The Wannabe Stunt Man Experience

I have become reacquainted with my body in new, excitingly uncomfortable ways.

My training regimen, per Yung (who privately pulled Matt aside and, in grave tones, told him it would take a full month to whip my doughy ass into reasonable shape after our session in London) consists of two-hour session of training in the morning and afternoon, Monday through Friday. Thursday afternoons are skipped, to allow for a bit more recovery time.

The week breaks down as follows: Monday is legs, Tuesday is core, Wednesday is arms and chest, and Friday takes on the full body. These exercises are specifically geared towards the needs of film fighting, rather than strength training or sport. That means there are assumptions baked into the prep - that I will be able to rest in-between takes, for instance, means I'm not training like I'm fighting multiple 3-minute rounds of boxing. Explosive action is the key. We eschew static weight lifting with resistance bands and the constant reminder to exit from tense, coiled positions "explosively."

The last time I did anything athletic "explosively" was the last time I was able to lay claim to any sort of physical fitness during my brief but hilarious tenure as a pole vaulter on my high school track team. We vaulters were to uncoil from an inverted state at a reasonable height above the ground and twist into the final stages of a proper pole vault. Essentially, it's everything that needs to happen in between when the pole gets planted to the moment that one guy in the last Olympics got hit in the nuts.

(True pole vaulters, incidentally, know of a much better video depicting that particular injury, as it's not uncommon. This video is a part of the deep lore of Pole Vaulting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5sU0VgeP1Q )

I am a person who discovered, to his horror, that the first two weeks of pandemic hard lockdowns were indistinguishable from any two work weeks from the prior years. This means I lie to my doctor and tell them my physical activity is "the option after 'sedentary.'" As you might imagine, going from not exercising to exercising four hours a day, five days a week is the fitness equivalent of riding the Formula Rossa rollercoaster, a coaster that accelerates so fast that you're given safety goggles because at the speeds it reaches a bug will take your eye out.

Over these past couple weeks, I have noticed a number of things as a new promoted "physically active" adult. In high school, planking for two-minutes was agony. Now, I find myself surprised by how much time has passed when I glance at the clock mid struggle. No wonder - two minutes, after all, is half as long as it used to be half a lifetime ago. My ability to tolerate pain and discomfort has improved. I'm still a wimp, as my blessed few days off are filled with grunts of muscle soreness as I drag my aching bones out of bed, and I dad grunt when I plop into chairs now. But pain has a different dimension - it's less sharp, less immediate and demanding. I know the feeling now as my muscles apporoach their limits. I more intimately understand the feeling of reps to failure. But recovery seems slower. I'm drenched in sweat by the time warmups are finished. My mind isn't as quick or as sharp as my 20s, and I know that.

Donnie Yen, when asked to come up with fight choreography for a span of a sequence, countered: "What choreo? This is choreo." He then executed an expert series of punches, slips, and dodges at fight speed. For him (Jiro Dreams of Punching, perhaps) these movements are effortless, drilled into every fiber of his being from a lifetime spent in dogged pursuit of martial arts. The intricacies of the physical dialogue between hooks and blocks are supremely uninteresting. He instead thinks about poses, keyframes, beats, body shapes, and rhythms. The specifics of the in-between moves are incidental to those guiding principles.

Yung wants a version of that from me. In between the punches, he wants me feinting, step jabbing, circling into blindspots, head ducking and weaving, and never staying in one spot for long. These moments aren't part of the choreography, they should be my instinctual default state. In other words, I need to move at all times like I'm in a fight. Why? So it looks like I'm fighting.

Nearly all actors, I learn, don't train all that intensively for fight stuff (notable exception: Keanu for the Matrix movies). Part of that is the way big movies are setup, the way departments need to maneuver for the vital resources of budget and time. The fight team can easily bring in highly-experienced doubles, who nowadays can be easily face replaced in VFX. This way, the actor gets to say they trained hard for their role, the fight team employs some more folks and gets more time to get things right (because they're not shooting with the A-list talent as a second unit), and everyone's happy in the end. Most actors, when presented with fight training, show up in earnest for the first couple days, then find a reason to skip the rest. I tell Yung I am his guinea pig. For better or worse, I have reduced my entire life as an actor to a simple directive - if Yung says I have to do it. I'll do it.

He wants my character to have a traditional boxing foundation. Therefore, we drill boxing fundamentals - the stances, the punches, the movement, and the footwork. The shape of my body when I jab needs to look right. The arc of my left hook, though modified for film fighting to be more telegraphed and extended so it looks better on camera and the person getting "punched" can see it coming, still needs to be driven through my legs, the muscles of my body firing in correct sequence so it looks like it's landing hard. Once again, I need to throw punches like I'm in a fight. Why? So it looks like I'm fighting.

This past week, Yung returned home for a week and traded me off to SL. According to SL, his long career as a stunt performer taught him that stunt fighting is defined by its rhythms and timings. The cadence of attack, its beats and pauses, are what make a fight. He concerns himself with questions like where pressure is coming from and how it's applied (which in turn defines the footwork.) Who is pressing? Who is being pressed? How does this affect their distance? That gap may tighten as the aggressor throws a flurry of combos, pushing the defender backwards. But towards the end, perhaps the defender creates more space in their retreat, which they slingshot back from and close aggressively for their counter attack. Explosive, explosive, explosive.

