Stunts & stunt coordination

that information. And... I remember seeing these dailies and just thinking this was totally dope. It's just like, oh my word, the scale of this, I love all the cast there, all the extras, the characters behind them, it's so good. Yeah, most of them, most of them are actually stunts, loved working with these two and their first day on the movie. Yeah. When they showed up, I handed them a couple of pages of dialogue and said, don't worry,

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the steering in the car, and now the stunt driver is trying to control the car. And it just had a mind of its own. And we added the bus later and just used the shot. You'll see this was a little bit longer. They used to spin around in front of the wedding cake monument. Well, that was it. We were getting a lot of notes about length in the car chase and in the train, and we just kept pulling out shots one at a time. And in the end... There was also, there was a sense that the...

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There was an eight-foot-high sculpture of smashed scooters. And here we are. This is the essence of this chase. For all the energy and all the resources that go into it, the cops, the stunt performers, the street closures, none of it would work without the performance of these two actors. And speaking editorially... And always covering them, almost always, in a two-shot. There were very few single shots. And that means that

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Thank you. Bob, one of the things you said that I want to bring up... I think one of the earliest phone calls, maybe even the first phone call, you said, "You could end the film "right with him riding the bus, defeated, deflated, "and that could be a great short film about a day where nothing went right." Yeah. And that's the attitude that stayed with me throughout. The idea that this is a godsend. This moment of these guys... I think the original plan was to have Ave Maria playing in the background for this moment 'cause it was literally a godsend. It was amazing. That person yelling "bus," the character's Teddy Kuznetsov, played by... Aleksandr Pal. - Aleksandr Pal. And that man right there is Daniel Bernhardt. Daniel Bernhardt is the man who trained me to fight for two years. That guy right there. He's one of the... He's the greatest. He's maybe the best stunt actor working for the last 10 years. Man, he's great. And you might know him from the TV show Barry. And you might know him from the big fight in Atomic Blonde. And you would know him from John Wick movies and Hobbs & Shaw and every other great action movie of the last 20 years, 'cause he's the best, and he's a great actor too. Bringing a lot of character to this whole sequence. But from the moment things got real with the possibility of me doing an action movie, I started to train, 'cause I was a comedy writer for 25 years, and I did a normal workout of any suburban dad.

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Shit. This guy thinks he's gonna beat the crap out of these guys. Anyway, Daniel trained me, guys. I do my fighting in this movie, and I always wanted to do that. I won't say the name of the actor, but I told an actor once, who I like, that I'm gonna do an action movie and that I was training, and he laughed at me and he said, "Why are you training? "They have guys who do the fighting for you." And I was like... I didn't say it to him but I wanted to say, "No, I want to do the action movie. I don't want to just be in one." You want to put in the work. I want to do what Jackie Chan does, my version of it, the best I could do. So I trained for two years with Daniel, and he took me from zero to wherever the hell I am here. But I do this fight that you're about to see, and I had fun doing it. I had so much fun doing the fight sequences. And there are no stunt doubles except for one shot in the entire sequence. Which is... It's one thing coming from me. It's another when... Our fantastic action choreographer, Greg Rementer, he said, "Ilya, enjoy it because you don't get this ever. "You don't get the dedication. "People just come in and they kind of, you know, Stretch a little bit "and then as soon as it gets a little bit uncomfortable "the doubles run in and do the hard work." It was fantastic that every shot, every action beat was done by you. And furthermore, the fact that, you know, we had to cut, and we wanted to make it a little more dynamic than just a steady camera single shot. But we could have done five, six connections in a row, no problem, without cutting away because you memorized the hell out of this whole thing and trained in this very bus. There were moments when you trained, right? Right before the production and prep? - Yeah, we trained in LA. We had a layout of this bus and we trained for this sequence. It changed over time. For different reasons, it changes. There's Daniel and me, head to head. There he is, the guy who trained me. And he's such a great fighter. He's such a great on-screen fighter, and he's such an amazing guy. An amazing, intelligent, upbeat, hardworking, just one of the best people I've ever worked with, known. And he got me here. What else can I say? I love him and I want to make more movies with him and... Then he gets thrown out of the bus. Our hero.

