One of the fun things for me is to create action and suspense sequences and part of that immense fun is doing fight scenes. Jackie Chan is one of my idols, I consider him to be one of the greatest filmmakers and an unmatchable artist performer that is on an unreachable level by the current crop of stars,or anyone before him. To see what I mean, go watch ARMOUR OF GOD and WHEELS ON MEALS.
For RAHANA I had an idea of how I wanted the fights to play, but because of the complexity of the scenes and the time I had to complete them while shooting other scenes, I had four fight choreographers involved in this (Phil Mawdsley, David Blakwell, Fraz Awan and Nathan Levis).
So when I attempt to create a fight scene, I like to have some rules set in place for the fight choreography: Do it in one take or attempt to make the shots as long as possible, the longer the shots, the more intense and believable the fight is. Check out a lot of Jackie Chan’s classic movie work and you will see what I am talking about. The other rule is to have a McGuffin a device or object that is the goal of the fight. And another important rule, is another layer, maybe some emotion, maybe humour, or destress or remorse or all of those things. Make the acting performances strong.
The scene you are about to see is a fight scene we created for the movie RAHANA which has the rules I set above. The McGuffin in this scene is a GodGun carried by a monk played by Jimmy Elizaga and the three villains who are going to fight him are played by Phil Mawdsley, Nathan Levis and Charlotte Askew.