1 ACTION JACKSON
“You want a war, or do you want to just give me a gun?”
EIGHT YEARS AGO …
When the original John Wick knocked audiences on their collective asses back in 2014, they really had no idea of the Sturm und Drang it had taken to bring the ambitious action film to life or the intricate planning for the elaborate stunt work, balletic gunplay, slick noir-infused aesthetic, and kinetic editing. Despite all the challenges that stood in the way of its box-office success and all the elements that would eventually converge to distinguish John Wick as the defining action film franchise of the second decade of the twenty-first century, the first week of filming had virtually no action to speak of, though it did deal with an issue that would have far larger reverberations on the fledgling franchise than anybody could have ever imagined.
BASIL IWANYK
(producer, John Wick: Chapter 1 through Chapter 4)
We shot about four or five days in John Wick’s house. We probably should’ve shot only about two days in that house, but we shot a lot. When you’re starting out on a movie and everyone’s like, “Oh shit, this movie’s not going to work,” and your first week of footage is Keanu brooding in his pajamas around a house, getting a dog, and pouring coffee and looking longingly out a window, you’re like, “Is someone going to shoot somebody? What’s going on here?”
The first action scene in the movie, people come in and try to kill [John], and he kills the people that are in the house. It’s the first attack. I was like, “Holy shit, this is incredibly cool! The somersault and this and that. Damn, this is fucking unbelievably cool.” And I remember that night we had the cop coming to the front door. It was played so straight and played so tonally perfect, I’m like, “These guys get it. They don’t just get the action but they get the joke. We’re making something absurd, and we’re leaning into it.” They didn’t just go, “Okay, we’re making fucking Gone with the Wind. We’re making a fun, insane graphic novel that’s self-referential.” And that’s when I knew that they had figured out the tone. Because the thing about directors and movies in general is that the tone is the hardest thing to hit. Tone is the end result of so many little and big decisions. Then, when you see it laid out, you’re kind of like, “What???” Or, “I hope it gets better in post.” This time, between that action sequence, which was so badass, and then him talking to the cop, that was when I was like, “Okay, this is going to work.”
RAY MORTON
(senior writer, Script magazine)
The story’s structure is really clever. If the film didn’t open the way it did—with a bloody and battered John pulling up to the vet’s office in the battered car, which tips us off that we’re watching a thriller or an action picture—for the first twenty minutes, we would have thought this was just a drama about a grieving man coping with the death of his beloved wife. After things take a darker turn when the Russian creeps he meets at the gas station invade his home, kill his dog, and steal his car, we might have still assumed we’re watching a standard drama—perhaps about rising crime in the suburbs. But then Aurelio recognizes John’s car, and Viggo tells Iosef who Wick is. At that point, we would have realized this may not be a standard drama after all. And then when Wick wipes out the team of assassins sent to kill him, we would have known for sure we were not watching a standard drama. But even though the opening scene has already told us this is going to be a thriller or an action film, nothing prepares us for the Continental.
Once Wick passes through its doors, we realize that the movie has just left our reality and has entered an alternate universe where anything can happen. From that moment on, we have no idea where this movie is going to go, so just hang on tight and wait to see where it takes us. All of this works so well that I kind of wish they cut the opening scene, because then the movie would have been even more surprising than it already is.
BASIL IWANYK
My theory was there are so many action movies, and the premise is really familiar: “Oh, you killed my wife,” which we’ve seen about a million times. “You’ve killed my brother, you’ve killed my dad.” Or it’s something kind of exotic. “I was a Navy SEAL in Afghanistan, and I got betrayed.” Or, “I was a cop, and I was a DEA agent, and you killed my partner.” Something that 98 percent of the audience really doesn’t know how to understand it. And movies labor to evoke emotion. I thought to myself, Oh my God, what if someone killed my dog and stole my car? I didn’t go to the dog part. I always went to the idea of the wife’s dying, leaves the dog to the husband, and says, “You need to keep loving in your life, start with this.” That was the element, that was the memory of his wife, and then that’s killed. To me, anyone could understand that. Anyone could emotionally empathize with it. It’s so tactile and down to earth. People who wouldn’t ordinarily watch an action movie would go, “Oh my God, don’t mess with my dog. I’d go off.” And we got a lot of that. It was the clear love of Keanu and what he pulled off with his wife and his dog and his despair—the audiences loved it, and they put themselves into it.
DEREK KOLSTAD
(screenwriter, John Wick: Chapter 1 through Chapter 3)
I struggled a little bit with the dog, because you both wanted it to be the dog, but also it’s the symbolism of the dog, but also it’s the excuse of the dog. It’s those three things. When we initially met with directors, there were a lot of directors who loved the script, but were like, “No, it can’t be the dog; it has to be his whole family.” And to us, it’s like, “You’re kind of missing the point.” That’s not even the dog lover in me, it’s like, “No, it’s not just the dog, but it’s the dog.” We struggled with the dog for the longest time. Even in postproduction, like, is it enough? It wasn’t until the first screening, where we watched the audience watch it, that we were like, “Nope, it’s the dog. It’s just the dog. And we love the dog, and every motherfucker who killed the dog should die.”
* * *
118 YEARS EARLIER …
What could be the first major action scene committed to celluloid arrived in 1896 in the form of the film L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, known famously in English as Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat. This fifty-second-long silent effort was created by Auguste and Louis Lumière, the pioneering French brothers who helped give birth to what we know as moving pictures. Seven years later, in 1903, The Great Train Robbery was made by Edwin S. Porter for the Edison Manufacturing Company. In the film, a band of outlaws rob a steam locomotive, flee across mountainous terrain, and are finally defeated by a posse of locals. In a story that could very well be apocryphal, the action of the film’s train robbery and subsequent gunplay coming directly at the screen was enough to so terrify audiences that had never before seen a movie and send them fleeing into the streets outside the cinema.
The Great Train Robbery ushered in the audience’s fascination and obsession with action movies. From the early cliffhanger serials of the thirties and forties to the spy adventures of the sixties like the James Bond, Matt Helm, Derek Flint, and Harry Palmer films, to such gritty crime thrillers like The French Connection and kung fu epics of the seventies like Enter the Dragon, muscular, high-octane, testosterone-fueled smackdowns of the eighties like Predator and Rambo, and the new age of action in the nineties with the dawn of Hong Kong cinema and the Wachowskis’ The Matrix, they simply couldn’t get enough action on the silver screen.
And there have been myriad iconic cinematic moments in the genre over the decades, from the introduction of James Bond, the only gentleman agent with a license to kill … and thrill … in 1962’s Dr. No, as well as Clint Eastwood’s iconic Man with No Name in the spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone, to the arrival of archeologist-cum-adventurer Indiana Jones in 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, Arnold Schwarzenegger vowing “I’ll be back” in 1984’s The Terminator, John McClane yippee-ki-yaying his way through Nakatomi Plaza in 1988’s Die Hard, and Jason Bourne fast-cutting to fame in 2002’s The Bourne Identity. But nothing has come close to matching the balletic gun fu of the revolutionary John Wick film series.
Arriving on the scene in 2014 as portrayed by Keanu Reeves, in less than a decade John Wick has kicked, shot, hacked, and pencil-stabbed his way to the top of Hollywood’s action heroes. Driven by revenge and regret, Reeves’s “Baba Yaga” has enshrined itself as one of the most iconic characters and action performances in cinema history.
RIC MEYERS
(author, Films of Fury: The Kung Fu Movie Book)
I don’t consider the train movies as the first action movies, because they were about novelty rather than the action scenes themselves. But there are so many silent films of the early 1900s that have been lost and so many I haven’t seen that I can’t actually be sure that there wasn’t at least one balls-to-the-wall nonstop action short amongst them. But because Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton didn’t really hit their action stride until 1917, and Douglas Fairbanks really didn’t hit his action stride until 1920, I’m going to have to go with Pearl White and The Perils of Pauline in 1914 (as well as her imitators). Those were not about the novelty of moving pictures. Those were all about action!
* * *
It was also the beginning of the action movie cliché: the helpless dame in distress tied to the railroad tracks and in desperate need of rescuing. With the advent of the twenty-first century that trope has been largely eschewed in favor of kick-ass, resourceful female protagonists like Rey in the Star Wars sequels, Captain Marvel, and Charlize Theron’s world-weary but relentless Lorraine Broughton in Atomic Blonde. Even in 1999’s The Matrix, Carrie-Anne Moss’s Trinity was an action heroine who could give as good as she got.
