you know i i'd love to take all the credit but the creators of the show gareth evans and matt flannery do have an awful lot uh to do with that action and uh you know it's it's as i'm sure you can relate to it's rare on a project of that sort of scale that the action is taking that seriously and given that much attention and time and care so you know i'm very grateful to gareth and matt for having me along and i'm really happy to see people responding to it the way we hoped they would respond today we're going to be talking about some crazy hong kong stunts [Music] you started off in hong kong didn't you just to talk about that briefly your history in hong kong yeah i i i got my start in hong kong uh in the industry there around the end of 1996 and i lived out there for eight years working as uh action martial art actor and as a stunt performer and i often hear myself described as a hong kong stunt man and i feel very proud of that but i'm very aware that i'm probably the least talented stunt guy to ever work in hong kong with the least no seriously because we're going to look at these clips and then then i'm a fan you know when i watch these people i go okay and i think while technically some of these stunts may have dated a little bit in their execution i think you cannot fault the the skill of the people you know that performed these stunts and coordinated them absolutely and we're going to be looking at a time 80s early 90s hong kong action movies a time when there was no cgi a time when the stunts had to be done for real it all had to be done in camera and you know make no burns about it if you were going to be a hong kong stunt man you needed to be tough because you were going to be put through the ringer and we're going to i'm sure we're going to see some of that today absolutely so if i'm pointing out where a crash mat has been used or a wire has been used it's not to try and take anything away from these people quite the opposite yeah because nowadays you can paint out the crash mats you can paint out the wires you can do all kinds of things they couldn't do that 30 years ago yeah thin wires thin crash mats yeah very much so this is from jackie chan's 1983 film project a oh yeah and uh probably one of his most famous stunt sequences yes and inspired by um is it harold lloyd was there yeah i mean i think jackie chan makes no secret of the fact that he's very inspired and influenced by the silent film comedians and performers like harold lloyd buster keaton and charlie chaplin hanging off the clock is very much harold lloyd from safety last but falling through the awnings i think was influenced by buster keaton we'll just i'm just going to pause to watch the magic unfold in front of the [Music] camera but there was also a buster keaton film called three ages and in that there's a moment where um buster keaton gets needs to get from one roof of a building to the other then he uses a board kind of like a springboard to jump and uh actually he failed he didn't make it so he got onto the side of the building and then he fell off and buster kitten landed in a safety net and but they still wanted to use the footage so they came up after the fact with the idea that he falls off the side of the building and threw two awnings and i think that's where jackie got the idea for this so for buster keaton it was a complete mistake absolutely it was not an idea i'm going to copy that huge mistake yeah absolutely i mean the kitchen secrets is fantastic but yeah it was kind of like that the accident which injured tom cruise you know jumping and grabbing onto the side of a building but keaton lost his grip and fell below frame onto a safety net and then they were like as he was recovering yeah maybe we should keep that in the movie and that's how the the canopy sequence was was born in that's high perfect landing and what jackie does here which is really unusual in terms of like from a filming point of view is he actually uses two different takes of the same stunt one after the other in the edit of the final movie which shouldn't make sense to show the character falling differently twice but that's what he did we were all there to see jackie chan aren't we jackie chan do his own stunts so so he did it three times right well i don't i'm not going to try and take anything away from jackie chan so you know he's like one of the gods of action he's one of my heroes he's inspired generations of stunt people um when this film was released on dvd in the uk maybe 20 years ago i was fortunate to record an interview with mars who was one of the stunt team on the film if you look if you slow down the shot where the the clock gets kicked open and jackie's hanging from the from the clock as it comes that's the shot just there that's mars he's got a very distinctive look and uh probably he's doubling for jackie because it's an inconsequential shot and jackie's directing the movie and then mars told me that they shot it at least three times and the first time a stunt guy did it and he got injured and that's in in the outtakes at the end of the movie and i think you've got the clip of that this one is not jackie i i think possibly not i don't know that as a fact but i think that's an ng and i imagine that stunt guy probably needed to you know take a rest for a few days but the last take is definitely jackie i think it's possible that a stuntman or two stuntmen did it one after the other one of them being mars and then the last times jack second take we see it's jackie because he gets up exactly yeah taken one of the stunt team you know got to grips with it first yeah made sure it was in focus absolutely gave the camera guy a chance to rehearse because it's it's a pretty these stunts they're not just stressful for the performers they're also stressful for the camera team as well you know the the focus pullers got to make sure that what's in focus is the right stuff you know they're zooming in they're trying to capture the moment to talk about the actual technology involved they're not going straight into hard ground with sand on top they've created what's called a dugout so they make a small trench and they fill it with cardboard boxes and then they put a layer of crush mats on top of that and then they cover that with sand there might be like a bit of like a tarpaulin or some hessian on top of the that rig and then the sand on top and that's what's disguised it but that's quite a high fall to go into one layer of boxes and mats is well the guy that came off whether it was jackie or someone else the guy that came off the other way do you think he missed the mating or would it all have been uh you know strategically covered i hope it was strategically clever i hope so but i don't know i think if you if you're hitting the deck from that height it's bad news no matter how tough you are i hope i hope that the rig had a big margin for