In my time as an occasional culture reporter, I’ve come to expect strange days at work.
This one, which involved a round trip to Burlington and flipping a grown man to the ground, might be one of the strangest.
The film “Fight Another Day” follows a cop, played by Eric Johnson (“Fifty Shades Darker”), into a dystopian future, where he must fight different villains throughout history in order to return to the past. His roster of enemies includes a gladiator, a samurai warrior and a cowboy, and the film boasts a number of star performances including Jim Belushi and Martin Kove (“The Karate Kid”).
James Mark, writer and director of the film, has an extensive background in stunt work (he was a stunt double on Toronto gem “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” in 2010). Growing up surrounded by fighter movies, he knew he wanted to make them one day.
“I started with karate, then transitioned to taekwondo,” he said in an interview on the set of “Fight Another Day.” “We grew up watching all the greats — Jackie Chan, Bruce Lee — and that inspired me to get into film. I started as a stunt double.” (The craziest stunt he’s ever done? A drop from 40 feet with no airbag.)
What some might be surprised to learn is just how much preparation goes into getting a stunt ready for filming. On “Fight Another Day,” Mark worked with his team to break down the script and design “base choreography.”
“We shoot the fight with the edit in mind,” he said. “We don’t shoot the entire fight from one angle, then another, then another: we’ll go from punch to punch and decide what looks best from each angle … and then on the day of the shoot, we copy that and we go in chronological order. Any time there’s a cut point, that’s a new shot. So we can move very quickly that way.”
While CGI-enhanced stunts have become something of an industry standard, Mark has a personal appreciation for “practical stunts,” or stunts performed without the help of a computer or editing.
“It’s the old-school way of doing it. But I still lean into that direction a bit more,” he said.
The time travel element of the film came from wanting to see as many different types of fighters as possible onscreen. Mark was determined to make it happen.
“We wanted these warriors from different time periods to fight each other and we landed on time travel to do that. Of course, that brought its own complexities to the project and, as we know, there are some very, very serious time travel movies,” he said.
Johnson, too, grew up with action movies and dreamed of starring in them as a kid.
“When I was thinking about this career as a kid, it was always the idea of doing an action movie, something really physical with one-liners and stuff,” he said in an interview.
“I saw ‘Fight Another Day’ as a challenge … it meant I wouldn’t be spending all that time in the gym for nothing! This was an opportunity to try something definitely not in my regular wheelhouse, and to challenge myself and hopefully walk away without too many bumps and bruises,” he continued.
“I’m surrounded by very, very talented stunt performers. I feel like I’m in a super band, playing rhythm guitar, just trying not to screw it up. Everybody else is so good … it’s a testament to how professional and how prepared everyone’s been for this.”
Film producer Bruno Marino spoke in an interview of the enduring fan base for genre films like “Fight Another Day.” According to him, the “genre space” very much still exists.
“Marvel movies dominate the theatrical space now, but then there’s all the streamers like Amazon, Netflix and whatnot. So there’s a place for independent film to exist, which has given us opportunities to not only rely on traditional formats like video-on-demand or DVD,” he said.
“There’s someone out there for every movie. It’s just a matter of getting it to them. Half the battle is getting the movie made and the other half is getting it seen,” he continued.
Christina Ochoa, who plays Isabelle in the film, agrees: even for what some might consider a niche or a genre film, there will always be an audience there waiting for it.
“I did a show a while back called ‘Blood Drive’ and it was very much a genre,” she said in an interview. “But that audience was so fervent, like diehard fans … if enthusiasm is the new metric, genre still has it.” Ochoa grew up a fan of old-school fighter films like “Total Recall” and “True Lies.”
The other crucial part of getting a film made, beyond finding a target audience, is engaging a knockout cast. Kove, best known for his appearances in the “Karate Kid” franchise and now Netflix’s “Cobra Kai,” was eager to make a futuristic movie.
“I liked how this one was written,” he said in an interview. “The written word is everything … you can rarely make a bad movie from a great script. You can have a fair script and make a bad movie, or a good script and a bad movie. But when you have a great script like this one, and the words are terrific, rarely are you gonna kill it in production.”
Kove fosters an enormous reverence for classic Western narratives (his ringtone is the theme from “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”), and appreciated that “Fight Another Day” incorporates elements of the Western genre into its storytelling.
“My dream is to rejuvenate the Western,” he said. “My whole world is the West … kids today don’t have a hero. I think they need a hero. And heroes of the old Western cinema, the American heritage of cinema, I want to emulate that — I’m not a writer, but I can produce, and I can act. We can bring back the genre to the kids who don’t know much about it.”
The best part of making a fighter movie?
Teaching an unsuspecting journalist how to flip another human being.
Mark and stunt man Dylan Rampulla showed me how exactly a stunt is filmed: first, you mark out the choreography. The person getting “hurt” (not me, in this case!) is generally the person doing the most work. For this stunt, Rampulla showed me how he’d react to my “punches,” and even though I knew I wasn’t hitting him, it looked completely real.
Then, after our “fight,” I got the honour of “finishing” it by bringing him to the floor. Mark and Rampulla showed me how to move so that the flip would look real — really, Rampulla just did a front aerial while I did very little.
“Audiences are inundated with special effects and all these huge, very costly scenes that you see,” said Mark.
“But I think, because they’ve seen them so often, that the audience just kind of yawns at this point … we don’t need those effects. We have the great story.
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