JONATHAN EUSEBIO
(fight coordinator, John Wick and John Wick: Chapter 2; stunt coordinator, John Wick: Chapter 3)
It’s kind of weird, but it almost feels like it goes full circle. If you look at, like, old Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton movies, they’re doing mostly all their own action. I grew up on Hong Kong movies, so I grew up watching Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung—all those guys in Hong Kong. So you’re looking at guys who are doing long takes and long performances in camera. Same thing if you look at the MGM musicals and things like that. Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly—all those guys—are doing long takes of physical action. So I just think everything came full circle again. Now, when you started getting into, say, The Matrix and The Bourne Identity, you’re starting to see A-list kind of Hollywood actors doing Hong Kong–style action, which to me, man, they’re just doing all the fight scenes. They’re doing long takes and training to do everything like Jackie and all those guys were doing in the eighties. Prior to that, it’s Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and those guys in the twenties to thirties, thirties to forties. You look at what Jackie did, and it’s the same as Buster Keaton, who was hanging from a clock high above the ground.
GLEN OLIVER
(film historian)
To properly assess the deployment and consequences of action in film, one has to make an almost silly existential assessment of what action really is. Action is not just a mechanism to accomplish x on-screen. It’s an innate, essential component to our very existence. The first narrative film arrived in the second half of the 1890s. By 1903, we had The Great Train Robbery, widely regarded as the first “action” movie. Meaning it took less than a decade for the action film genre to begin forming. There’s a reason for that: I’d suggest that it’s because humanity has always been determined by action and inaction, thus it has always been instinctively drawn to action through various avenues. It feels purposeful, involving. Natural, in a way. As soon as opportunities come to deploy that familiarity into a new medium, it happens without hesitation.
RIC MEYERS
It all started with The Great Train Robbery in 1903, which culminated with the iconic shot of a cowboy shooting a six-gun directly at the audience. From there, action films were carried on the strong shoulders of Westerns, comedies, and swashbucklers. Silent-screen gunslingers like William S. Hart and Tom Mix brought law and order to the Wild West; Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd (and many others) did astonishing acrobatics to get laughs; and Douglas Fairbanks flew, fought, and performed amazing stunts as Zorro, Robin Hood, and The Thief of Bagdad long before color film and sound ever entered the motion picture. But some of the now forgotten, but then unforgettable, action occurred in silent cliffhanger serials, starting around 1910. In such multiple-chaptered adventures as The Perils of Pauline, The Exploits of Elaine, and the more than a hundred (!) episodes of The Hazards of Helen, daredevil damsels in distress boggled the audience’s minds until sexism reared its ugly head.
Even though male heroes took over by the 1920s, the stuff that stuntpeople were doing are still jaw-dropping when viewed today. At the time, they were creating an entertainment industry and empire, so no safety rules seemed to apply. More than a dozen serials a year were released, each around fifteen chapters long (making the finished film somewhere between four and eight hours), until the 1950s, introducing movie lovers to Flash Gordon, Tarzan, Dick Tracy, Captain Marvel, Captain America, Batman, and even Superman.
GLEN OLIVER
In my mind, “action cinema” began the moment audiences were enthralled and impacted by what they saw on-screen. Given the nature of film and filmmaking in its earliest days, this was most likely something we’d perceive to be mundane today. For example, footage of a train. While not unique in and of itself, it would’ve been remarkable and affecting because of the way it was delivered, the context in which it was being viewed by audiences unaccustomed to such presentation and technology. The capturing of a discernible, demonstrative action, that was then conveyed to audiences in an unexpected or compelling way. Would this not be a fundamental mission statement for any art or storytelling? And an expectation of most visual narratives even to this day?
JASON CONSTANTINE
(president of coproductions and acquisitions, Lionsgate)
Somebody can make an argument that Buster Keaton’s The General is an action movie. If you’re talking about The Great Train Robbery, there’s an argument to be made that it’s an action movie. So then the question is, “How are we defining the action genre?” Are we defining the action genre in the context of when the industry started talking about it as a genre? There’s thrillers, there’s mysteries, there’s rom-coms, there’s dramas, there’s comedies, there’s sci-fi—these have been well-established genre terms for decades. And then all of a sudden, you have the action genre start to become the action genre in the eighties in terms of the industry. So when is the birth of the action movie? I would say that nobody was talking about “action” movies until the eighties.
RIC MEYERS
When sound was introduced around 1930, cowboys such as Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and John Wayne still had a place, but the wiseguys who got much of the attention were gangsters like Little Caesar and The Public Enemy (both 1931). Beautifully balancing out their villainy was Errol Flynn, taking over Douglas Fairbanks’s mantle as the king of screen swashbucklers in such classics as Captain Blood (1935) and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). Once Hitler started to try taking over the world, war movies like Flying Tigers (1942) went shoulder to shoulder with Westerns like Stagecoach (1939) and swashbucklers like The Sea Hawk (1940) to keep the home-front action fans satiated. Not surprisingly, the burgeoning Japanese movie industry had a bomb dropped on it by the end of the war, but it’s tough to keep a good samurai down, so they popped back up in the 1950s—as did, also not surprisingly, Godzilla and a whole slew of atomic-born action-packed monster movies.
MIKE HOSTENCH
(deputy director, Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival)
Most fast-paced “cliffhangers” or “theatrical serials” of the 1930s and 1940s would be the beginning of film storytelling with a high dose of action aimed to thrill the spectators.
RIC MEYERS
The 1960s were all about James Bond and his knockoffs. In fact, just about the only action films that compared came from the other side of the world, with Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo in 1961 in Japan and Chang Cheh’s One-Armed Swordsman in 1967 in Hong Kong. It wasn’t until 1968 that Steve McQueen’s Bullitt took advantage of Sean Connery leaving his 007 role that there was room for another cool action hero in filmgoers’ hearts.
* * *
To explore the rise of the genre, one has to look back to one of the greatest defining moments in action films—although at the time few realized it—in the form of the arrival of Ian Fleming’s James Bond, in the persona of actor Sean Connery, in 1962’s Dr. No. That film, which followed by three years Alfred Hitchcock’s brilliantly inventive and influential spy adventure North by Northwest, starring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, and James Mason, ushered in a whole new transformative era for action in movies with its sophisticated wit, breezy pace, and action set pieces such as the classic crop duster sequence and the final confrontation between Grant and a young Martin Landau atop an iconic American monument, Mount Rushmore.
DANIEL CRAIG
(actor, “James Bond”)
Director Marc Forster and I had a long conversation when he came on to do Quantum of Solace. We’re both big fans of the early Bonds, but also of the movies that they spawned in the sixties. They had a direct effect on movies all over.
PHIL NOBILE JR.
(columnist, Birth.Movies.Death.)
Nineteen sixty-two’s Dr. No offers lo-fi, smaller stakes than you might expect from a movie that launched a fifty-five-year film series, but Connery was never better in the role than he is here. Thirty-two years old, all sex and danger, Connery immolates the then stereotype of the wan, prim-and-proper British film hero, invents the action star and maybe the action genre, and changes film history forever.
JAMES STRATTON
(author, Hitchcock’s North by Northwest: The Man Who Had Too Much)
North by Northwest brought lavish production values, attractive leads, and glamour to what had been grittier, film noir–like narratives. Also, unlike the more cerebral, complex narratives of le Carré, the emphasis was on a series of loosely connected thrill-ride adventures.
JAMES CHAPMAN
(author, Hitchcock and the Spy Film)
Obviously, Bond would go to some wild places that Hitchcock never would have, but, given North by Northwest, does it feel like a natural progression for Hitchcock from his spy films to, at the very least, Dr. No and From Russia with Love? I think the look and style of the early Bond films were very strongly influenced by North by Northwest. Most spy movies in the 1950s, in Britain and Hollywood, were relatively low-budget, black-and-white affairs. Supporting features at best. Hitchcock’s film demonstrated that the genre could be mounted on a bigger, more spectacular, A-feature scale.