error but of course the other thing is in the shot which where it's undoubtedly jackie he lands and then you've got yoonbu and an actress running in now they wouldn't have been able to get really close to jackie if that had suddenly been like a a massive huge spongy crash mat area so that's something else to take into account see this is why we're talking to you dude because you've got all the the inside info brilliant i'm speculating here though bit of speculation but with a wise mind one of the well um thank you one of the things i'm i'm a bit confused about with this stunt is around the same time as project a was in production indiana jones in the temple of doom was being made and there's a sequence in that which was shot in macau now some of project a was filmed in macau and in that sequence indiana jones and the uh the lady played by kate capsule they jump out of a window and go crashing through two awnings right and it's very similar and i wonder did one production know what the other one was doing and borrow the idea or were they both just coincidentally inspired by buster keaton um hang on a minute there was that other story as well with e.t so project hayes with the bicycle as well and they heard that there was a bicycle chase in et so they all went off to the cinema to watch it when they realized it was you know obviously very different because yeah flying across the moon yes they continued with the sequence so yeah what they did in the in the indiana jones one vic armstrong was one of the uh stunt coordinators and they used a device called a fan descender which basically it's a it's a wire rig so vic armstrong and the female stunt double i'm not sure who it was might have been wendy leach they were falling on a cable and being slowed on the way down and fan descenders original use was training people had a parachute and vic armstrong saw that technology and thought we could put that to use in the film industry and vic actually won an oscar uh for technical achievement for developing the fan descender but if you look at the fall in indiana jones versus the the fallen project here i think you can see the difference there's there's gravity doing a bit more work in project a and there's a little bit more sort of acceleration it's known as either millionaires express or shanghai express it's quite widely available express and uh it's a stunt performed by yin byu so not only does he jump off a huge height he decides i'm going to do a no andy cartwheel yeah so he's doing a i guess it's like a bahrami um and then runs over delivers a line of dialogue so it's undoubtedly forgot the line um i'm sure they would have cut in for a close-up rather than do it again but i don't know because samuel hong directed this and i've got a feeling you know you've worked with samurai if he's not happy he'll probably go get up there and do it again i mean the thing about this i think is that this occurs maybe 20 minutes into the movie and in a lot of movies this would be the stunt but this is just one moment in in a sort of a chinese new year action comedy it's kind of a throwaway moment completely incidental yeah and obviously yun bu is incredible he's an incredible acrobat uh amazing stunt man before he became an action star so he's doubled for pretty much everybody in his career in the 1978 version of game of death he's one of the people doubling for bruce lee and the thing about this this bahrani i was lucky i worked with bu on a film and we talked about the stunt this movie i worked with him was called a man called hero and we were shooting on a set that reminded me of that set and i was talking to him about the stunt and he said yeah we the rig that i went into was just one layer of boxes with one layer of crash mats and the crash mats they use as you'll know scott they're not gymnastic crash mats they're they're just foam mats that you would sleep on yeah so from that height going into one layer of boxes and then one layer of mats it's it's not a lot of cushioning and you notice that he's going in dead straight and then he lands on his side because if you went in legs first you'd quite likely break both legs or even paralyze yourself so it's incredible control just to add into it there's the element of fire as well yeah you see how we just i'm not even thinking about the fire to be honest but of course you know you've got that heat coming up into your face you might essentially be falling blind into your rig because you're doing that that bahrani somersault and then you've got this perfect rotation because if you if you mess up that rotation you could be causing yourself some serious damage right what's this one then jude so this is a film called my lucky stars um and uh this is from the end and you're seeing summerhall who also directed the film and he's fighting a villain played by la gawing who's a kung fu master in real life and a veteran of many uh martial art films lal garland's father lao jaan was actually taught hong koon uh hungar kung fu by lam sai wing who's probably better known as the magnificent butcher a student of wong fei hong now samo played the magnificent butcher in a movie of that name and now he's fighting one of his disciples and this is how he gets finished off through that table should we pause it there firstly just talking about the fight scene you've got samo fighting against laughawing who's uh an incredible real kungfu master in southern style kung fu but you can kind of tell on some of the reactions where he's getting hit and flipping over that it's a stunt double performing those things because just because you're an excellent martial artist doesn't mean you're the best person at falling or maybe it's good to let the stunt person do the falling so that you're still fit the actor is still fit to carry on doing the fight scene and they're not getting too beat up going through the table is a different matter altogether now just looking at it as part of the sequence it may not look like the most impressive stunt in hong kong cinema history but if you see the behind the scenes of how it was done that's quite impressive i think and essentially what you have is a a stunt guy i think it's you noir and he does a round off preps for a backwards somersault and just doesn't rotate he opens up and uh i think he got knocked out cold yeah it looks he looks pretty out cold you can see he goes stiff yep i don't know why i'm laughing and i should also say that if your stunt person is unconscious it's probably not medical advice to run over by the lapel start shaking them um but well do you know what gets me um just before he comes in samoa gives him that sort of come on then yeah gives him a look of like get on with it so to get that height he's doing a round off beginning a back somersault that's a lot of commitment and then he's going through a table that will be made of lightweight wood and the