Epic Fight Scenes
That's the thing a lot of people talk about is that huge elaborate fight sequences. You're sitting down to develop and write season two...was there a sense of urgency in saying, "We have to go bigger. We have to do more elaborate fight pieces?"
Not necessarily more elaborate, but we just have to make sure that we continue to raise the bar of what we're asking of our fight coordinators. That's the case, I think, on any show. For us, our fights always have to tell a story. You never want to just have token fights. You never just want to say we're 15 minutes into the episode, it's time for a fight, and just have people do a bunch of martial arts and have a fight.
Every fight has to come out of a character need, and every fight has to actually tell a story. Once you sort of make that your mandate, it becomes less about how do we top last season, and it's more about who's fighting with whom and what's at stake. I think that's really what fuels the fights as opposed to we need more flying kicks.
That said, we did say a big part of this show has to do with the iconography of Bruce Lee. It was really important to me that we continue to celebrate the iconography of Bruce Lee, so I made sure that somewhere in season two, Ah Sahm gets his hands on a pair of nunchucks.
You mention Bruce. I know you are a kung fu fiend, but is this the type of situation you require the room to go back and watch his stuff for inspiration?
No. I don't think you need a room full of kung fu fiends, but I did have a room full of pop culture geeks and a room full of action movie geeks and people who really just appreciated some of the shoulders that the show was standing on. If I was ever talking about a particular moment that I wanted to use as an inspiration, right in the room, we would just find it on YouTube and project it onto the wall and discuss those things.
It wouldn't be good if we were all kung fu fiends in the room. You need different kind of writers in the room. We had playwrights, we had genre writers, we had more character writers. It was kind of a mix.
You mentioned earlier, fights have to tell a story. I'd like to know more kind of about your process on that front. How in-depth are you for writing these scripts? Obviously, there's a stunt coordinator, a fight coordinator, and all that. Do you script out every punch yourself, or do you leave it up in part to the coordinators?
I do script out every punch, but that doesn't mean that's what we shoot. I script out the entire fight so that my stunt coordinators get a very full understanding of what the story I want the fight to tell is. Brett Chan was our fight coordinator, and he's one of the best in the business. Brett, in addition to his very strong martial arts background, he's been doing this a long time, he has a really good understanding of the script.
What will happen is I will write out the whole fight, but those guys won't just shoot what I write, because they're much better at this than me, so they'll take the intention... but by writing the whole thing out, I give them my intention. They'll then take the intention and choreograph a much better fight.
It's a collaboration where I'll write it one way, Brett and Johnny will choreograph it a second way. I'll look at what they've choreographed, make a few comments based on where I think maybe it's moving away from something, and then we'll end up with the final fight. It was a very easy and fluid collaboration.
Have you ever run into a situation where you scripted something so over the top they're like, "No, we have to tone this down a bit?"
I've never heard any fight coordinator ever say to me, "We have to tone this down a bit." Once in awhile, they'll come to me and say, "The particular actor you're writing for won't be able to pull that off, and we want him to do this," or "That scene you're writing,"... I kind of had a rule, I didn't want any wire work on the show. I felt that our martial arts had to be very grounded, and I would occasionally write something, and Brett would say to me, "That's going to require a wire, but we can do this instead," and he would show me something much more grounded, brutal, and cool. It was that kind of collaboration.
Once you've done the first few episodes, you get a pretty good sense of what you can and can't write. My attitude was always to try to go for broke in the script and then let the reality come after that.
C. LeeSuperherohype Administrator
Lily Adler#forthecontent! 📹 (she/her)
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