PETER HUNT
(editor, Dr. No, From Russia with Love, and Goldfinger; director, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service)
Of course everybody has forgotten it now, because we’ve all fallen into that idiom in the way of presenting films—we always cut films in the way I did Dr. No—but at that time, that was something completely different to do. If you looked at any films made before 1961, even American films, they always have the guy walking down the steps, through the gates, getting into the car, and driving away. We don’t do any of that anymore. The fellow says he’s going, and he’s there. You cut to the chase, which is what I did in Dr. No in order to make it move fast and push it along the whole time, while giving it a certain style. Now, of course, that style is standard for everything.
TERENCE YOUNG
(director, Dr. No, From Russia with Love, and Thunderball)
Nobody had ever cut pictures the way we did the Bond films. Dr. No and From Russia with Love were an absolute breath of fresh air in the cutting rooms. Even director David Lean, who’s one of the best cutters in the business, used to come and watch From Russia with Love on the Moviola while we were cutting it. He was cutting Lawrence of Arabia in the next room at the same time and often used to say that he wished we could swap films.
STANLEY SOPEL
(associate producer, Dr. No)
Peter Hunt hadn’t been the first choice as editor, but right away, we could see he had the right feeling for what we wanted to do. I remember shouting matches between Peter and Terence Young and other directors when he implored them to keep the scenes short and avoid long speeches. “This is an action picture, not Shakespeare!” he would tell them.
LISA FUNNELL
(author, For His Eyes Only: The Women of James Bond)
The Bond films are among the first in the action genre, and over time, they become more action-oriented. The fight sequences in Dr. No are very short. They usually center on combat between Bond and a single opponent or small group. The fight sequences are short, ranging from five to thirty seconds (if that). And the fighting style is straightforwardly American fisticuffs. Over the course of the franchise, the fight sequences become more complex, pulled from a greater range of fighting like kung fu in Man with the Golden Gun and athletic/sport like parkour in Casino Royale traditions, and the duration of the sequences increases.
* * *
One of the landmark action scenes in cinema (and most enduring) dates back to the second James Bond film, 1963’s From Russia with Love, and the violent fight between Connery’s 007 and Robert Shaw’s Red Grant aboard the Orient Express that showcased what separated Bond from other big-screen heroes at the time. It’s an adrenaline-fueled battle set within the claustrophobic confines of a train cabin with revolutionary editing by Peter Hunt.
PETER HUNT
[Director] Terence [Young], I think, was a little nervous, because it was the second one, and he wasn’t sure how it was all going to come out. He soon overrode that, and the confidence came back, helped, in no small way, by one of the definitive fights of all time on the train. The carriage was built on the set, and we had three cameras filming that scene, which was great. It took a lot of manipulating in the cutting, but anything good almost always does.
STEVEN JAY RUBIN
(author, The James Bond Encyclopedia)
It’s one of the most bloodthirsty examples of hand-to-hand combat ever filmed. With Richard Maibaum’s script linked to Peter Perkins’s choreography, it was James Bond at his best.
RIC MEYERS
The fights in Dr. No, even the climactic one with the metal-handed title villain, were frosting on the action cake. The train fight in From Russia with Love was clearly the central highlight of the entire film. Everything that comes afterward pales in comparison. Director Terence Young apparently wanted to do the sequence as Hitchcock would have done it—a supposition supported by his choice to have no music, bathe most of the scene in blue light, and have villain Red Grant break the train window so sound effects would flood the compartment.
BOB SIMMONS
(stunt arranger/stunt double, From Russia with Love)
If you look at that scene over again, you will see it isn’t so much the action, but it is the sound effects: everything builds up, and it isn’t so much the visual action as what you’re listening to.
RIC MEYERS
Not surprisingly, the result is a landmark classic in the annals of action cinema.
STEVEN JAY RUBIN
With increased attention to style and pace, the writers began, for the first time, to lose sight of Fleming’s Bond. If the novels had at times resembled comic strips, they still included their brief studies of a man undergoing extreme pressure. Fleming’s Bond went through typical middle-age hang-ups. He had health problems, bouts of sexual melancholy, an obsession with drink and cigarettes, and doubts about his own effectiveness as a human being. He was human, and he fought against an inhuman world with his own wits and a few surprises. With Goldfinger, the Bond writers created a new agent, an indestructible man who would survive any situation. It was no longer a question of whether Bond would survive; it merely became a case of which button he would push or what he would say.
RICHARD MAIBAUM
(screenwriter, Goldfinger)
It is true that with Goldfinger, we were getting wilder. The whole business was becoming larger than life. We also took into consideration the audience’s growing sophistication. We dared to do something seldom done in action pictures, by mixing what was funny with what was serious.
TOM MANKIEWICZ
(screenwriter, Diamonds Are Forever)
I think what turned the Bond pictures around—and long before I got on them—was that Aston Martin DB5 in Goldfinger. I think the minute Sean pressed the button for the ejector seat and the audience roared, the series turned around. The audience saw outlandish things they had never seen before, and the natural response of anybody—a writer, a filmmaker—is to give them more of what they want. And there’s a constant pressure, as the films gross a great deal of money, to make each one bigger and “more” than the last. That car was the first enormous piece of hardware that just opened the dikes. After that car, anything went. If you could believe that, you could believe anything.
* * *
And today, six decades after the James Bond films were first released in theaters, the audience still believes, as evidenced by the twenty-fifth 007 adventure, No Time to Die, which pushed the action of the venerable franchise to new heights including the reintroduction of a fully loaded Aston Martin, first introduced in Goldfinger, equipped with machine guns, a staple of the Bond series. The importance of weapons to the Bond films, and any action movies, are made clear with the way almost every 007 film opens: the iconic gun barrel sequence where James Bond steps out into a gun barrel, turns and fires, striking his target, who begins to bleed out to the strains of the classic James Bond theme. And Bond would be as naked without his iconic Walther PPK as the myriad Bond girls he has bedded over 25 official films. The Walther being as important to James Bond as the Winchester was to a myriad of Western heroes or the tommy gun to the gangsters of the classic Warner Bros. gangster films.
RIC MEYERS
Guns have always been a part of cinema. One of the most iconic images in movie history is the close-up shot (if you’ll excuse the expression) of a cowboy firing his six-shooter straight at the camera at the end of the landmark, pioneering 1903 film The Great Train Robbery. But from then on, especially exemplified by the serial and series Western movies and TV shows from the 1920s to the 1960s, the gun became a magic, never-emptying, rarely accurate device used predominantly to fill time by adding action sequences and eliminating the need for a more complicated, nuanced solution to any conflict.
HARVEY O’BRIEN
(author, Action Movies: The Cinema of Striking Back)
The complexity of what was being said with that gunplay was greater than the vocabulary of the standard Western variety, though. Think of the classically impassive face of Schwarzenegger compared to, for example, Chow Yun-fat. There’s always something else going on.
RIC MEYERS
Having fired every weapon available during my years writing Dirty Harry novels, I quickly realized just how inaccurate Hollywood’s depictions of guns were. I can think of no film in the entire history of cinema where guns’ recoil, shell shards, deafening sounds, and burning heat are made part of the slaughtering experience. And never have I seen a movie moment when a hot bullet casing being ejected from any automatic weapon ever hit a bystander.
AUSTIN TRUNICK
(author, The Cannon Film Guide: Volume I, 1980–1984)
Those films taught audiences that firearms and the damage they cause—the breaking glass, the spurts of blood—can be oddly beautiful. They brought a visual poetry to gunplay that was absent before. With American action films of the eighties, the most aesthetically attractive things on-screen weren’t the machine guns or rocket launchers but the shirtless, supremely chiseled actors firing them. The biggest action stars of that time looked like statues carved by Michelangelo, but with assault rifles tucked under their biceps. The Hong Kong films, on the other hand, gave viewers something to look at beyond the howling muscle-heads of American action films and trained their cameras instead on the choreography of chaos.
RIC MEYERS
By the time armory-fueled, muscle-bound heroes began to proliferate in the 1970s and ’80s, the guns changed their magical attributes and began to grow in size and complexity—seemingly to mirror their steroided owners—although their basic use remained the same: to shoot projectiles that never seemed to run out. However, to continue to bolster the filmmakers’ apparent desire to avoid nuance, reality, and complications, they also appeared to be featherlight and supremely simple to use. There were extremely rare exceptions—such as the low-budget cult film Gun Crazy in 1950, where the doomed lovers had a more complex and obsessed relationship with the power these devices gave them, but they still used them with relative ease and were generally guilt-free about it. It wasn’t until 1961 that the true, core, seed of “gun fu” premiered in, of all places, Japan.