glass will be sugar glass so i think we all kind of know what that is it's made from sugar it's not likely to cut you it breaks very easily i have a feeling that's you noir performing that stunt oh yes was one of samo's team uh he was an excellent acrobat it's uh doubling bruce lee for the flips in enter the dragon and for instance if you look at the the opening event of the dragon with the monks when bruce's character runs does a round off and then back some assaults over the outstretched arms of the monks that's the kind of move that yoonwa was very good at and i think he was going for something like that with this i think he also does the the the clip up doesn't he only throws a punch because um i always you'd look at that and go that's not bruce lee's butt yeah he doubled bruce lee for that for the kip up and he doubled bruce lee for the backflip with with uh o'hara bob war oh yeah and i believe he doubled john saxon as well for a kip-up uh when john saxon's fighting i think bolo at the end of the movie yeah well what do you think about that because um in all the other bruce lee movies um the fights are very uh realistic well you know to a point but do you think that was the influence of the americans being like i want to put something special in here or do you think bruce came up with it because he didn't he wouldn't double himself for a martial arts move like the uh the bob wall flip kick previously so what was it this time do you think feel like maybe he was felt like he was playing more of a superhero and maybe she'd do something a bit more fantastic or i don't know there's some there's some acrobatics in in chinese connection in fist of fury there's like one somersault in that and then in in the big boss uh the original like credited stunt coordinator or choreographer of the big boss is hong yan git who played the villain in the film and hong yang came from this background of bouncing off trampolines so you see a bit of trampoline work in big boss so i think the gymnastics element was always going to be in there and i think it's it's eye candy i mean as you know real martial arts and acrobatics are kind of quite far apart but there seems to be this very comfortable marriage on the screen you know yeah uh even some of the ufc fighters will celebrate with the backflip now and again absolutely absolutely um when bob wall grabs on to bruce lee's ankles then he does that backflip kick even though it's not realistic and it's entertaining i could see bruce lee being on board with that idea even if he didn't come up with it because it kind of from a character point of view it makes sense bubbles done a dirty trick but i'm gonna do something smarter to get out of it yeah it's very slick and we've all practiced that one into the pool [Laughter] even the guys that can't even do it absolutely i think we've seen a lot of videos of people failing as well yes and and the thing about you noir is he's such a good double for bruce lee i mean facially they're not similar but in terms of physique they both had this very wiry muscular ripped physique i don't think and he was able to copy bruce's mannerisms because in enter the dragon when he does that backflip and lands it doesn't just cut there he carries on with a bit of that yeah um i once again just to name drop i was lucky enough to work with with you noir and and he told me that bruce talked about after enter the dragon going to the states and doing more projects and while was going to be one of the people that he took with him so i think he and bruce had that kind of you know good relationship that's what we got next dude it's another one from my lucky stars and uh it's with jackie chan fighting a character played by dickway looks like it's going to snap his spine so here's some behind the scenes some outtakes it doesn't look good on the lower back does it no it doesn't oh that's an oh he landed it on his feet yeah he's thinking she landed on my feet i've got to do that for sure yeah as you know i like to post uh you know memorable stunts on on social media and uh i posted this with the the caption oops somebody forgot the crash mats and um ridley choi who we're going to talk about in a bit commented no no there was a crash mat and i was like yeah but not the kind of matting that uh a western stunt man would expect for for a fall like that yeah i think what they've done is they've stretched that lino that's representing the floor over maybe just one layer of crash mats you know thin foam mat where her head is yeah she's kind of on the curve of the mat isn't she yes and and on the one where the stunt guy goes in a little bit first that's where you see the floor get uh a little bit uh it just moves a little bit but it's it's it's incredible body control yeah but um angie is that definitely um a shoe on the foot that is that's the old shoe on the hand hong kong trick with a bit of talcum powder sprinkled or fuller's earth yeah and they call that power powder firstly before we talk about the actual stunt itself i want to talk about the camera angle that they use because it's something i noticed about samuhung when he shoots falls even if they're just low falls i mean for me samo is like the ultimate master of like modern day action it's low angle but it's not crazy low angle it's not like a super wide lens with distortion tilted up what samoa tends to do is drop the camera below your natural eye level and i think that increases the sense of height without it feeling distorted so i think that's one of those things about samuel which is makes him a master so he can make a fall from three foot feel like it's from five feet just dropping the eye level i think if you see a lot of western cameramen they're always carrying the camera on their shoulder and i've seen hong kong people if it's a similar kind of shot they just hold it under slung here and it just gives a little bit more sense of height with those kind of things yeah another thing it helps for the kicks as well in just a basic fight sequence to get down a little bit make the kicks look a bit more extended and prettier 100 100 just drop lower than the natural eye level just imagine it's like a five-year-old or a six-year-old watching it a couple of other observations about this and as you know you know we're we're both subscribed to the hong kong style of shooting things in deliberate predetermined shots and edit points is you get that close-up of the the fake leg passing the the face when it cuts wide the stunt guy is prepping he's prepped and just leaping he's not reacting to the kick on a lot of hollywood or western movie scenarios they would expect the stunt guy to the hero throws a kick the stunt guy reacts to the kick and then he has to throw himself over the balcony and then you can it's more dangerous but also you can often see the stunt person checking that they're going in the right direction