A Fighter's Heart: One Man's Journey Through the World of Fighting (42 page)

Communication is critical between the parties in a movie fight, and you have to maintain eye contact. In a real fight, you don’t do that; or maybe you use your eyes to mislead, look high and kick low, but in a movie fight, you
need
to telegraph your punches, not only for your partner but also for the audience. When Chuck was beating up an extra in the prison kitchen, he momentarily forgot and did what he normally did, which was use his eyes to mislead. He threw a light slap that the extra didn’t expect, and that one, although it landed, looked fake, because the extra wasn’t ready to sell it. Oakley had done sword fighting on
Timeline
and said, “For swords, eye contact is really key, because now you’ve got actors with weapons.”

The other big part of shooting a fight scene is where the cameras are; profile on the actors is the worst, the hardest to sell. You want to be either in front or behind, or at some kind of three-quarters view, so that the camera flattens out the distances and the punches appear to connect. Matt, one of the main cameramen, said, “You always want the action coming at you, move the camera into it. It’s a game of angles.” They do a lot of messing with the speed, the frames per second, too, depending on the type of action, and whether it will be slow motion or ever so slightly speeded up. Normal speed is twenty-four frames a second, and action might be shot at something around twenty, while slow motion is ninety-six. But there are all kinds of in betweens and exceptions, and Mike said, “Certain action looks better at different speeds.”

The shoot continued, unabated, and the whole crew moved from Rosarito to Ensenada, a few hours down the road south, to be nearer to the hacienda. The shoot moved to a fancy vineyard where American owners were making serious attempts at turning this part of Mexico into a wine name. We drove in, down washboarded dirt roads before sunrise, the warm blue of the sun still down below the horizon, the light suffusing and lifting details one by one from the rugged countryside. I remember passing a Mexican man on his bicycle—he paused as we dusted him out (our Mexican drivers would never slow down)—an older man in his mid-forties with a mustache and a hooded sweatshirt against the morning chill. He watched us roll past with utter indifference, and I wondered where he was going at five in the morning, deep in the desert mountains before the sun was even up over
las montañas
. He probably had a family out here in the scrubland, in one of the dirt shacks.

That night, Pat and I were back in Ensenada, working on the trailer fight scene with Oakley, Mike, and Stefanos. Paul and John were going to show up later, for a serious rehearsal.

Between us we had worked it out over the past week, sometimes with Stefanos, sometimes with Oakley, and I had necessarily stood in for whoever wasn’t around. Paul, the leading man who was in nearly every scene, was constantly busy, and when he wasn’t, he was exhausted. Being a movie star isn’t breaking rocks in the hot sun, but it isn’t a cakewalk, either. The shoots are long, nonstop, thirty or forty days of shooting, all of them twelve or fifteen hours long; you have to be present, focused, and powerfully active. The money, of course, is ridiculous; so it’s worth it—but it’s not
easy
.

The fight scene started with Stefanos disarming Paul, and then went back and forth with kicks and punches, head butts and fishhooks, body slams, triangles; the kitchen sink was in there. It ended with a spectacular neck break from Paul, dispatching the monstrous Stefanos. It was something like sixty separate steps, broken down into beats of four or five exchanges, where we would cut, reset, and rehearse the next beat.

Paul and John showed up and we had a real rehearsal. John was raring to go. “If I can’t make the violence rough and raw with you guys, I can’t do it,” he said. We started to go through the scene. Pat would walk Paul through the beats, and then Paul and Stefanos would run them. Stefanos was tough—he was a real fighter—and he moved forward like a machine, massive and forbidding. It quickly became apparent that there were some kicks in there that Paul was supposed to do that he couldn’t quite get right. Pat had put in a little piece of footwork that someone who had trained in muay Thai would be able to do, but it was hard for someone who hadn’t. Oakley couldn’t do it, either. “What about Sam?” he asked. “Sam, you do it,” said John, and suddenly I was in there, doubling Paul Walker. I went through it once with Pat, and then with Stefanos, and it was a lot different to be in there with him—he was big and quick and hard, and I was just trying to remember the moves and get it all to flow. Stefanos liked it. “This guy can do it good, kick me good,” he said in his broad Greek accent.

