an interesting newsBIrth of a Ninja Movie
30 NINJAS: James McTeigue, the film’s director, said that the Wachowskis came up with the concept of the film while talking with you and your company. Were you part of that discussion?
CS: Well, I guess it all started when we began shooting Speed Racer in Berlin at Babelsberg Studios. My partner, Dave Leitch, and I were over there — we often work with Larry and Andy [Wachowski] on most of their [movies], as their stunt coordinators and choreographers. It was our job to teach some of the cast to do some of the funnier fight scenes in the movie and train the cast on some fight choreography and techniques. A couple of weeks into production, Larry introduced us to a Korean pop star named Rain, who I’d never heard of before. At first Rain wasn’t initially included in much of the action sequences, so Larry asked us to take a look at him and give a quick little evaluation of what he could do. Dave and I already had our work cut out for us, so we were like, “OK, we’ll give him a move or two and see how he does.” We thought, just give him some loud sound effects and all will be good.
So Rain comes in for the first day of training, and he picked up not one, not two, not three moves — he picked up everything that we threw at him, very, very quickly. Granted they were very easy motions, but he moves like a professional. Rain was still getting his English going, and a lot of it was still through a Korean interpreter, and Rain was also very, very quiet and very shy to us at the time, but it became very obvious that he had immense physical skills. So in the next couple of days in training we started pushing him more and more. More for our own amusement, to see how far he could go and how good he really was on the outside parameters of his talent. Well, two weeks later, we still hadn’t hit those outer reaches — he was picking up choreography, he had a fantastic memory, and his energy and performance were fantastic. His martial arts were a little rough on the edges — but physically, he was capable of doing anything that we threw at him.
So we went to Larry and Andy a couple of weeks later to show them the rehearsal tapes (we had shot a little rehearsal, not really related to Speed Racer, just to show them how good he was). At the time, Larry and Andy hadn’t seen how good he was either; they had just met him somewhat formally. So we showed the tapes to them, and they were like, “Wow, he’s really good!” And we were like, “Yeah, he’s really good. We should give him some more stuff in the movie.” So we ended up doing a couple of different fight scenes, and granted, Speed Racer wasn’t a fight movie, but we tried to put in a few little things to show off Rain’s physical promise. Well, as time went on Rain continued to train with us, even after he’d shot his sequences, just to have fun and get a little time off set. We’d known Larry and Andy since the first Matrix movie, so we’d always joked about doing one of our favorite types of movies: We liked Bruce Lee movies, we liked comic books, and we like anime — and everyone loves ninja movies — and we’d love to do a ninja movie. Larry always said, “Ninjas, ninjas are great.”
So a couple weeks later, after we’d worked [even more] with Rain, we went back to Larry and Andy after lunch, and said, “Hey, we think we found the guy for your ninja movie.” And we showed him more tapes of Rain doing his thing, and we talked about it, and then that was all that was said. Speed Racer wraps, and about a month and a half later, we get a phone call from Larry Wachowski: “Let’s do a ninja movie. We’ll keep it small, and we’ll do a fun little ninja movie. We’ll bring all the guys back, and we’ll have fun.” And that’s kinda how it all got started. They got James [McTeigue] on board, and they started doing the writing, and we started getting our stunt team together, because everyone wanted to make it very much a stunt and fight movie, and we got in some of our best guys through our company.
30 NINJAS: Rain’s character, Raizo, was brought into the clan as an outsider. How does his fighting style differ from the rest of the ninjas? Is he just a little bit better than everybody else? Or is his character, his identity as an orphan and an outsider, somehow expressed in the way he moves and fights?
CS: I think you’ve hit on something good there. I think Raizo, he’s an orphan, just like most of the people inside the orphanage, and Rain knows pretty much the same techniques as all his other brothers. But what keeps him apart is that he doesn’t finally give in to just being another sheep. He doesn’t give in to what the clan really stands for; he tries to maintain some level of humanism and some level of identity, and it’s through that and through his persistence that he sets himself apart. I think deep down, after Raizo does his first assassination and he realizes he’s not who he’s supposed to be, I think the tenacity that he shows in his fights and his fighting style is very much derived from him trying to stay human and to be who he really is. You know, he wants to feel love, he wants to belong to something, but that’s just not what the clan stands for. So I think it’s just his tenacity and his willingness not to be part of the clan that makes him just a little bit better. He’s fighting for a cause instead of just fighting.
