Action Choreography Quotes

I worked for Sam Peckinpah on quite a bit of action in his films, and he got excited once in a while.

Stunts have to be meticulously arranged. Choreographed. You could take a fight scene and set it to music.

On 'Black Lightning' I have a stunt double who's a lot younger than me. The fighting style on the show is heavily martial arts-based, and I know boxing; I don't know martial arts. I also have a really bad knee, and he's been doing martial arts since he was 6 years old, so I'm not thinking, 'No, I can do that! I can make that look cool!'

The fight scenes in 'The World's End' have a certain balletic quality to them.

Shooting a fight is like shooting any other scene. You have to tell a story using a very specific choreography.

On his fight scene with Hugh Grant in Bridget Jones: It was a delicious experience.

Sword fighting in film is not about how good the fighter is, but how good the actor receiving the blows is.

We're under Rigan Machado, who I think is one of the best jiu jitsu instructors at least in Los Angeles, if not in the world. We have a lot of his instructors here, as well as Japanese jiu jitsu, Japanese judo, and sambo. That was Keanu's [Reeves] recipe [in John Wick 2].

CROUCHING TIGER is nevertheless a gloriously big epic, starring the Hong Kong action stars Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh in a visionary adventure where the characters seem set free from the force of gravity.

With every action oriented or adventure film, there's going to be a moment when every actor becomes a stuntman and every stuntman becomes an actor. You try to do as much of it as you can, but inevitably the studio wants you to finish the movie. So you've got to slow down and you're really got to defer to your team to make sure you do.

As much as you do get beat-up doing even small action sequences, it's incredibly fun.

Just movies in general. It's such a wonderful business as much as you feel, you are fine tuning your craft, every movie is a completely different challenge. Every fight sequence is different. Every action set piece. I enjoy that.

Coming from an action background, I always approach the action sequences in any script as kind of placeholders.

They don't mind getting punched in the face and, more importantly, they don't mind punching other people in the face. I'm just about the movies; I enjoy the dexterity of actors in action movies and the choreography side of things. You've just got to be a different person to be a professional fighter. I train with professional fighters so I know what it takes. It's a very difficult profession, probably harder then the acting profession.

I'm in professional wrestling, which is what I do for a living. I coordinate stunts. I memorize them.

I just recently realized. It's very strange. But doing fight scenes with Kate [Beckinsale], I was little bit more cautious. You can go harder with a guy, which I don't mean as an insult.

Since I do seven different styles of martial arts, I don't foresee myself fighting the same in any two movies. I think every fighting style should fit the character that's doing the fighting.

You'll still work with some directors where that doesn't happen, and sometimes it's out of necessity because you're in a really complicated, choreographed fight scene and the whole thing is being prevised in a computer, so it's been decided months before, but I think that's sneaking into the way action scenes are shot.

It's always fun to do the fight sequences and then to complete them, because some of them are quite complicated - with guns and so on - and there's always things that can go wrong. It's fun to shoot those things because we rehearse them very strenuously. It's fun to shoot them, and fun to know they're finished, that they're in the can so to speak.

If you're not flying people around on wires, and you're only allowing them to do things that people can really do, it can't go on for very long, because eventually somebody gets the drop on the other person and then it's over.

Vic Armstrong is, of course, a legend

I think what we want to do is - when we choreograph, when we design choreography, we try to take it from a character standpoint first. Obviously you write a script and it's like, a Jason Bourne or a John Wick or something like that, you don't start choreographing double twisting wire moves and backflips, or doing the splits. You try to keep it so it fits the character, or the tone of the film.

For a lot of explosions and stuff like that [in Transformers] you're harnessed to something getting swung in the air or dragged onto something or thrown onto something.

Mads [Mikkelsen] and I have a really epic brawl - a week shoot, lots of rehearsal - and he was just delightful. He's a dancer and a gymnast so he knows how to plant the moves. He was always saying, "Are you okay?" When you've got that level of mutual consideration you form a family very quickly.

I think it's much harder to have a long dialogue scene than an action scene. An action scene is long, but it's not really hard. It's kind of boring, really. It looks good at the end, but to shoot it, it's not the most exciting thing.