* * *
Japan had a much different relationship in cinema—and life—with their bladed weapon of choice, samurai swords, considered extensions of the person themselves as opposed to simply an instrument of death. As a result, everything one did with them was infused with a personal weight, unlike the casual, even impersonal, dependence on guns that cowboys had.
RIC MEYERS
The samurai sword had to be used in close proximity to the target and, unlike bullets, always cut deep—figuratively and literally—having a lasting effect on both the cutter and the cuttee. Not so the gun, at least according to the vast majority of flicks the West made. In those, mowing down masses seemed extremely easy and with no aftereffects. Unlike America, Japan frowned, to say the least, on guns. To the point that any Nippon filmmaker who wanted to use them on set had to build their own in the prop and special effects departments. That reflected the real-life historical Japanese perspective on the things, which the samurai class disdained as too easy. They perceived their warrior state, which lasted from the 1100s to the 1970s, as cultured, disciplined, and honorable, so all their conflicts and duels had to display superior sword skill rather than simply taking the easy, high-caliber way out.
Naturally, World War II complicated the country’s world cinema contributions, but then Akira Kurosawa revolutionized the chambara genre with Seven Samurai in 1954. Although it was remade in America as The Magnificent Seven in 1960, it wasn’t until Kurosawa’s 1961 samurai classic Yojimbo (which was remade as A Fistful of Dollars in 1964 Italy) that the gun fu seed began to bloom—because the difference between an impersonal action film with guns and a gun fu movie is the user’s relationship with their weapon. But what made the gun fu seed truly blossom came the following year with Zatoichi, directed by the vastly underrated Kenji Misumi. Zatoichi was a blind swordsman, masseuse, and gambler, not a samurai, who used his cane sword as truly an extension of himself. The beautifully, emotionally made movie led to a hugely popular film series that was virtually unknown in America but wildly influential in Hong Kong, whose kinetic, pervasive action cinema was just taking shape.
Yes, the gun fu genre was growing, but 1963 saw a direct descendent to a certain John Wick appear, in the form of an alienated half-breed ronin named Kyoshiro Nemuri—alternately known as Son of Black Mass or Sleepy Eyes of Death. Nemuri, the debauched redheaded spawn of the rape of a Japanese woman by a Nordic missionary, traveled Japan during the 1800s taking on all comers in the vain hope of finding someone skilled enough to kill him. By then, the sluice was well and truly open, and the following years saw the cinematic introduction of James Bond (who started every film with a gun barrel targeting him), the continuation of the Fistful of Dollars films, Sam Peckinpah’s gun orgy, 1969’s The Wild Bunch, Clint Eastwood’s gun-rhapsodizing Dirty Harry in 1971, the 1972 appearance of the rule-breaking Itto Ogami in the Japanese Baby Cart films (a.k.a. Lone Wolf and Cub), and John Rambo’s First Blood in 1982 when things were still personal. But still, true gun fu was not yet visible.
MIKE HOSTENCH
We all know that the martial arts/kung fu movies started in Hong Kong during the silent 1920s, and you can have a taste of it on YouTube. Most were stories glorifying folk heroes like “gung fu”/“wu-she” master Wong Fei-hung, practically the inventor of “gung fu” and the man who inspired Bruce Lee to follow the path of Jeet Kune Do. With time, the “gung fu” became kung fu and a genre in itself. Nevertheless, and while in Asia, period kung fu movies were extremely popular, Bruce Lee and Jimmy Wang Yu in the early 1970s are the first kung fu superstars on a global scale.
RIC MEYERS
Kung fu movies weren’t considered action films in the West. Like so many movies before them, the studios/critics looked down on them, prime examples being all the kung fu films being labeled the stinker-and-skunk of the week on the Siskel & Ebert review show. They were considered action films in the East. And, in fact, are the very definition of action films in that if their action was removed, there’d be no movie! Also keep in mind that studios/critics needed to distinguish between the kind of action movies they were, hence Westerns, cliffhangers, kung fu, et cetera.
Hong Kong cinema was simply carrying on in their tradition of melding kinetic style with emotional substance. They took the stunning athleticism and acrobatics of ballet with the emotional content of opera. They also took the internal/external, mental/physical, martial/healing aspects of their centuries-old kung fu techniques and gave it cinematic form, pitting talent against talent and style against style. Be it Monkey versus Snake or Drunken versus Tiger or hundreds of others. Sadly, the efforts of some Western producers, seemingly fearing for their own bottom line and homegrown action directors, did insidious things to diminish the Hong Kong action influence. But even beyond those racist efforts, it would be hard to grow a genre that required a majority of its stars to be as skilled as Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Bruce Lee, and Jackie Chan. And the birth of the gun fu genre came with John Woo and A Better Tomorrow. Everything else followed, including Ringo Lam and the great Johnnie To.
JONATHAN EUSEBIO
When I first watched A Better Tomorrow while I was in high school in the mid-’80s, I felt, “Wow, this is martial arts with guns.” I’d never seen that before. I used to walk around copying Chow Yun-fat from that movie. So John Woo is a huge influence on the way we do action now. He basically started that mode of gunfighting for me.
HARVEY O’BRIEN
I guess John Woo is the filmmaker I’d most associate with it. Last Hurrah for Chivalry was classic wuxia, but A Better Tomorrow seems the obvious template for what would follow and get called gun fu. Others may have been thinking the same way, but it was the stylistic continuity and the consistent morality that makes Woo distinctive as a contributor to the emergence of the form, if it is a form (maybe it’s a style). I was at a special event in the Irish Film Institute in the early 1990s, where Woo was touring with a program of his films (BFI [British Film Institute] had done it, and the IFI got it, too). I was very struck by his sincerity as a person, and again, I think that’s important in thinking about action films beyond the “mere” genre elements. It brings me back to talking about John McTiernan and what makes his films work—again I think there’s a solid core of the filmmaker taking the filmmaking seriously. It’s not that they’re not out to make a buck, but in so doing, they’re approaching the work and the audience, who will view it with respect, and I think that’s indisputable in the case of Woo. Certainly, Woo’s films were the first where I noted what we’re calling gun fu, whereas Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung and that generation were still very much doing Peking Opera Blues—so to speak … yes I’m deliberately referencing Tsui Hark—and using weapons as props in a juggling display. Gun fu put more emphasis on the use of the weapon expressively, and I think Woo is where I first saw that … leaving aside Dirty Harry’s soliloquies to the weapon, of course.
DEREK KOLSTAD
It wasn’t until later in high school and into college when you’d go over to the video store and they had the foreign section. Growing up, “foreign” was kind of a dirty word. I’m from Madison, Wisconsin—we were troglodytes, but we just didn’t watch foreign movies. But then you start getting introduced to Donnie Yen and Sammo Hung and Jet Li and John Woo and Hard Boiled and you’re like, “What the hell?” The first time I saw the shoot-out in the nursery in Hard Boiled, it was like, “What the fuck?” And then we start talking about gun fu.
The first gun fu would arguably be all the Westerns. The first time you saw someone quick draw and fan the hammer? What the hell. Chuck Connors in The Rifleman, what is this? Silverado, same kind of mid-’80s movie, with the Henry rifle. You had kind of the magical realism of these films that are so much fun to watch. But I would argue the first true gun fu movie I ever saw was Equilibrium, which was Kurt Wimmer and Christian Bale. That first action sequence was done way too stylistically for my taste, with darkness, shadow, and light. But when they start doing the gun-kata, I think they called it, suddenly, you’re like, “Oh man, this shit just feels fun.” You got to watch all of this stuff a little bit tongue-firmly-entrenched-in-teeth, you know? But it’s a blast.
MIKE HOSTENCH
If we think about more contemporary action, the 1970s are the turning point in this universe, with sequences conceived specifically to raise the adrenaline of the audience. The French Connection encompasses a heavy dose of vérité in its intentions. This and its European flavor made it popular among the critics worldwide, giving it a patina of “respectability” for the high-brow segment of the audience. This was also an era where the directors were the stars and people were taking more seriously the helmer’s craft and started considering them as some kind of artists. However, I’m sure that if you ask William Friedkin, he would confirm he was very conscious he was making a good and sophisticated gangster film and an action film at the same time. I would blush calling it “avant-garde action.”