I need to retrain my feet. My footwork now needs to address the possibility of 360 degrees of adversaries. I need to throw combinations not just anchored in place, but moving forward, punishing a defender's opening, or backward, or be able to quickly shift to the side into the blindspot of my opponent's jab. With SL, the lack of coordination between my lower half and upper half is laid bare. Advance by throwing a left jab as the right foot moves forward. Right cross, left foot forward. Never the same hand and same leg at the same time. SL demonstrates what it looks like when you throw with the same hand and step with the same leg. His body is flattened by the pose, and he wobbles forward like a stop motion gingerbread man. His silhouette lacks power and dynamics. He then demonstrates the right way. His shoulders twist, the potential energy of the pose is supported by assured, balanced steps forward. I continue to put the wrong foot forward. My brain after every session feels like scrambled eggs as I rewrite the old tape of habits I've settled into from a lifetime of never so much getting into a heated argument, let alone a street fight.

SL has seen his share of street fights - they seem to find him. He tells me, after the weekend, that he almost came to blows at the Glendale Galleria. The Glendale Galleria is an outdoor mall with an Apple Store, a Cheesecake Factory, and a Cupcake ATM. Fisticuffs as the water fountain plays a routine to Sinatra cranked over the loudspeakers seems completely impossible. I am in disbelief. SL shrugs: "Los Angeles is a dangerous place!"

As a kid, SL trained in a Shaolin temple, where the primary objective was "not getting beat up by the instructors." When he demonstrates combos, he closes the distance between us with alarming crispness. "When you fight a guy, you need to move like this," he says as his entire body shifts into my off-side and he rips a brutal-looking four punch combo against my ribs. "Ba! Ba! Ba! Ba!" The entire exchange is done in about one second. The punches look brutal, but they land with a gentle tap. Despite this, I flinch every single time.

He tells me I'm causing him to hold back on me during sequences, even as he throws his big loping movie hooks. He slows himself down because I'm not clean on my dodges, and it's a skill all stunt people acquire when fighting actors. They have to - they can't be clocking the lead. Instead, in these scenarios where they don't fully trust the other performer, they make adjustments to their own movements. He shows me how he alters his punches, leading with the shoulder a bit more in an exaggerated way before accelerating through the sequence, buying vital milliseconds for the actor to remember what exactly the hell it is they're supposed to be doing in that moment. Or, seeing that the actor is out of position, he shows me how he might extend his stumble for a half a beat longer, only proceeding when he knows the actor has arrived at the right place. Whatever it is, he says, you gotta do something. You can't do nothing.

Those "nothing" micro beats, when stunt fighters freeze waiting for a beat to catch up to them or for another performer to be ready, are referred to as "eggs." We have to avoid eggs in our fights. He records our sequences and we watch them back, and he points out my eggs: how I pause a half beat too long before throwing my hook, or how I gawk awkwardly waiting for a punch to come before I parry. Certain movies, he tells me, are notorious in the stunt world for being filled with eggs. I get a peek into the drama between stunt teams, the machismo back and forth. He trades stories of his terrible experiences on set in too-light wardrobe, freezing his ass off on a New York City winter night shoot. It snowed while he was wearing shorts. What's worse, the shorts afforded no places to hide pads. Stunt people "bad set" stories, I note, are leagues worse than "bad set" stories from other cast and crew because they usually involve getting Actually Hurt.

An important technique to avoid getting Actually Hurt is eye contact. That eye contact between performers is vital non-verbal communication to ensure everyone is seeing what's happening and reacting appropriately. My parries and slips need to react to his incoming punches and not anticipate them. I can't simply put my head down and do the moves - I have to see them coming. The distance between a fist and my head needs to be minimized, so the peril is rendered properly on camera. The only time you don't have to worry about watching your partner, he tells me, is when you're doing certain Shaolin kung fu routines. The Five Spears technique involves too many stabs too quickly for two performers to coordinate. In that scenario, you simply need to trust that your partner is dodging as quickly and precisely as you are stabbing the spear towards them. "We're not doing that," he assures me.

My primary problem, identified by both Yung and SL, are my hips. Too easily I slip into a habit of hunkering down between the walls of my broad shoulders and stiffly pummel my fists forward while my lower body remains rigid and locked in place. TikTok knows this is my problem too - I get served boxing footwork drills and sparring videos in a steady stream now. I watch these with greater attention and appreciation than I ever have before. I let them repeat, studying the movements of the fighters, trying to figure out what they're doing to look as good as they do. The way their left knee torques and drops as the hook uncoils, the way they're balanced 60/40 on the back foot, how lightly they shift their body around, bouncy but unpredictable. Most impressively, I now see how despite all that movement from their upper bodies, they still sequence their uppercuts properly, throwing from the feet, flowing through their legs and hips. And most of all, how relaxed and loose and flowing it all comes across.

So every day, the list of things I think about expands. Relax my shoulders. Get on the balls of my feet. Tuck my chin. Look. Look! Look where the next punch is coming from. Time the slip, shift my head from the centerline, bring my torso forward and to the right, towards the opponent and not away. Hunch the shoulder, so the shoulder eats most of the punch if my slip is off. Hands up, all times. Transfer weight to the other foot, which loads me up for another duck under the next hook, but now I'm a little late, and I've compounded the error thinking about it. Discombobulated, I slip into what would be a career-ending overhand punch from SL, but always in control, he freezes before making contact. That would've been another blown take caused by thinking too much. Takes here are finite - I know now well the physical resources depleted each time you call Action, and how it affects the movements on camera. This is another bad habit I have - stopping when I screw up. I have to push through, because the rest of the take might be usable. I can't freeze or I'll get hit by the next punch for real. Stunt guys, after all, don't get to yell cut. Continue fighting, remerge with the choreographic stream, finish the combination to the end.

Suo, brow furrowed, deep in thought, invents combinations for us to drill. "Just for fun," he says, "Like we're dancing. Loose. Loose!"

I shake out my shoulders, settle back into my stance, engage my core, and we go again.

-fw