John, the director and the final word on everything, was far from convinced, and he frowned at me. “We’ll see if we need him.”

Pat was musing to Mike, “It’s funny how Paul is actually pretty serious about this,” referring to training, and Mike replied, “Paul has anger in him.” It made me think about fuel again, in these different contexts, what drives people, especially to fight, to hurt. It is more obvious to me now that fighters were almost all street fighters first, and then they found an outlet in the cage or ring. Rory said he used to go out and get in a fight every Friday
and
Saturday night, without fail, for years. His hands were covered in scars. Nearly all fighters are from broken homes. Pat’s father abused Pat and his mother. “My father was a jerk,” he said, “and my mom was my buddy growing up and I still talk to her every day. She’s a saint. I really want to make enough money to get her out of that crappy house I grew up in and move her to Montana, where she’s always wanted to go. I’ve got to get it done while she’s still young enough to enjoy it.”

Rory nodded. “I’m working to get my mom off her feet, too.” Rory, at twenty-four, was still fighting in small shows, for five hundred bucks a fight; he was eyeing the acting gig with a lean and hungry look. He was tired of being broke, and there is so little money in MMA.

The next morning, we were out in the vineyard again, to rehearse the fights some more and for the free food. Oakley had a scene in which he had to take a horse and jump a fence with a kid on the back of the horse. A very small man named Banzai Vitale was in to double the kid. Banzai was friendly, and I started picking his brain about selling punches.

“The head snapping around is the most important thing to sell,” he said. He looked like a jockey: small, tight, athletic. “Let the body part that gets hit first lead the reaction,” and he showed me in slow motion.

“Let the jaw lead the head, which turns the body. Twist your shoulders to sell it, and then instantly come back to center and reset.” He demonstrated several times quickly, his head snapping around with imaginary punches, his shoulders twisting afterward, jaw slack and snapping.

“If you twist diagonally, you’ll jack your neck, so just twist side to side.” In rehearsing a fight scene, you had to keep in mind that you might be doing twenty takes, so you had to be able to do the moves again and again without getting hurt.

“The most important thing is physics,” Banzai continued. “Every action has to have an equal reaction. The reaction needs to match the punch—if you throw a huge looping punch and I just twitch my head, it won’t sell.”

Banzai helped me rehearse, out in the cold, early desert morning, with horses eyeing us curiously over the high barbed-wire fence. The vineyard owner’s wife bred Andalusians with some Mexican breeds and these were her gentle gray babies; we had a scene with gunshots coming, and I knew they wouldn’t like that. The sun was slowly warming the chilly, foggy air.

“With body shots, shoot your ass straight back with your head up, just a little bump; don’t let your feet get too high off the ground.” Banzai showed me some body shots with Pat pretending to crack him, and Pat enjoyed it so much that he chased Banzai around for a while, giving him body shots, and giggling.

Mike walked up and said, “Now, the advanced stuff is to be throwing a punch when you get caught, so you’re always in the motion of
about
to throw a punch when you get hit—you’re not standing around waiting for the punch, you sell the in-between moments—that’s big-time stunt stuff right there.”

Later in the day, the director walked by, and he looked over and then walked up to me and pushed a lazy punch past my face, and I “sold it” according to how I’d been rehearsing all morning. I really went with it, snapped my head over.

“Well, okay,” said John, but he still wasn’t convinced.

For the rest of the day, we bounced ideas around for the Split-Rock fight, Pat, Rory, Mike, and I (while Rob slept sitting straight up in a metal deck chair). Mike leaned toward chop-socky and flash, while Pat always went with the basics of real fighting, combinations and the Controlled FORCE stuff. Mike would throw in some kung fu–style hand interplay and kicks, and Pat would counter with big heavy locks and the jab-cross-hook. Rory argued that the “real” stuff, the MMA stuff, was why we were here; Mike nodded and simply offered that movie fighting is different from real fighting, and if the action didn’t kick ass, Pat wouldn’t work again. “For this movie, I need cool more than I need real,” he said. “Give me something real
and
cool.”