RIC MEYERS
Once that floodgate opened, a careening carload of cool cops came shooting in, including Dirty Harry, Shaft, and The French Connection. Everybody else would have to wait because, at the same time, Bruce Lee showed up in Asia and the kung fu sluices opened, flooding the world with Five Fingers of Death, Fists of Fury, and even Drunken Master. Meanwhile, back in Japan, alienated sword-slingers ruled, with Zatoichi, Lone Wolf and Cub, and many others slicing for attention. But just when it seemed there’d be no more room for any other blades, lightsabers showed up in 1977, and the Star Wars universe opened.
GLEN OLIVER
Action is frequently utilized as a necessary supportive mechanism for other storytelling that doesn’t otherwise hinge on what we commonly define as “action.” For example, one can have a movie which is largely a drama or comedy, but an action scene—a race to catch a plane at an airport, for example—might define and determine the outcome of whatever narrative is being spun, even though that narrative itself is not inherently action-centric. A fight scene may determine the path of an otherwise low-key, tepid tale. A spectacular car wreck might shape the entire outcome of a dysfunctional family drama in which everyone is otherwise sitting around talking, moping, and reconciling. The potential utilization (and combinations) of action within nonaction genres is endless—and profound. When viewed forensically, I think it’s safe to say that action—arguably more than any other quality or device in storytelling—is the most flexible and valuable asset to getting things done and making things happen across the considerable spectrum of genres.
JASON CONSTANTINE
Nobody said The French Connection was an action movie. Nobody said that Steve McQueen was in action movies—though we could argue he was. And nobody said that the Sean Connery James Bond movies were action movies. Obviously, in hindsight, we’d say the James Bond movies were action movies, and Roger Moore action movies in the seventies.
RIC MEYERS
Those films—The French Connection and Bullitt—were not about action. They were about gangsters, police, adventure, et cetera, and all too often, their action scenes could be removed without affecting the film’s story in any way. If the action is integral and the changing or eliminating of it would leave you with no real film, then that’s an action movie. The rest is just studio/critic ego and the need to control the industry’s labels.
AUSTIN TRUNICK
To understand the beefy, monosyllabic American action hero of the 1980s, we need to examine the American “action star,” which truly became a “thing” during that decade. Dirty Harry and the Man with No Name were two of the many different roles Clint Eastwood played, but those weren’t the only things he was doing at the time. Gene Hackman was incredible as Popeye Doyle, but action was only one small part of his acting arsenal. Steve McQueen made one of the all-time classic action films with Bullitt, but most people probably wouldn’t think of him as an “action star.” Burt Reynolds, Mel Gibson, Sean Connery—these were all “movie” stars who made action movies.
GLEN OLIVER
It comes down to how action is used. Is action a requirement to advance the narrative? Or is it icing on the cake/a vehicle to keep audiences involved? Movies like Bullitt, The French Connection, sections of Dirty Harry films, et cetera, relied on action to accentuate and facilitate plot elements, but the overall drive of their stories did not intrinsically hinge on the presence of said action. With a tweak or two, the same macro stories could’ve been conveyed in an entirely different manner. Thus, they’re procedural/crime movies with action elements—elements which contributed greatly, by the way, to the Action Renaissance we’d see in the eighties … but they are not “action movies” per se. Whereas when Indiana Jones is trying to keep the Nazis from acquiring the Power of God? Or John McClane is trying to save the plaza from dastardly Eurotrash thugs? It would not be easy to write around the inherent need for action to resolve those narratives and challenges.
MIKE HOSTENCH
I can think of five main types of action developed in the seventies to its full glory that changed the face of action cinema. First, car chases—with The French Connection as the best example. Car-porn action such as Vanishing Point and Convoy are also pretty close. Second, running chases—with the iconic persecution of Steve McQueen through the streets of Chicago. Third, gunfights. Michael Ritchie’s Prime Cut, a shoot-out at the country fair, comes to mind. Although we can’t forget the threshing machine versus Marvin and Spacek sequence. Also, Sam Peckinpah’s most violent works were very influential for future generations of European and Asian filmmakers. Fourth, man-to-man drama martial arts movies, with Bruce Lee as the flagship and all the Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest productions following. Fifth, the very unique Japanese crime-action-thriller movies known as the Jitsuroku genre (or “true record”). Those were extreme examples of ultraviolet Yakuza flicks with knife-wielding duels and extra-bloody gun massacres. Those were the years that made superstars of Takakura Ken, Watari Tetsuya, and Sonny Chiba. The latter also incorporated martial arts to the bloody mix.
RIC MEYERS
Larger-than-life heroes ruled the entertainment industry through the 1980s and way beyond. Rocky from 1976 to 2018, Rambo, Conan the Barbarian, The Terminator, Indiana Jones, Lethal Weapon, Die Hard. How could the occasional superhero such as Superman in 1978 and Batman in 1989 hope to compete? Thankfully, Stan Lee knew something they didn’t know, but that boot wouldn’t drop for another decade or so.
JASON CONSTANTINE
My thesis remains that action didn’t become a genre until the eighties. I’d had a conversation with Sylvester Stallone about this. Sly was like, “Yeah, in the seventies, nobody was talking about action movies. But in the eighties, they were.” Now, I haven’t really dug deep into my thesis, but if it’s correct, it’s fascinating to think about the action genre’s evolution by decade: the ’80s, the ’90s, the early 2000s, and then the 2010s.
Just to switch genres, you can look at the horror genre, and there are certain movies that come along that have a particular impact that separates the genre before and after that movie. Films like Godzilla, Psycho, Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Stepford Wives, any of the slasher films from the eighties, whether it was Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street, which has more of a supernatural quality. Then you get to the nineties and, say, Scream and Blair Witch.
You can talk about the horror genre as before and after movies like that. And then in the 2000s, I’d say Saw and Paranormal Activity a little bit later. Actually, I’d say Paranormal Activity is still in the post–Blair Witch era with a new version of a found-footage movie. And then there’s Get Out, which is one of those definitive movies that you can talk about before and after.
RIC MEYERS
What set The Wild Bunch, a cult classic, apart from other revisionist Westerns of the sixties and seventies was its graphic content, as well as its then-new filming and editing style, which heightened its gunfights into scattershot explosions of sound, color, slow motion, torn flesh, and splattering blood. There’s little question that this movie set the schematic for John Woo. Any film, in this case 1971’s Dirty Harry, that is remembered predominantly for its title character’s loving ode to his sidearm, has got to be one of the pillars of the still gestating gun fu genre. “But being this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself a question…” From that moment on, the handgun was more than a prop; it was a can’t-take-your-eyes-off-it costar.
DEREK KOLSTAD
The Chuck Norris movies are weird. I grew up with them, I love them, but they’re just strange. Not in a bad way. It’s almost like we were finding our stride with a lot of these kind of things. Because with Lethal Weapon and with Die Hard—remember in Die Hard, he tries to leave. He doesn’t want to be the hero. And he’s kind of a shitty cop. And yet, he leans into his shittiness and murders everyone, right? But then you have the first Lethal Weapon with a suicidal cop. I remember as a kid, when he’s in his trailer and he puts the bullet in, and he starts breaking down—and you’re like, “I’m very uncomfortable.” For good reason.
And then when you go back and watch Dirty Harry—when you watch Dirty Harry as a kid, you’re like, “Oh, what a badass cop.” Then you watch it as an adult and you’re like, “Oh, he was making fun of all of the cop movies at the time.” But I think to me, Rocky and Rambo, and the work Stallone did in the seventies and eighties has been key. Rocky’s not the best fighter, Rambo’s not the best soldier, but they get up. It’s about will. Once you lean into will—ahhh, fuck yeah—I want to follow that guy. And I want to follow him for a long time.
JONATHAN EUSEBIO
I remember screaming in the theater when Rocky’s beating up Drago in Rocky IV. And that’s the feeling I want when people watch the movies I work on. Where you’re so into it and you’re rooting the character on to win. So if it makes you physically say something or emote some type of response, that’s the feeling you want.
