Paul W. S. Anderson Quotes

An action choreographer is kind of like a dance choreographer. You choreograph the moves and you let the director, cinematographer take into positioning their cameras.

The way you present a stunt is tied in to the way you photograph it, so you're hanging out with the cinematographer.

I admit that I've been beaten up so many times in films, but we do not fake it - we actually have to fight when we shoot to make it real and to save film and time. Even the props that are not real, like the bats are plastic, but they're still very hard, so it still hurts.

With the fight scenes, they would take a video camera and shoot alongside the camera so we would piece it together on the computer and had an extremely rough cut of what we were doing.

You really get to direct the movie three times when it comes to the action sequences and the set pieces.

I have stage combat training from college, which is drastically different than fighting for the screen, but I do enjoy that kind of stuff.

In Hong Kong, particularly, we craft this art for decades. The action choreographer actually is the action director. He takes over and he choreographs with - by himself or with his team, and place the camera where he feels cinematic effect to bring out that choreography.

If you know how to shoot a scene, then you know how to shoot an action scene. If you've seen an action movie, and you watched it, and you paid attention to how scenes are constructed and where the camera is and how the camera moves, then you know how to do it.

Some directors are interested in acting, and others are only interested in cranes and moving the camera.

In certain fight scenes in 'Raging Bull' - for example, the shorter ones - I literally just took the head and tail of the shot and put it together, and it all worked beautifully.

'Raging Bull' was just a dream to work on, but it took a lot of work to get all those fights to work right and incorporate them properly into the story.

I'd never really shot action scenes before, but I realized early on that is very much like shooting choreography and dance.

Everyone realizes when it comes to fight scenes, that's gonna be my wheelhouse.

[In acting] I like the fight scenes because you don't have to remember lines.

I take bits and pieces from every director. I'd say Sylvain [White] and Nimrod [Antal]. They were more about teaching me lens sizes and depth of field and how to move the camera and lighting. I do want to direct and I didn't go to film school, so having a director that are very much hands on that way and looking to let me learn, that is a key factor.

I don't like reverse-angle shots - I find them very fake and very untruthful to the viewer.

I've always been athletic and a dancer, so I love doing fight choreography.

I think a shot can actually influence a scene in a huge way. For example, comedy is always better in a two-shot. What's between the characters is what's funny. So you learn about these things as you go along.

I'm always excited to do the fight scenes.

I had a rope around my waist, and the rope was attached into the helicopter in case I fell off. And the shot was a shot that began with Kim Novak going out of a house and getting into a bus. Then it was supposed to go over the countryside and find a freight train on which Bill Holden was standing. And then after seeing a good look at the freight train, the camera was supposed to move up into the sky for the end credits.

I think you can say a lot with the movement of your camera but you can also say a lot by keeping it still.

I see an incredible abuse of close-ups in many films these days. Why is that?

To shoot a decent fight, you need to cover all the different angles, and it ends up eating a lot of days.

I've done a bit of live action before but the fight sequences, the wire work and the physical regime were taken to another level [ in Doctor Strange].

Doing all the rig work and the stunt work has actually been wonderful. It's a whole new skill set that I've learned that I'll get to take onto my next jobs. We get to do that all the time, the fighting and the learning new moves. It's quite exciting.