By the end, we got somewhere, a basic idea of the sequences for all three fights inside Split-Rock—Paul beating Robbie, then Rory, then Pat. Then we went to watch the pool scene, which had a whole bunch of cute little extras in bikinis in the freezing-cold overcast day. Mike muttered to me, “That collaboration wouldn’t have happened on other sets; you’d get the fight coordinator telling you this is how it is, and all you could ask is ‘What do I do here?’”

Late in the cloudy, strange afternoon, with a low marine band of clouds hanging in over the mountains, Rory and I went for a run. Wide-open desert stretched out around us. We pushed on down the dirt roads and headed toward the foothills, past fancy modern ranch houses with massive sculptures out in dry desert fields, and past a Mexican graveyard strewn with plastic flowers and the ornate gilt trappings of impoverished Catholicism.

We turned around and headed back, and the setting sun began to catch the underside of the clouds and gild them silver. Rory started talking a little bit about his hopes and dreams, and he said in his Chicago twang, “I have a passion for fighting and a passion for acting,” his
passion
a long nasal sound. “It’s just that once you start fighting, you reach that stage of intense concentration and excitement; I’m so
pure
when I’m in the final stages before a fight. I can’t give that up.”

Rory asked me a favor. He was broke and didn’t have a return airline ticket—could I drop him off in Iowa when I drove back east? My first thought was,
What an imposition
. Pat had assumed I would do it—I was part of the team, wasn’t I? And I realized he was right. I couldn’t just continue being the selfish solo traveler. I was a part of things, so I said, “Of course. It’ll be fun.”

On the way home, in the van, as everyone nodded off, Banzai sat next to me and said quietly, “If you’re doing it for the director, make sure you try and sell it big-time—because he doesn’t think you can do it. That’s just between you and me. I heard him talking, and he wants to bring in somebody else, so sell everything hard.”

There is a very cowboy “nut-up-and-do-it” attitude about stunts: Don’t say you can’t do it, or your ribs are fucked, or anything—just do it. Can you do it or not? Here’s my chance, I get to double the lead, get my SAG card, make money—just don’t blow it.

The next morning we went to the beach set for the trailer scene, down the rugged, cliffed-out coast. I was nervous as I got my wardrobe and put on Paul’s clothes, just like Oakley. Suddenly I was a part of things. I didn’t say a word, but I felt like everyone could see straight through me as a hack. I sat in makeup and had my hair colored by the crew, a pale blond that didn’t look too far off.

Pat shook his head a little bit when he saw me. “You’re a lot bigger than he is,” he said. Nothing I could do about that, but at least I knew the whole routine better than either Paul or Oakley, because I had rehearsed it with Pat, Mike, and Stefanos more than either of them had, by the pool in Ensenada. I had become acutely conscious of the sell, snapping my head with the punches, lurching with the knees, and snarling when I hit back.

I was called to set and felt extremely self-conscious as I entered the rarefied air of the actors and director and DP—the real movie.

As it turned out, Paul was doing 99 percent of the fight, because(a) he could do it, and (b) the trailer was tight and close and you could tell who was actually in almost every shot. In addition, because of time constraints, they’d cut a huge chunk of the fight scene, from sixty moves down to about twenty or thirty. As Mike had said, “When a movie starts to fall behind schedule, action is always the first thing to go, because it’s not all plot essential.” Action takes a long time to shoot because of all the setting up and taking down for each shot, and multiple angles. You need days and days to get a fight scene right, and there is always going to be compromise. One of the things Mike wanted to do was address this by designing the action beforehand, instead of loosely sketching it and then figuring it out as you went, which is how a lot gets done these days. By designing and having an exact shot list and careful plan, you can save time and money
and
get everything you need. Plus a lot of the time, the directors don’t even know what’s
possible
in stunts.

The kicks were still in the fight, and the little muay Thai footwork for a lead-leg kick that I was supposed to do hadn’t been cut, so I went in and did it, kicking at Stefanos and trying to make it look good. I ended up not having to sell a punch at all. They even did a close-up shot of my feet, there was a little skip kick, but I doubted that would make it into the film. It was somewhat stressful, with the camera crew looming all around, but Stefanos was a pro, and I blocked everything out and just focused on the kick.