GLEN OLIVER
There’s a general perception that Lethal Weapon and Die Hard were epicenters for the reinvention of the action genre—both were unquestionably tremendously significant and pivotal. It’s important to acknowledge, however, that the films—each in their own way—were, to a meaningful degree, the result of filmmaking proclivities and trends which were already afoot by the time they were actually made and released. I’d argue that they weren’t, themselves, an actual “evolution” but, instead, were the clearest, most startling examples to date of a narrative/perceptual recalibration that had already been baking for some time. Top Gun, for example, had been released in 1986—a full year before Lethal Weapon. Top Gun has nothing in common with Lethal Weapon, but Top Gun suggested the type of energy-infused, visceral, in-your-face filmmaking that would later be so skillfully evolved by Richard Donner’s team in Lethal Weapon. I’m not asserting that Lethal Weapon was inspired by Top Gun—not at all. Merely that filmmakers were already grooving on a different vibe, recognizing new and visceral potentials in cinema, and redefining big-screen artistry by the time Lethal came out.
RIC MEYERS
Originally a standard muscle-bound late eighties action film in the vein of Commando and Rambo, the cookie-cutter fate of 1988’s Die Hard was avoided by the largely decried casting of a lowly TV actor named Bruce Willis—who decided to remold John McClane from a superman to an everyman, who, shock upon sin, actually showed effort, emotion, and pain when using a gun. That paid off but, sadly, only for the sequel in 1990. By the time of Die Hard with a Vengeance in 1995, it was back to effortless business as usual.
GLEN OLIVER
Die Hard was the result of a similar critical mass. John McTiernan’s Predator was released in 1987, a full two years before Die Hard. Die Hard’s sense of visceral bravado was clearly evidenced in that picture. Mark L. Lester’s dopey, fun, raw actioner Commando was released in 1985, two years before Predator. It was written by one of the writers of Die Hard (Steven E. de Souza) and edited by John F. Link, who would later go on to edit Predator and Die Hard, all of which were produced by Joel Silver.
STEVEN E. DE SOUZA
(screenwriter, Commando, Die Hard)
Jim Berkus, my agent, calls me up and says, “Listen, I want you to come to our agency Christmas party at the firm because Joel Silver wants to talk to you.” He tells me that [the president of 20th Century Fox] Barry Diller has a movie going with Arnold Schwarzenegger, but we’ve got to see Arnold immediately [to close the deal] and because of the way we worked in television, he thought I could come up with something overnight.
The next day I go over to Fox. Not just me, but a dozen people or so who worked for [producers] Larry Gordon and Joel Silver, are given every script that’s gathering dust in the back shelves of 20th Century Fox that could remotely be an Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle. Because Diller had run into Schwarzenegger at a cocktail party, and came to Larry Gordon and said, “I met Arnold Schwarzenegger, he’s actually a really funny guy—if you can come up with a feature for him, I’ll greenlight it for ten million dollars. We need movies in the pipeline.” So everybody agrees on a script called Commando, which is the closest thing to an Arnold project, but it’s problematic. The character’s wife and child are not kidnapped to Page 47, and the hero of the movie is actually a former Mossad agent, an Israeli agent, living in America. This is kind of a stretch for Arnold. So, I come in the next day, and say, “This is the way I see it can go.” I throw out some ideas and they say, “Great, you’re going to go see Arnold at 1:00 P.M. today.” I go, “Wait a minute, I just rolled out of bed.” They say, “C’mon, we know you’re a television writer—it’s an hour drive, by the time you get there you’ll have it all worked out.” We get there, and [director] Mark Lester joins us. They say, “Tell the story to Arnold.” So finally I finish telling Arnold the story, and he says, “I like this part. I’m not a robot from the future or a caveman from the past—I’m wearing clothes John Wayne could have. I’m doing this picture.” So we get back into the car and Joel has a car phone. This is 1985, I guess, so they patch us through to 20th Century Fox. “Arnold’s in.” “Get right back here.”
So I go to Larry Gordon’s office, and he has a stenographer and the head of physical production in his office, and he says, “Tell us what you told Arnold, and we’ll break it down like you do a TV episode.” So I said, “The opening scene is three mysterious whackings, probably five pages to whack three people—could be practical, could be backlot. Five pages. Next scene, Arnold with his daughter, title sequence, probably four pages—petting zoo, ice cream parlor, probably practical location.” And I go through this—and keep saying, like we did in television, “Probably two pages, probably four pages, probably a practical location.” Just knowing the way they wanted it to work. Larry Gordon says, “How many pages is that?” She says, “A hundred and five pages.” “Perfect! Steve, start writing the script. Do not change any locations without letting us know because we need to put this picture into production immediately, because the writers strike starts May 5th and all writing has to stop.” And this is already like March.
GLEN OLIVER
There were clearly defined MVPs on the field—ingredients already being whipped in the mixing bowl—and a discernible path towards Die Hard in 1988.
STEVEN E. DE SOUZA
Commando has a cult following. There are websites devoted to it. I invented a fake country for Commando—this is something [producer] Harve Bennett taught me in some of the early scripts I did with him for The Six Million Dollar Man—because we were always dealing with Commies, we would say, “The Cuban Ambassador to the U.N. is involved in drug smuggling.” He’d say, “You can’t say that.” I’d say, “Why not? They’re Commies.” “I understand, but we could get sued.” So Harve Bennett and I and everybody else was always making up fake countries. My favorite fake country I made for The Bionic Woman once—was a country called Toluca. Because there was a neighborhood called Toluca Lake and there was a building called the Toluca Embassy—an apartment building. So I wrote a scene—it was the last episode of The Bionic Woman—where Lindsay Wagner was bodyguarding the daughter of the Tolucan Ambassador. So I had a scene where she comes out of the Tolucan Embassy and—it’s a stupid joke.
For Commando, I made up a country called Valverde. Which then Joel Silver recycled for Predator. Which then I recycled for Commando 2. So we had our own little brain trust that after General Arias was deposed from Commando, the subsequent government involved the guy from Commando 2. And then other people starting catching on—until now when you go online—somebody has made a Valverde Wikipedia page. Forbes magazine somehow picked up on the fact that Mary Ellen Trainor who plays a newscaster in Die Hard also appears in Ricochet—and when Jan de Bont made Speed, he put a truck in from Pacific Courier, which is the same truck that pulls up to the building in Die Hard. So Forbes magazine said it’s the other $30 million shared universe that 20th Century Fox had. Everybody knows about the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but look at this one.
DAVID LEITCH
(codirector, John Wick; director, Deadpool 2, Bullet Train, and Atomic Blonde)
Not counting movies that I’ve actually worked on as a stunt performer that were actually influential—The Matrix, 300, Fight Club—I would say before I started movies, there was a whole litany of films that made a deep impression on me. Die Hard is probably number one, just because the character of John McClane is the archetype for how to make an empathetic everyman hero. The action was great and sort of ahead of its time, but most importantly, the action serviced the character so well. I still apply the John McClane model in the stuff that I design. And Lethal Weapon is in the same sort of vibe as Die Hard, but in terms of the quintessential buddy cop comedy, it’s head and shoulders above, especially with the live wire, loose cannon character. But also, the action is crazy.
GLEN OLIVER
Lethal Weapon and Die Hard were perfect storms in many regards. They represented the well-considered alchemy of not only materials and talent but long-shifting filmmaking explorations and attitudes. They were the fusion of a number of tropes from various genres culled across a broad number of years, skillfully assembled into a product which was fresh and provocative—yet also comfortably, accessibly familiar. In this regard, Lethal Weapon and Die Hard were not dissimilar to Lucas’s original Star Wars movie. They felt utterly “new” in and of themselves—yet their components weren’t necessarily so, if you slid them under a microscope. They’re dissonant—even brutal—hybridizations of elements from numerous inspirations, expertly grafted by directors with clear visions, writers with a strong cross-genre knowledge base, and editors possessing either the instinct or mandate to maximize raw, visceral impact.