where on this if you play it through frame by frame you can see the stunt guys perched i think he's actually on a slight apple box like on a level or something so he's perfectly positioned to launch himself and you can only do that when you're working with the director and action director that knows how it's going to cut together yeah and and somehow he's the one doing the dangerous stunt isn't he so really it's what what do you need mate what what can i do for you so if i was in a position there where i was delivering the kick um i'm gonna go off his timing he's gonna do the stunt and i'm just gonna make the move that i'm supposed to be finishing yeah and i think that's what jackie does actually if you watch it is because he's your eyes aren't really on him if you watch it i don't think jackie threw like the full jump spinning hook kick yeah yeah so he's like doing like an outer hook kick isn't it like a little a small jumping hook kick yeah he's just making the motion and uh i'm pretty sure that the the stunt guy performing uh that is uh chingalo who's uh incredible incredible stunt guy we're going to look at some of his other work shortly one of samo's key people and since then he's become an action star in his own right when he was a stunt man he doubled for everybody he doubled for jackie he doubled for you he doubled for for samuel and now he's a director and action director in hong kong this is the guy from scorpion king that's right he's the star of scorpion so the next stunt is from a film called paper marriage which is from the late 80s it was filmed in canada and it stars summerhall [Music] and it's summer is it is that actually summer we can talk about that oh no did that get not go to plan was he meant to land on the hard swimming pool floor that's pretty much gone the way they plan it to do although they did more than one take so to start with it is samo and that's real glass through the tempered glass he's getting cut to shreds there surely that's right so what what he's doing is he's going through a big sheet of real glass which gets detonated a fraction of a second before you hit it and you will get cut but as opposed to glass that's not detonated it's not going to slice you or take off a limb or kill you so samuel is doing a small version of the stun he's going through the glass and landing on a box rig just below frame and for the wide shot chingalok's doubling him going through the glass but then continuing the fall so that's samo right and now that's chingalok right and he's not actually landing on hard swimming pool side they've got a load of mats and then they've covered them with some cloth that's that sort of beigey yellow color okay i mean it's not the most forgiving landing but i suppose it's better than cement it's better than the alternative because it's you know you don't even want to slip up on that stuff do you no absolutely i've never gone through a tempered glass window it's actually something that i really want to do um but i keep getting talked out of it oh i can see now because normally you'll blow it with the debt yes and they did here they did but he's hitting it and you can see it bending can't you yeah so is that what because normally you have to go through it at speed in order to not get cut as much absolutely is it because whatever he's landing on is not far away so he doesn't want to go too far over missing or is it because he's hit it before it's blown and it's took some of the edge off at the speed i wonder if he's actually hit it and the the sfx guy's a little bit late that's what i wonder because it takes so can you see it you can see it flexing and he's probably got an elbow pad on um but ideally you want that thing to crack before you go through it you're right samo's not launching himself too far because you don't want to overshoot your boxes and your crash mats yeah but what you tend to find is more often than not sfx people will get the thing sooner rather than later and you'll see some movies when they do these stunts in slow motion you can tell that the glass has been debted before the person goes through i think on that one well observed i think samo actually hit the glass before it went off yeah um i know you said you'd like to do it i have to say every time i've done it i've been cut yeah and it's not been serious but small cuts but for instance i did one movie where i got thrown through a window and and hit the ground is it only like a two foot drop hit the ground and turned as part of my performance and my hand landed on a bit of glass and you know went into my hand you know it wasn't a major injury but it could have been stitches in the medallion with samo i my character does that bit where he smashes the window and what actually happened was um it all smashed and then there was a big like shard still up there yeah that it delayed for a little bit and then it landed on my hand you got my hand open i wasn't even going through the bloody thing i personally think it's a little bit of that idea of make sure you travel far enough is that's not always an excuse because even if the glass is on your body as you travel you're going to push it away from you and then you're turning and landing on it yeah but uh yeah there's a good chance of getting cut so usually actors won't be ones going through i'd like to do it i'd like to give it a go and smash through the window come up into a fight scene yeah so it's on the last day though yeah just in case [Applause] [Music] [Applause] now that's not samo is it the stunt of hitting the car the main stunt is not samo that's performed by a stunt man called chin silence was one of samoa's team and uh he and i were good friends in hong kong he was uh from southern china and he was an opera guy another chinese opera guy and he performs that hard hit but then it's samuro coming off the front in the the shot that follows on and if you look in that angle there that high angle you can actually see there are thin rubber mats on the road so you can see there's thin mats there for the stump double to to land on which nowadays would be so easy to paint out and you know there's a there's actually we did a car hit in the uh opening episode of gangs of london and the stunt guy was landing on some thin mats which were digitally removed but then it's samo doing the continuation shot and samuel actually injured himself doing that shot there he injured his arm this guy how how badly injured was he i believe he was okay i mean it was i mean how could the cars hit him that hard well the thing is i don't think the car is actually hitting him that hard this is another one of those i mean it's it's it's a hard hit for sure the close-up of the legs is from a different moment from the shot of the stunt guy hitting the car so i think the stunt guy is actually attacking the car and leaping into it oh yes which so he's picking up his legs