Exclusive: Ninja Assassin Stunt Guru on the Film’s Blend of HK and Japanese Fight Styles and How Its Fight-Prodigy Star Was Discovered
If you’re fired up to see Ninja Assassin, the stormy, dark-hued Wachowski Brothers fight film that crashes into theaters November 25th, chances are it’s not because of the unconsummated love of two teenage heartthrobs with windswept hair. Let’s just be honest: It’s the action, stupid.
Put simply, the action in Assassin is going to rock. Rain, the film’s Korean pop-star lead, may seem at first blush a bit of a Timberlake wannabe, but the fact is, the guy is a total martial arts prodigy. He performed virtually all of his own stunts and completely owns the many fights in the film. What’s more, you’re going to be able to tell it’s Rain himself bringing the carnage, not a stunt double, because this fast-paced, bloody, and acrobatic film is an homage to the old Hong Kong movies, with longer takes, wider lenses, and less dependence on wire effects — all of which allows for more focus on pure martial arts skill and beauty.
This emphasis on kicking ass old-school was driven home repeatedly by Chad Stahelski, a stunt coordinator and second unit director on Ninja Assassin, when he spoke at length the other day with 30 Ninjas Editor-in-Chief Julina Tatlock. Chad knows Assassin up and down, since it was he, along with his business partner in 87 Eleven Dave Leitch, who originally pitched Rain as the star of a ninja movie to the Wachowski Brothers (The Matrix trilogy).
The Perfect Recipe For a Bloody-Good Ninja
30 NINJAS: Can you tell me a little bit about your perceptions of the fighting techniques that go into making a great ninja fighter?
CHAD STAHELSKI: A lot of that is the perception and the tone of the film. If we were making, say, a very historically accurate or very realistic movie, the reality of the situation is that one guy dressed in black clothes, probably even in Japanese feudal times, wasn’t going to take on a whole regiment of samurai and survive — it just wasn’t going to happen. So we take a little creative leeway in making a ninja movie. What we wanted to do on Ninja Assassin, in terms of the fighting styles, was to show off more of the human talent, [make it] more of an ode to early Hong Kong films, where it takes a little longer in between cuts — a little less like The Bourne Supremacy. We had longer takes and a little bit wider lenses, so you got to see more of the action. In Ninja Assassin, you get to see Rain actually be Rain, and do his thing, [fighting] our stunt guys.
We thought the ninjas should be physically very well adapted to all kind of things, like acrobatics and sword works. We tried to keep a very distinct style of kinjitsu, which is a Japanese sword art, in our stunt guys’ movements, and we combined a little acrobatics and a little bit of Hong Kong-style reactions, just to give it a little bit of flair on top of the grit. To do that, we just brought in some of the best guys that we could find in martial arts choreography. I guess you’d say we tried to give it a very Japanese flavor with the sword work, at the same time sprinkling in some of the Hong Kong elements and some more of the American elements, as far as a little more rough-and-tumble and a bit bloodier.
30 NINJAS: But there’s a slightly higher survival rate for the heroes of the film …
CS: Yeah, exactly. We just made Rain be a little bit better than everyone else. One of the mottoes for all the heroes and in all the choreography that we do here at [our stunt company] 87 Eleven is: We really beat up our heroes a little bit. We’re not big fans of trying to make Terminators out of them all. We like our heroes to get beat up and still overcome, and they take punches, and they still give back twice as good as they get. So at the end of the movie, that’s why you see Rain completely bruised, battered, and cut up and bloodied.
30 NINJAS: If they’re not touchable, it takes away the jeopardy of it, and the seriousness of the fight. You want to see the reaction of the hit — whether it’s a good guy or a bad guy getting hit.
CS: Right, like when Rain jumps knowing he’s gonna make it, he jumps because he has to jump. He fights because he has to fight. He’s trying to find time for Mika [his lover], or he’s trying to escape; he’s never just gonna stand in the center of a room and wipe out 20 ninjas. There’s a purpose to him. He’s trying to get away, and you know he’s barely getting by, by the skin of his teeth.
http://30ninjas.com/blog/exclusive-ninja-a...stunt-guru-rain
Ninja Assassin training http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgADoe4Xqmw
