Fighter's Heart, A

by Sheridan, Sam

  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” st
uff, 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.

  That was it, just a few minutes of work, then Paul was back in there. As I walked off the set, the AD shook my hand and whispered, “Congratulations, you just got your SAG card.” And made $719, the day rate. I asked Robbie if it looked okay, because he was a guy you could count on for the truth—Robbie didn’t care about your feelings. He nodded, and I sat and watched the monitors as Paul and Stefanos battled through the trailer, growling and roaring. I had a new appreciation for the way Paul took the hits, and Stefanos did a great job of acting; he really seemed enraged and frightening. He also had had a rough day, I’d leg-kicked him a little too hard (even though he’d asked me to) and he’d had to walk it off, and then he got smashed by Oakley several times into some cupboards made of balsa wood that didn’t break as they were supposed to, and then he got burned on the stove. He laughed and said he felt like he’d been in a fight, but he was glowing with happiness and from exertion by the time the shoot ended, late at night. Because we went so long, I got overtime pay, too, which put me up to around $1,500, basically for sitting around drinking coffee all day and doing fifteen minutes of kicks. It’s why everyone wants to be in the business.

  * * *

  We wrapped the trailer scene and went back out into another part of the desert to shoot Split-Rock, the huge fight scene between Paul and all the boys. I had been standing in for Paul for most of the rehearsals for this, too. Mike talked about the differences in the planning stages of action; he had just done Elektra, and the female lead, Jennifer Garner, had rehearsed the fight scenes for three months before the movie started, eight hours a day—one scene had a hundred moves and five attackers with bo staffs. On Bobby Z, there just wasn’t the time. Pat and Mike had originally hashed out a big fight scene that went up and down the rock, with a ten-foot fall for Paul and Pat, and the director wisely wiped that out with a few words, because he had two days to shoot the entire sequence.

  The Split-Rock set was a huge man-made rock triangle, placed out in the middle of a plain, in what felt like high desert but was only a couple of miles from the sea. Mexico was heading into winter like the rest of the hemisphere, but it had been a dry fall and a fire had started, and from the set the entire southern horizon was covered in roiling smoke, blowing out to the ocean. It was low scrub ground with very spotty fuels, and so I reassured anyone who was worried, as the smoke billowed up in black gouts across the sun, that we were in no danger—the entire plain was a safety zone, and the fire was miles downwind. But it was close enough to be spectacular, and as the sun sank, to turn the day a dreaming red.

  It was Pat and his boys’ chance to shine, and they did. Robbie, who had been sleeping all day, suddenly came alive. “He’s a game-day player,” said Pat. He looked great moving and coming around the rock with murder in his eyes. Paul dispatched him with ease.

  Rory was next, and he came hard with his knife, but Paul was up to the challenge and disarmed him, beat him to picking up the knife, and slashed his throat. That was the first day.

  The morning of the second day, I dressed as Paul again, and doubled him for the close-up of
Rory getting his throat slashed. I watched what he had done on the monitors and then tried to match it, while keeping my face angled away from the camera. It was hard to remember everything in order, and to also use the gag knife, which had a blood bulb in it—I was supposed to squeeze it as it went across Rory’s throat. (The effects guy laughed and said this technology was straight out of 1930.) It took a few tries, but finally we got the shot. There is a fair amount of stress in doing action live for the camera, because you want to nail it, get it right on one take, and sometimes you just go on and on getting it wrong. Rory did a terrific job selling the knife slash, his eyes darting from his head.

  Then it was Pat’s turn, and they battled back and forth until Paul caught Pat in a leaping triangle and elbowed his face about a dozen times. The director had the makeup guys put a thin trickle of blood down Pat’s nose, and I thought, Man, his face would be busted to pieces—it would look like an exploded tomato. Paul’s elbow should have been red with blood, too. That scene was the most impressive for Paul’s commitment: He and Pat tumbled all over the place, they went up and down and up and down in the dirt, banging and smashing. “Movie stars don’t do that,” the AD said. Paul had wanted to make it good, and he wanted to hang with Pat, and Pat felt the same way. They pushed each other and got down and dirty, and by the end of the second day they were both exhausted and beat up.