yeah and then he's getting a nice little kiss from the car yeah and then the stomach he's hoping to take uh most of it on the windscreen but he just goes straight through it and just hits the rim of the yeah and and i think he did you do see that the um the mets the metal work on the front of the card does bend a little bit dent a little bit that's his head that's caused that dent ladies and gentlemen so you want to be a stunt man huh yeah in hong kong in the 80s yay what the thing about that stunt guy chin ceiling really good stunt man and once again really nice guy and the way he got into samoa's stunt team is he heard that samoa was auditioning for new members and he went down and he met samo and he said they talked about chinese opera for a little bit of time and then simon was like okay you're in so he didn't have to do any kind of demonstration or any kind of test it's just samo was happy with his opera credentials yeah and that was good enough to give him a job well yeah as we all know is tough training so if you've been through that for more than a couple of years you're probably quite good tough training uh really good spatial awareness you know that sort of thing so you probably found that some hong kong stunt people a lot of hong kong stunt people actually aren't martial artists and or at least back in in the sort of 80s and 90s a lot of them weren't they came from an opera background and they were brilliant acrobats excellent spatial awareness but they had a good foundation to then learn screen fighting i mean i'm not really even sure what um chinese opera is really i have my own idea of what i think it is but i don't know how right i am but i just see it as um it's a lot of acrobatics and there are some sort of live fight sequences right jumping over the spears absolutely stuff you see the wushu people demonstrating with so it lends itself completely to film making you know martial filmmaking doesn't it yeah i think if you look at the beijing opera you've you've got acrobatics and singing and dancing and acting and i think acting is something that people often overlook there's a reason why jackie younbu yunhoi are good actors i mean yoonwar has become this amazing character actor but he's not a stunt guy that became an actor he's a you could say a classically trained actor that became a stunt guy that became a screen actor because chinese opera is the theatrical tradition there's a life on stage performing isn't it and people forget that bruce lee was a child actor that's correct and his father was the chinese opera performer there you go so i think his father was cantonese opera which is a little bit less acrobatic but there are similarities and if you look at one of the big carryovers from chinese opera into hong kong action is not just the physicality but it's the rhythms because if you watch people performing beijing opera and fighting it's done to percussion there's this constant i'm not gonna i'm not gonna do it for you now it could be quite fast and the rhythms change and that carries over into if you look at how jackie chan fights there's a rhythm there's a percussion and i'm sure you're very very aware of it because you've probably also seen people who haven't worked maybe with hong kong stunt teams that try to emulate that style they don't understand that they just go fast because they think hong kong action is fast but it's not it's about rhythm different rhythm yeah i mean when i'm performing fights um i'm working with someone that's maybe a little bit new to it i do have to tell them to slow down and take speed off because they're giving they're giving it everything they've got but what they need to understand is actually it's not going to look better because of that and if you slow down like half the amount of speed it's still going to look quick in the camera they're in their their own heads aren't they but what you need to understand is it's not about what you think it's about how it looks in camera absolutely and yes so we always take a bit off it and you can get closer to each other and work in unison and you work into that rhythm and the timing and also just in terms of like motion blur if you're throwing a flurry of punches and it's all super fast like a professional boxer it's not necessarily going to register on camera because from the moment you fully extended to bringing it back the camera might not have captured that if you look at jackie when he he fights it's almost like he lets it linger there for a fraction of a second before he retracts the same with the kicks it's because how does the camera read that next so this is a this is quite a special sequence i think probably i'm not going to say anything about it while we watch it because i'm hoping you've not seen it and yeah let's watch it and i'm going to watch your reaction i think i've seen that little girl before you see i think i've seen her going through an absolute horror show oh she's such a lovely little cute little girl surely no no harm is going to come to this little girl i'm sure then we'll have to huh oh no that's 22 frames oh my god she's not enjoying that is she there's a real tears oh jesus that's pretty fast oh my god you can tell she doesn't want to be there right you're not saying anything i'm not saying anything until we finish watching i think we need to squirm oh poor little bubba oh look at him like that looks very fast oh i ended up doing that triple threat nice is she actually being hung up by her or she holding on to his as you tell me later i'll tell you later no unions in hong kong nope let's do what you want um you wouldn't get away with doing that nowadays in in the uk and also you wouldn't need to oh look nobody's driving god he's got an interesting looking face doesn't he this guy this film fatal termination is directed by a gentleman called philip koh ko faye who passed away a few years ago he was a martial arts actor and uh action director one of his uh stunt guys that he worked with on this as a gentleman called ridley choi who i was very lucky to work with and i asked ridley about this sequence because it looks it looks insane and it looks really cruel and basically the way it worked and i'm not saying i endorsed this or not i'm just saying this is how it was done yeah is that's a fake arm that's basically scaffolding that's rigged to the body of the car oh right and the little girl is in a in a harness and she's cabled to that bar oh yeah i could see the fake thumb so there's no way that she's going to drop she's basically suspended on a steel cable attached to some aluminium or steel that's attached to the body of that car and then they go for a drive now once again you wouldn't do that in the uk you wouldn't get away with it in fact that shot there that you're looking at right now if i was if i was coordinating this nowadays and there was the budget you'd do it green screen