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Can we just talk for one second about our black Russian? Araya. Araya is a great actor, Araya Mengesha. Yep. And he has a great part in here, and he plays it so well. Now, is he a stuntman? - No. He is an actor from Toronto. Yeah. - A great guy. And I give him a lot of credit because he... When I talked to him, I said, "Look, I want him to be... "I want Pavel, the black Russian, to be speaking Russian "and to sound as Russian as possible." Yeah. - 'Cause he's based on... I don't know how to pronounce it. "Amalgamation"? Yeah. - Of a few Russian black guys that I know. 'Cause, obviously, we don't... You know, we're mostly predominantly a white nation. Right. But the story that Pavel, or Araya, the character talks about how he's the son of an Ethiopian Olympian from the Moscow Olympics. That's all... There's a certain group of people in Moscow or in Russia who were the result of the Olympics. Just people came over, had sex and left. And so these hyper-athletic kids from Olympian fathers or mothers, fathers, they grew up with a very different skin color in a country which... People were not used to that in the slightest. So they had a very, sort of, in a way, great experience 'cause they were getting the right kind of attention. But obviously, with the right kind of attention also comes, usually, the wrong kind of attention. So he is based on a real concept. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I said, "Araya, it'd be great if you can, you know, spend some time "and I'll coach you a little bit and let's get the Russian right." And he did. Like, we spent, before recording, you know... Yeah. Twenty minutes a day just going over... - He's fantastic in this. Such a great guy. A joy to work with too. As were all these guys, but... This is a team of people, mostly Canadian stunt people, but overseen by Greg Rementer and Daniel Bernhardt, who did some of the fight choreography, all the fight choreography. Well... - It was Daniel and Kirk together. Yep. - Well, together. I mean, Greg Rementer is this... What is his title here? - I think he's both... He's the stunt choreographer and the second unit director. Yes. Anyway, it was a team effort.

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raises some eyebrows but in general it seems like swords were really just for the wealthy so this raid of the slavic village is one of the sequences that i am proud of and do think is successful it took a lot of hard work C.C. Smith the stunt coordinator

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That's C.C. Smith, the stunt coordinator, as the sword master back there.

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Those extras, stunt guys back there, really look like they're having a conversation, which is nice. Yeah, we don't know where slaves were kept, but, you know, probably some slaves that would be doing household things would likely have slept in the floors of the house, but it's also very likely that some slaves were kept with the animals, and certainly that was a choice that I liked because it seems quite primitive and harsh.

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Nia DaCosta

Help! This, we had a really fun rig on Gordon... Wait! ...In this scene, who plays Jonno. And we have the best stunt performers in this scene. They were just, like, so game to throw themselves around, to get tugged around.

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Nia DaCosta

This was so fun to shoot. This... Our amazing stunt performer, who we lit on fire, I think, three times. And the crazy thing about this, which I didn't know, is basically he gets covered... His body... Like, underneath the costume, he gets covered in something that protects him from fire. And then he gets... puts on the costume, puts on a gel that was supposed to light up. And then he wears a mask over his face so that he doesn't, you know, his face doesn't burn off, obviously, and... But he has to hold his breath for the entire time that he's on fire, which I didn't think about. But obviously, you wouldn't want to be inhaling and burning your lungs to shit. So I was so impressed. And I always am with everyone I work with, but especially him being lit on fire three times, I think, on that night, and then three times on this night, to do the shot that's about to come.

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Nia DaCosta

I love this so much. I think that might have been their actual reaction 'cause I shot them reacting to it the first time they saw it. Put him out! So, Mirren Mack was very proud of herself for doing this stunt, not that one. Please...

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Edward Berger

It was a scene that we had help, obviously, from a lot of stunt people and VFX. And we wanted to create this sense of hell, utter horror.

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But these, man, this is like one of the proudest moments for them. They all did great, but the close proximity shooting, if you've dealt with gunfire, if you're a movie maker. Solid stunt for not being a stuntman. Yeah. Blank fire, proximity, I challenge anyone to beat this. If you do, good fucking job. Hey, come on, man. Giddy up.

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