“Killer of Killers” is so awesome, man. I really want to talk to you about the action in this movie, because it’s just incredible. How did you approach the challenge of creating these amazing fight scenes? There are a lot of different fight styles across these different eras. So what was your kind of overarching approach going into that?
I’m glad you dug it in that way. I think to launch it off, I will say, I’m a huge action film junkie, specifically Hong Kong action movies of the ’80s and early ’90s were really my awakening. I think the feeling that people had watching the Star Destroyer come overhead in the beginning of “Star Wars” — which I also loved and was very impactful to me — but that specific [feeling] like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe I’m seeing what I’m seeing,” that, for me, was seeing “Hard Boiled.” For the first time, I couldn’t believe I was seeing what I was seeing. And probably maybe a year or two before that, specific to “Killer of Killers,” was seeing “Akira.” And there’s specifically that move in the beginning of the movie, but the end of the bike chase when Kaneda steps off the front tire and does a kick. It’s a move that is so cool, so inventive, and could never happen really in live-action.
So I was certainly trying to chase that in making “Killer of Killers,” and embracing the medium of animation allowed us to do action in a way that we haven’t in live-action. And I should also say one of the secrets in the recipe is working with The Third Floor pre-viz team that always does incredible action sequences that sometimes we’re able to replicate. I say “we,” as in, me and every other director that’s out there. I’ve been involved with Third Floor for so long now, I’ve seen so much of their work obviously through the things I’ve done, but even seeing other movies or dead projects that never took off, and they do incredible work. And now in animation, we get to see it through to the end without the limitations of … not even the limitations of a camera, necessarily, because we certainly try to be as strict as possible for the most part. Not all the time, but for the most part and making this as if we were making something the way we had always for movie screens and TV screens.
But really just because things arise, problems come up, and a stunt coordinator can’t acquire this thing that you need to pull this thing off, or whatever it is. We were boundless in pulling off our action. We also worked with a stunt coordinator for The Sword chapter that I had developed a relationship with on “Prey” named Jeremy Marinas, who’s with the 87Eleven team. I think he just did the “Ballerina” movie that came out the same weekend. He’s really incredible and helped ensure that the fights were surprisingly authentic for martial arts nerds or historians. They’re fighting with a pretty strict amount of authenticity, in the ways they’re wielding their weapons or their swords in particular. But also coming up with really cool things and allowing me to riff on cool things that I haven’t really been able to unleash in an action sense the way I’d always wanted to, in the way that was burning inside of me in high school when I would go off in a daydream and picture my own Jackie Chan fight, what I would do with Jackie. It’s just been burning inside me and boiling and boiling, and was really allowed to unleash in this movie.
As well as all the other artists that had awesome ideas. Everyone really, there was a lot of like, “Oh, wouldn’t it be cool if we did this then? Wouldn’t it be cool if we did this then?” And certainly I can have the start of an idea. The oner in the Viking chapter. As they are in live-action, oftentimes — not always — certainly for me, oftentimes the oner is a solution to a production problem. And that was a sequence where we needed to have them raid, and we could not afford to build the entire village, but it needed to be a big fight. We needed to show their prowess for the Predator to be able to see how awesome they are and to target them. And the whole thing was building to this raid, and we had some earlier action stuff that got cut for time. So we were kind of putting all our chips on this thing, but we couldn’t show everything. What could we do?
So I just had the idea of it feeling like it’s a football field and we are behind the quarterback in Ursa, and we are charging. The camera is really just locked to her. We can look a little bit left, a little bit right, but we’re really hinged to her. And using that shield in inventive ways. Then someone comes up with, ‘Then she grabs this arrow and [does this]!’, and then I get to say, ‘Then the arrows are filled on the shield, and you can bash them into a face!’ And then someone else gets to go ‘Oh my god, and …’ We’re constantly geeking out and amplifying the sequence.
Did you use any rotoscoping or anything?
No, it’s all hand animated — or keyframe animation, I should say. The funny thing is the pre-viz, and we pre-vized the whole movie in four months thanks to the expertise of Third Floor, and the action scenes for The Sword were mocapped for the pre-viz, but then when they’re animated, that’s thrown away. And just like any animation, it’s used as reference, just using animators looking at themselves doing a thing, or in this case, they now have this great reference of what Jeremy and his team was doing. So yeah, it was always keyframe animated, just with visual reference like any animation was made from the very beginning.