okay so you wouldn't need to have a real road and if you look at some of the behind the scenes of the car chase in the raid 2. when green screen is done well you don't notice it it's when it's done badly now what i would have done if i had budget and it was back in the 80s for that top shot is you can actually and they do this in some hollywood movies when people are fighting on trains and things is you have like a conveyor belt going beneath the actors and it's just a painted cloth that looks like road so that's one way that you can do it but this little girl she's hanging above real road um but what i can say is that she's cabled in she's not going to get dropped it would take some serious mechanical failure or an obstruction in the road like a huge curb or something for her to get injured they shouldn't even bother putting some nice boots on her she's got ballet shoes she's got her belly pumps on i asked ridley about this and he did say the girl's parents were there all the time and the girl was happy all of the time and what you're seeing i'm really crying is that is acting that's some good acting very good acting and hong kong's not known for its child actors she looks like she's absolutely to herself well i mean you know you wouldn't you wouldn't do stuff like that you know in many places in the world and you shouldn't horrible child cruelty you go all right what's the next [Music] that is moonly doing that it's very clearly moon lee on a wire i don't think that's that was ruined so there you go so that first explosion yeah she was in the thick of it yeah i think what they did there is i think they had two versions of that set so this one i think is probably maybe just 15 feet off the ground in a different tree and moonly is just jumping onto boxes and then on this one she's hoisted up on the wire three two one they do the explosion and then they descend her but the way they did uh wired descenders back oh look at that if you watch it slowly i think the stunt guy's hat comes off but then when moon does the overlapping action her hat stays on in the edit you can't tell it is a hard hit bang you would have felt that and i think what you've got there is probably they had like hardboard on the floor on top of uh foam mat so it's not like a fully solid ground that the stunt is landing on but yeah so there's moonly jumping without a wire probably onto you know 10 feet or 15 feet onto crash mats it's definitely got our eyes closed on a cable getting lowered they wouldn't have had fan descenders like they had in hollywood it probably would have been a case that the wire was attached to a rope that was getting fed through a friction wire i think is it would have been two wires um not necessarily a two would be easier for her to keep that body position because you'd go to either either side of the body she's just getting lowered through an abseiling device probably like a figure of eight or something she's not falling at full terminal velocity sort of breakneck speed because then if you stopped her it would give the body an almighty jolt and the wire would probably snap whatever it is catching her up here yeah moving quicker than she is yeah and i think those kind of descenderful look best when they're photographed in slow motion because you're not so aware that the person isn't falling at real speed i mean talk about the metoo movement expected to do what the men were doing back then in the 80s with uh i think it's great because you know when when atomic blonde came out it's great to see people reacting to charlie's terrance she's an action heroine she's doing her fights this movie's led by a strong female character it's great but that's nothing new especially if you look at what hong kong cinema was doing in the 60s 70s and 80s and um i think you know it's great that people like michelle yo moonly were doing a lot of their own action and a lot of stunts and sometimes they get doubled but sometimes the the male stars got doubled they did a lot of work themselves and they did it very well and they were as tough as as any of the men you're expected to do it i think of that scene in is its police story 2 where the uh the love interest i forget her maggie maggie jones being chased by by benny ly it gets hit on the head yeah that looked like a nasty one that was a nice deal i feel kind of bad about that because maggie jung never really positioned herself as an action actor but he was made to do it she was made to do it but moon leaves into doing that shot moon lee did a lot of action movies and she was very very good at it like a lot of action stars she actually came from a dance background but those skills transferred very well to to film there's another movie i think i think you've got the footage of showing some pyro which didn't go very well there's a film called devil hunters which also starred moon lee and in that moonly ray loy and sibel wu are meant to jump away from an explosion and sibel wu who's not an action actress not particularly physical uh got very very badly burned because she's delayed it she's sitting she's sitting in i imagine the pyro technician has taken has pressed that button when somebody said a cue like three two one go as opposed to when he's seen the last person leave their jumping spot it's uh it's not good not good at all not good at all the reason why they call them stunts absolutely you know there is a there is a predicament there where it's like okay it's a bit high and i'm worried to jump yes i'm a bit scared to jump but if i don't i'm trying to get burns not good situations being i i don't want to cast aspersions on any of the crew but i would say that um the way it's shot and edited it didn't need to be any of the actors doing that it could have been three stunt doubles three stomp doubles actually a bit of a crawl uh nothing to do with the stunt going wrong is it yeah the producers basically are talking about what happened which is it's nasty it's kind of a cash-in on on how they let one of their cast get hurt and it's not a case of jackie chan or tom cruise getting a bit injured this is an actress who doesn't who's not known for doing action doing something which i think she shouldn't have been put in that position that's my personal take on it and i would say you could have done that same shot with three stunt doubles and the stunt doubles could have been in head to toe fireproof clothing and covered in in you know heat resistant gel and they they wouldn't have been a great risk it's pretty forceful explosion as well isn't it yeah it looks like petrol has been used and you know petrol is quite unforgiving yeah i know yeah i mean it's burning flipping hell i mean i've done something like that in el gringo and i had it blow up around my feet and i jumped off the roof but it's just one of those ones that it's a flash and then it and then it's powder so there's heat at the