DEREK KOLSTAD
I love hearing people say they love John Wick, but then they say how new it was. I’m like, “Good God, man. No, it ain’t!” It’s all the shit I grew up with and loved. I’m forty-six, and I’m a child of the eighties. But I watched my grandfather’s movies, I watched my father’s movies and genres, especially noir and crime thrillers, and they always had that same heartbeat. Yet what ended up happening in my life was Die Hard, Predator, and Lethal Weapon, which all came out during the same three-year stretch. Suddenly, you’re like, “Oh shit, you can do that.” Then you add Aliens into the mix and Black Rain, and you’re like, “Oh, you can do a samurai movie against a present-day landscape while you’re still in Tokyo.” The possibilities were endless.
* * *
With the advent of home video in the early eighties, actors like Sylvester Stallone (Rocky, Rambo), Arnold Schwarzenegger (Commando, Predator, The Terminator) and Bruce Willis (Die Hard) became genre megastars as the center of the action movie universe. And while they top-lined mostly A-list studio pictures, another dramatic entry in the action film sweepstakes of the eighties was the explosion of Cannon Films, the production and distribution company of go-go boys Golan and Globus, whose roster of action stars like Chuck Norris and an aging Charles Bronson harkened back to the old studio system where the moguls had most of their biggest stars under contract, from Cary Grant to Bette Davis.
AUSTIN TRUNICK
Cannon Films burst onto the scene just at the right time for their style of low-budget moviemaking. Their arrival coincided with not only the home video boom but the advent of premium cable. They were one of the first companies to embrace those markets and truly exploit them. With empty shelves and hours of airtime to fill, there was a sudden, massive need for new movies in the early eighties. That was a space that Cannon was more than happy to step up and fill, even if it was mostly with Chuck Norris movies.
JASON CONSTANTINE
The explosion of the action genre in the eighties has a lot to do with the advent of VHS. There’s a fascinating interconnectivity of creativity and economics, because VHS—coupled with the international market—was a huge part of contributing to the economic explosion of actors becoming the highest-paid movie stars on planet Earth. And that’s because of the rewatchability of action movies. You almost want to say, “Oh, it’s just visuals,” but it’s the whole toolbox. The horror genre is the whole toolbox, too, but in action movies, it’s your shot, the composition of your shot, your coverage, your editing, your sound design, and your music. I’ve spent so much time in edit rooms, and you can give the same raw footage of an action scene to one hundred different edit rooms and you’re going to have one hundred different ways to edit an action scene. In certain movies, the editing is so brilliant and so extraordinary and so definitive anyway. That’s one of the reasons the action genre is so intrinsically cinematic on the big screen and one of the reasons it was intrinsically rewatchable on VHS.
AUSTIN TRUNICK
I grew up during the era of video stores. On Friday evenings, I would go with my father to one local shop or another, and we’d rent a couple of tapes. It was when your entire weekend’s entertainment was decided in a few minutes of looking through all of the eye-catching box art and then flipping the cases over to read a couple of sentences’ worth of synopsis and glance at the postage-stamp-sized movie still. We would take them home and then watch one each night. That was when I fell in love with movies. Back in those days, when VHS tapes still filled the shelves at the rental shops, Cannon was king. They had movies on almost every shelf—and so many of them! You didn’t have to look far to find their familiar arrow logo emblazoned on the front of a box. On top of that, their artwork was almost always eye-catching; they knew how to sell their movies on compelling artwork alone. At least in that respect, I think they did things as well as anyone else in the market.
GLEN OLIVER
Cannon action movies quickly and effectively demonstrated that “action” did not intrinsically have to be defined and executed in accordance with the lofty standards set forth by films like Commando, Predator, Die Hard, or Lethal Weapon. Similar to many Roger Corman pictures, the Cannon cavalcade of action told us that action could be a little more humble, a little more scrappy, a little less polished, but still be entertaining in and of itself.
AUSTIN TRUNICK
The rise of video rental and cable in the same period also changed our viewing habits. Audiences going to the video store weren’t looking for the newest movie out there; otherwise, they would have gone to the theater. When it came to video stores, a lot of the time, if you found a movie you liked, you’d return the next night or the next weekend just looking for something that was similar. That could be why the genre labels grew more broad and generic, because rental customers were looking more for an overall “feel” of a movie rather than specificity.
JASON CONSTANTINE
VHS exploded, and this was way before DVD came around. It was a whole other economic stream that didn’t exist in the seventies, plus you have HBO and cable TV hitting its stride. All of a sudden, that’s another revenue stream. And then, Schwarzenegger, Stallone, and Willis become the highest-paid movie stars in the world, which was also part of this action genre exploding.
AUSTIN TRUNICK
Cable and video stores also gave rise to what I lovingly refer to as “pizza and beer” movies. These are the movies that you wouldn’t necessarily go out to the theater to see but would bring home with you on a Friday night and watch over pizza and a few beers. I don’t want to say that video stores lowered the bar for movies, but they certainly lowered the risk. If a particular movie wasn’t great, it wasn’t like you wasted gasoline and an entire evening on it. If you watched the tape with your family or a few pals, your savings were even greater. A lot of video stores in those days offered better deals if you rented more than one movie at a time, which I think was for this reason: it made it harder to feel like you got burned. I think it’s pretty telling that there was no demand for Death Wish sequels from 1974 to 1982, then along comes video and—bam!—the market could suddenly support four more of them.
JASON CONSTANTINE
So the studios were like, “We’re making more of these. We’re spending more money to get more production value on these action movies. These really big action stars are worth a lot of money to us, so we’re going to be paying them a lot of money.” It was this amazing convergence of a new technology, a new window, a new revenue stream, and this new genre of action, and together, it was this symbiotic relationship that allowed the action genre to continue to explode in the eighties.
AUSTIN TRUNICK
Low-budget action films starring Charles Bronson, Chuck Norris, and Michael Dudikoff were Cannon’s bread and butter. Those guys would star in a new movie for Cannon every year, and sometimes more frequently than that. Cannon knew they could always turn a profit on low- and mid-budget action movies featuring their proven stars, and they used that to finance many of their more ambitious projects. Cannon made a lot of different types of movies over the years: comedies, horror movies, musicals, erotic films, period dramas, and literary adaptations among them. They were throwing all sorts of ideas at the wall, but action is what stuck for them and was usually the most successful.
GLEN OLIVER
One of the wonderful-but-strange contradictions about Cannon was how the relatively dodgy quality of much of their output contrasted so sharply with the company’s clear ability to recognize and advance interesting material. Runaway Train is a very provocative piece of filmmaking—that’s a Cannon movie. Cobra—high-end dopiness from Stallone—was Golan/Globus. Lifeforce and Barbet Schroeder’s Barfly were Cannon.
AUSTIN TRUNICK
Their first real domestic success was 1981’s Enter the Ninja, starring Franco Nero. That was followed by Death Wish II in 1982, which made Charles Bronson their unlikely box office hero at an age when most of us are considering retirement. And then, one of the biggest hits Cannon ever had was Missing in Action, starring a middle-aged Chuck Norris. Bronson wound up making eight films for Cannon, and Chuck made ten.
By the mid-’80s, they brought in Michael Dudikoff for American Ninja, who also made ten movies for the company; and then Jean-Claude Van Damme with Bloodsport, which may be the most agreed-upon classic in their catalog. It’s probably the best American martial arts movie since Enter the Dragon, and it launched Van Damme to stardom. Unfortunately, Cannon was in too bad of shape at that point to capitalize on Van Damme’s superstardom in the early nineties.
As far as evolution goes, Cannon followed more trends than created them, but I wouldn’t call them rip-off artists—at least in most cases. They just had their fingers on the same pulses as so many other studios and production companies. You had movies like Uncommon Valor, Missing in Action, Rambo: First Blood Part II, and P.O.W.: The Escape all arriving within the space of a few years, and all with very similar plots. It’s not because one was following the others, it’s just that POW/MIAs were part of the popular zeitgeist in the early eighties and something that caught the attention of guys like Chuck Norris, James Bruner, Sylvester Stallone, and James Cameron. Missing in Action and P.O.W.: The Escape were both Cannon films, one coming early in the trend and the other near the tail end of it.
HARVEY O’BRIEN
Cannon was the heart of the genre of action films, by which I mean that commercial production line of mass-produced, entirely routine, sometimes awful, sometimes good “genre” films that make up what a genre really is. Individual films become tentpoles or templates, markers of what a genre is about and what it can do, but like in-between frames in animation, most of what happens between the key frames is what actually gives you the animation. Like MGM churning out musicals, Warners doing gangsters, Universal dragging their monsters through the forties, Cannon was producing the volume that constitutes the output rather than making individual films that were breaking ground or opening up new avenues the way, say, the Eastwood urban Westerns did ten years earlier. I was a teen in the eighties, and Cannon films were like RKO Westerns to my generation—reliable genre fodder you’d rent out and eat up like popcorn.
