Interview with Chad Stahelski of 87Eleven - the Fight Team of Ninja Assassin, The Matrix and More! [Part 2]

Showflicks fans!  We have the great honour and pleasure to bring to you Part 2 of our recent interview with Chad Stahelski of 87Eleven, the awesome fight team and choreographers from The Matrix, Ninja Assassin, Rambo and more!  Here is our interview with Chad by Showflicks’ Lorne Gross.

LG: When you were filming Ninja Assassin, did the fight choreography adapt and change as you were training?

CS: Yeah, well you get somebody like Rain (the star of Ninja Assassin), you get him months beforehand.  They don’t necessarily don’t know fighting.  You start choreographing with that in mind, then as he gets better, the choreography gets better so it’s always a changing, evolving process, even on the day (of the shoot) we were changing things.

LG: So you must have a pretty adaptive crew to handle that kind of changing at the last minute?

CS: Yes, I think we probably have about the best fight time in the business right now.  They’ve very good, they’re young, they’re super talented and they practice every day just for such occasions.

LG: Prior to choreography, do you get a general flavour or stylistic indication from a producer or is a lot of that left up to you, in terms of general the general feel of the fighting?

CS: Its different on every show; sometimes you have a director with a very clear vision, sometimes you have a director with a very admissive vision who just wants your help, sometimes you’re brought in to give it flavour, sometimes you’re brought in to carry out the flavour that someone else has selected.  It’s just different for every show.

We like to think of ourselves somewhat as educators, because we spend a lot of time in that world, so if someone thinks they have a vision, they’ll usually ask us what do you think and then we’ll show them a bunch of different things.  You know it’s not our movie, our money, so we try to inform them about all the different arts available, what fits the character and ultimately what the director and producers like.  Once we go there, we go about implementing it and making it interesting for camera.

LG: It looked to me like some of the weapons in Ninja Assassin, like that blade on the end of a chain were pretty unique. I was curious if that was created just for the film, and if so did you have to invent a style just for that?

CS: Yep, that’s pretty much what we did.  We just thought we wanted something different.  We went back and forth with the director to try and get the concept or the aesthetic of the weapons … the director said yes, and then the aesthetic of it, like the actual look or the curve, you know the director and the production designer and the art department, and you kind of rely on (them) and we deal with the functionality of it.

Then we go about creating a whole style, it’s loosely based on Wushu rope dart but then we took our…you know our knowledge of some different styles of Silat and Kali weapons and put that to use. 

LG: And what’s it like working with a CGI weapon?

CS: We’ve done it a lot, since the Matrix actually.  Its all process.  It comes down to a question of the budget.  If it’s deemed safer and more efficient financially to do it CG we do it CG.  If it’s safe and financially viable to do it practical, we do it practical.  And if we want to take it to the next level, then that’s usually involved either in human talent or augmenting human talent with virtual reality or CG work.  So when you get producers like the Wachowski brothers who are very into that world, they had a certain vision for what they wanted this dream to look like and we couldn’t achieve that practically so it had to be done virtually in the CG realm.

LG: I see.  So, you guys must be fantastic.  It’s one amazing skill to do it practically.  It’s quite another skill to be reacting to things that aren’t there acrobatically in a coordinated way?

CS: Yes, our team – don’t think of us simply as martial art guys.  We all are martial art guys but that’s after we go home from work.  We’re professional action or stunt fight performers.  There’s a big difference.  It’s not a question of learning martial arts and then being in the movies. 

That’s something they did back in the 70’s.  Our guys are trained to use what talent they have from every martial art you can think of.  They’re physical mimics.  They take that and then practice with filming in mind.  We don’t practice choreography, we don’t practice our kicks, our moves or anything like that without having somebody with a video camera there.  That is important.  It’s not what we do, it’s what the camera sees that dictates everything we do.  If we don’t get it on film, it doesn’t exist.  There isn’t a move out there, no matter how goofy, no matter how silly, you can’t make look good with a little bit of creative camera work, editing and great performance.  It’s just a matter of where do you put it, it’s situational. 

So our team is trained to make everything they can look good, understand the camera and editing and then try to make those things work for wherever we are.  We train with CG, I mean we shoot our little pre-vis(ualization) videos on everything before we actually film the fight so we already know what we’re doing, we already know what problems we’re going to have and we try to solve those problems with the other departments. 

Our guys are versed to be congenial to wardrobe, to makeup, to hair, to the CG guys, … with green teams, CG weapons, all of that stuff so many times before you even step on set.  That’s why we’ve gone out of our way to find these guys that are so physically talented and so mentally apt to deal with (the demands and requirements of the work).  Like you said, it’s not easy to swing a CG sword around. We can find 100 guys that can do it well with a real sword but how many can make it look good with a CG sword?  Its very difficult.

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