very beginning and then it's just a cloud yeah i mean i mean good pirate technicians will be able to give you something that looks like that which isn't very dangerous [Applause] [Music] it's a oh helicopter that's a real helicopter and that's a real jump is that a real jackie though that is a real jackie when jackie is running and he jumps onto the the helicopter in the behind the scenes you can see that he's got a safety wire on okay it's not assisting him it's still jackie chan doing a real jump onto a real helicopter and you can you can see the wire goes up to a pulley on the helicopter and then down and there'll be people pulling to help jackie assist jackie up the ladder as he climbs pulling him from inside the helicopter no no you see the line goes up to the helicopter and then down oh these guys yeah so it's uh they're giving him an assist [Music] [Applause] is it all jackie probably not probably not but he's certainly doing some of it i reckon tom cruise was watching this i do recognize an idea i do i i i'm very confident he was watching this but that looks like jackie chan looks like jackie i wonder with this if there's a helicopter involved for that crashing through the awning or if that was just some crane six foot off the ground wire rig yeah well jackie as we we've discussed is a big fan of buster keaton and i recently re-watched the general and i think this in part was influenced by the general the sequence now when jackie drops onto the train i don't think he's dropping onto the train i think there's a false perspective thing here i think he's falling to the side of the train onto some boxes because uh you see that if he missed that would have been bad news yeah yeah i think because you notice you don't see the grind well wouldn't it yeah that would be an awkward landing bounce out of it crazy moment brilliant forgot about that one of the things that i find stanley tong is interesting as a hong kong action director is i think he's just as much influenced by the bond films and by steven spielberg as he is other hong kong filmmakers i think this sequence has a very much a james bond indiana jones type feel to it i could imagine vic armstrong directing it yeah there's a a group of visual effects guys that break down action sequences yeah yeah and they were talking about this film and they were questioning the use of wires and they sort of said oh you couldn't have used wires back then because you can't paint out wires and it's true that you couldn't digitally paint out wires but you could optically do it which is more of a photographic process and i think jackie was one of the few people that could afford to paint out why i know the corridor guys were saying micho yo can't possibly be on wires because they would have had to paint them out but um i know for a fact she was on work bruce law told me that he saw the behind the scenes of terminator 2 and the motorcycle jump in that and he was like okay we can drop her onto the train using wires so what you actually have is bruce lord doubles michelle yo for a jump and he jumped over the train onto boxes see i've seen that and i thought it was her doing it that's what really amazed me yeah so she's doing a small jump i mean that's that's all credit to her that's a real motorcycle jump but the following on shot is bruce law and then so that's bruce law that's bruce law and he's not going on to the train he's going over the train and that's michelle yo so this is her doing a smaller jump on a moving train yeah but it's not a jump she's levitating on wires you can see the behind the scenes the bike is completely wired okay and the train's going and then they just lower the bike i say just it's it's very impressive stuff they lower the bike onto the train right okay and then the wires get painted out this is a stunt performed by uh a gentleman called ridley choi who's an incredible hong kong stunt man and later on action coordinator director that is like inch perfect that's quite a hit it really is that's an incredible stunt isn't it it is it is i mean one of the reasons why i wanted to share that to to contrast with like the project day and the super cop ones is a lot of people won't know about this stunt it's from a small independent hong kong film it's just a little moment it's not like the stunt of the film but it's incredible the skill involved and um there's not a lot of time to time that to just because if you don't land on the edge you're going to struggle making it onto the other van aren't you yeah that's the thing about it i mean nowadays if you did that you would resort to wires you'd resort to cgi that you could do it but it would be very safe and it would be very controlled one of the things ridley said to me years ago was your skill is your safety and that's a case of there's a certain amount of planning involved you've got obviously the stunt guys wearing pads under his costume i think the van might be tethered to the truck i don't know this for sure but if it's tethered then it's getting pulled at a constant speed and the distance between the two vehicles is constant but at the end of the day you've got a guy jumping off a bridge falling onto his back and doing a spin onto another vehicle it's well if it's tethered and he misses the first place he's supposed to hit and he just goes through the gap then that other bit of the van is getting pulled straight over him yeah yeah or if he doesn't hit the edge of the blue part um close enough to the edge he's just going to roll down in between anyway yeah that's that's it's it's it's it doesn't get any balls here the timing do you think they might have done a few drive runs on to put a mat on top of it and maybe there's no gap there at all you would think so that i imagine knowing where that is in in uh chimsa tray east in hong kong i have a feeling they probably stole that shot right busy streets yeah i have a feeling i don't know if you could shut that down and and you're right the way to go about it would be to practice with maths yeah nowadays if you did it you'd have a safety wire on the guy for sure but um what ridley said was like it took him several days and hours of visiting the location the night before i think he went there and psyched himself up to do it i mean i've done stuff nothing like that where i've had to jump off something onto a moving vehicle and one of the things you can do which isn't particularly scientific is what i call the tennis ball test is when the vehicle reaches a certain point if i let go of a tennis ball where on the vehicle roof does the tennis ball land because the tennis ball is just gravity the tennis ball is going to fall at the same rate of speed as you would will you not fall faster than the tennis ball gravity if if you're untethered if there's no wires you're falling at the same speed unless there's drift or drag which they won't be with a tennis ball no so that can be a way of gauging you know i'm and in a hollywood stunt i don't think it's as impressive as this but in hard target there's that shot where van damme and nancy butler's doubles jump off the train i mean jump off the bridge onto that train yeah and you're just so aware that there's massive gaps between the carriages and like if you miss time that it's bad news yeah yes it's all about the timing isn't there some great stunts in in that film that guy goes over the top of the car that's a great stunt that stunting hard target i think is it's brilliant and then it's an awesome stuff that is amazing the fact that he stands up and starts surfing they didn't need that it's not just that though they win this the stunt guy does like a really ballsy stunt he's on top of that bike the vehicle hits he rolls and they cut to a shot of jean-claude doing like a roly-poly you know and it's like we don't need that oh yeah we didn't need that but also the way he stands up on the bike beforehand yeah i mean it's just better that he's riding the bike and he smashes it and he's got his hands on the handlebars and at the last yeah much better but yeah just just to talk about ridley choi you know he uh he's of a later generation compared to the jackies in the yin views he's a bit younger he's one of the last of the sort of opera trained hong kong stunt guys yeah um and he just amazing spatial awareness he did he got well known for doing hard hits high falls and and then his martial arts was pretty good he did a lot of one-on-one fight scenes and then he moved into directing and there's another stunt that i've sent you um from a film that ridley directed called no regret no return and ridley directed it and uh played one of the characters in the film and um i don't know many uh people that would put themselves in this position where you're going to jump out of a window and use an ambulance as your as the thing to slow you down but that was ridley nice so this is uh tiger cage three which is uh directed by young play can tell because i've seen that move in so many of his movies in fact that's what jet li does in the swimming pool fight that i was in and unleashed ridley is also very tall for for hong kong chinese he's six foot tall so ridley would double for people like terry and fart and some of the taller actors this is the fat dragon yeah skinny tiger fat dragon so that's really kicking him in the face he's got a main streak summer hasn't he come on yeah but the thing is i don't know was that an accident no ridley was one of the choreographers for this film and he told me that he was on the film and he wanted to show like the samohong stunt team guys no no i i'm good i can take it so he he suggested that kick me in the face summer yeah i've got a great idea well the thing is samoa did use then ridley in pantyhose hero to play the main villain so i think samo was impressed by ridley because he knew he could kick him in the face it will [Music] that stunts when he gets kicked off the balcony cracks through the bars but he kind of the virus doesn't really break his fall he just hits the edge of it the bars moves away and he just lands on the back of his head that is an instance i was told it was an ng stun in in that the idea was that he would hit the vars and it would collapse and sort of break his fall yeah so that that stunt in project a2 is it's like a an accident that got included in the film and i'd rather show stuff that people did and didn't get hurt and that went to plan because um i like to say that you know there's a difference between stunt performers and daredevils doing jackass you know i'm not saying they shouldn't have included that stunt as it was because it looked incredible but that wasn't how they designed it it didn't go to plan but they kept it and i think that's the right thing to do i mean it's you know on a very uh less dangerous level doing a fight sequence somebody gets clocked in the face we all know not to stop so if you hit the guy in the face you got to continue because otherwise it's been hit in the face for no reason i'm with you 100 because it's probably gonna look good no i'm with you 100 i'm not saying they they shouldn't have included it i just thought i don't want to just highlight an accident really um what do you think is jackie chan's best stunt i think the clock tower in project a is iconic yeah i think that the end reel of of police story is is incredible and um slide down the slide down the pole but also also that one over the balcony he smashes through that hut yes through the glass over the balcony smashes through the hut that's that looks more dangerous than the other one to me yeah and on um i was watching the 88 films brought out in the uk brought out a new blu-ray of heart of the dragon and there's a lot of behind the scenes of heart of dragon jackie was essentially doing heart of dragon in daytime and then at night time he was moonlighting he was directing and starring in police story and there's one bit in this behind the scenes footage where he's talking to the people about how he got hurt the night before or two days before and clearly he's talking about the ending of police story and he's done his backing by landing on a hard piece of wood so i think it's either that one going over the balcony or the the slide so in heart of dragon there's a couple of moments where he's doubled like yoonbu doubles him for a kick and i'm thinking that's kind of fair enough if you've just been shooting police story and your back's messed up if you need to be doubled for a jumping kick oh craig crazy's done crazy yes yeah oh well he's the man [Music] you

Channel: Scott Adkins

Views: 50,669

Rating: 4.9712958 out of 5

Keywords: hong kong stunts, stunts, stuntmen, sammo hung, jackie chan, yeun baio, yeun wah, project a, scott adkins, jude poyer, gangs of london, the raid, gareth evans

Id: e_Nv7lCoOr8

Length: 66min 58sec (4018 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 15 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/mflulder]

Jude Poyer, long time Hong Kong stuntman and Scott Adkins analyze some famous 80's-90's Hong Kong stunts. Very interesting insights.

[u/MovieGuide]

The Art of War II: Betrayal (2008) (V)

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Action, Thriller [USA:R, 1 h 43 min]
Wesley Snipes, Lochlyn Munro, Athena Karkanis, Winston Rekert
Director: Josef Rusnak

IMDb rating: ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆ 4.3/10 (3,205 votes)

When Agent Neil Shaw comes out of hiding to vindicate his former mentor's murder, he winds up on the trail of betrayal and lethal corruption. Under the charge of his friend and a senatorial candidate, his mission is to set things straight. But when more people turn up dead, Shaw realizes that he's been set up as bait. (IMDb)

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