AUSTIN TRUNICK
The other thing that has to be said is that by the 1980s, we started seeing guys who almost exclusively made action films, at least during those years. Not only that, but they crafted their bodies in ways that made it look like their sole purpose was to exterminate evildoers. Many were monosyllabic because, frankly, they couldn’t act or had heavy accents, which was fine, because their dramatic talents weren’t the focal points of their movies. These guys were some of the first pure “action stars.” Many tried to become more rounded-out movie stars later on. Some succeeded, most didn’t.
GLEN OLIVER
Action had grown up in the marketplace and was pointedly demonstrating that the genre could be about ideas and emotions as much as bang, bang, shoot ’em up. Cannon’s action—and more importantly, its ideas—didn’t evolve concurrently or in a manner commensurate with the marketplace they were in. As such, Cannon films started feeling a bit passé and old hat—and their shtick grew less inviting.
HARVEY O’BRIEN
I think Die Hard was the apex of the classic era of the action movie. Without wanting to be overly “author” about it, in my book, I argued for the emergence of action as a distinct mode through the 1970s and ’80s out of the Western, war, and crime films, all of which were being reframed and refigured through modern framings and settings. Action was able to take the place of the old genres to an extent, or use their tenets to come up with something slightly new, or at least enough of a variant to change the audience’s perspective. An urban Western is not, in the end, a Western. It’s easier to get audiences into Dirty Harry than it would be if it really was set in the West with the sagebrush and spurs. The “urban” isn’t entirely incidental—it speaks to the audience of the time, who had had enough of the iconography of the Western but who were familiar enough with the tropes to be able to enjoy them in a recognizably everyday setting. That period of emergence ended sometime in the mid-to-late 1980s, by which time the formula for what was now something distinctly “the action movie” was then very much in place.
By then, rather than films which asserted this new tonality through a prism of others, we had films made in that mode by design, which happens in all genres. As I noted in the book, the moral panic around Rambo: First Blood Part II had totally faded by Rambo III, when more than one reviewer merrily joked that the Russians pulled out of Afghanistan because Rambo had arrived. No one took that film in any way seriously, even for the purposes of outrage, whereas just a few years earlier, the moral panic around its predecessor had prompted debate about whether it was moral for an action film to poke at historical wounds like POW/MIA.
* * *
The seismic shift of action films in America during the 1980s is probably best epitomized by the arrival in 1987 of the late Richard Donner’s Lethal Weapon, starring Mel Gibson and Danny Glover and based on the screenplay by wunderkind Shane Black. Then, in 1988, director John McTiernan’s Die Hard, which introduced Bruce Willis as New York cop John McClane, visiting his estranged wife in California for her office Christmas party, but unexpectedly finding himself having to take on a team of terrorists (led by the brilliant Alan Rickman as the cultured but deadly Hans Gruber) who have taken over the building. One could argue that Keanu Reeves’s John Wick was a white-collar descendant of the blue-collar John McClane.
RICHARD DONNER
(director, Lethal Weapon)
I had been looking for a good action project, but because I hadn’t really done one before, it was difficult. I had read all kinds of shit; scripts written for violence’s sake, which is why those films were being made. I couldn’t even get through them. And then this thing came along, and I just fell madly in love with it. I felt it was a departure, and I suddenly wanted to make an action film. I really do not like violent films. I can’t look at them. People have said to me that Lethal Weapon is really violent, but it’s not. It’s really an old-fashioned, action-packed film. It’s like a good Western. The bullet pierces the heart, and the guy falls dead. It’s not that you’ve spent thousands of dollars to show how you can blow somebody apart. Even towards the end, when Murtaugh is shot and they literally put salt in the wound, we don’t focus on the wound. What we are, are illusionists, whether it be for laughter, tears, or action.
When you get something like that, no matter how good you do it, if you are really explicit, you’re expressing what you see and are imposing on the audience. But if you can bring them to the edge and let them see what they want to see, then you get the sickness of the individual rather than having to live up to everybody else’s expectations. There are cases where you say to an actor, “Bring the tears to the edge, but don’t spill them. Let the audience cry for you. If you cry, you’re getting rid of their emotions.” And I think it’s the same thing with this.
RIC MEYERS
Coming hot on the first gun fu film’s heels was Lethal Weapon in 1987 and Die Hard in 1988. Being American, the directors and stars took a slightly different, but almost equally effective approach. Unlike the Rambos and Commandos, neither Mel Gibson’s Martin Riggs nor Bruce Willis’s John McClane acted as if it were easy to fire a gun. Each showed refreshing and ingratiating effort, emotion, passion, and compassion with every shot. The Man with No Name, a.k.a. Dirty Harry, a.k.a. Clint Eastwood, used his own hard-learned personal magic in 1992’s Oscar-winning best picture, Unforgiven. It is one of the few “action,” gun-centric films where the audience can easily count every shot fired and clearly see where every bullet went. Try that with a Rambo or Commando or Predator or Terminator.
RICHARD DONNER
I knew we had a great relationship between Riggs and Murtaugh, and the actors—Mel Gibson and Danny Glover—were magic, and it would go out and be a strong picture. I think that the secret of the buddy pictures start with the old formula of two guys diametrically opposed, who gradually get to like each other and eventually pull for each other. It’s that spirit of it that works. The reason they work is that the characters come off so human with a sense of humor. And then with Mel being so vulnerable in the beginning, it makes it even stronger.
JONATHAN EUSEBIO
Mel Gibson was a great physical actor who could do all his stunts. I worked on stunts on a few of his movies, and that guy could do everything, so he’s just as good as his character. So much of what works about Lethal Weapon is just the banter between the guys.
RICHARD DONNER
As a director, you’re directing traffic. You’re taking an actor who reads that script and is going to play that script as that character. He’s seeing that picture through that character’s eyes. Then you’ve got the other actor, and he’s seeing it through his eyes. You have two pieces of subjectivity that may have no connection whatsoever. Now follow it all through your eyes and think you’re being objective. It’s the best part of the game, really, because you’re taking all these wonderful people and all their thoughts and trying to channel it down to one … It’s a good business.
JONATHAN EUSEBIO
And then there was Die Hard. I mean, Die Hard is one guy kind of stuck in a single locale, taking on multiple people. How many kids dream of that stuff? But at the end of the day, action, to me, is never as good without a good story. I’m an action person, but it becomes generic action when you don’t have stakes or anything real involved with the character. Like, what’s his motivation? Why do they do these things? At the end, it still comes down to good story, good acting.
LARRY TAYLOR
(author, John McTiernan: The Rise and Fall of an Action Movie Icon)
McClane definitely paved the way, but John Wick takes the mythology beyond reality. There may be more of later McClane in Wick than the early version. Die Hard absolutely changed the trajectory of traditional action. Bruce Willis was just a dude, his biceps were like your dad’s. It was a change from Stallone and the Commando version of Schwarzenegger, more accessible, so more inviting in a sense to audiences.
JONATHAN EUSEBIO
I grew up on eighties genre stuff, so I watched all those Chuck Norris movies, the Hong Kong and Stallone movies, Schwarzenegger movies. And they were all action stars. You had Stallone and Schwarzenegger, then you have Chuck Norris. There were these movies just dedicated to action; the big action spectacle where a lot of it was driven by the action as opposed to the story. You had so many of them back then and more choices to watch, I guess. I feel like now they do have huge action movies, but it’s like you don’t have the one main action guy like you used to.
BRUCE WILLIS
(actor, “John McClane,” Die Hard)
Die Hard is probably the closest I’ve ever come to showing what is in my heart on-screen. I really wanted to play a vulnerable guy. I didn’t want to be a superhero. I didn’t want to be one of these larger-than-life kind of guys that nobody really knows. These films are about an ordinary guy thrown into extraordinary circumstances. I wanted to play a guy that people know, who is subject to the frailties of human life.
STEVEN E. DE SOUZA
Die Hard was the fork in the road for action pictures. Conceptually, it was a gear change, whereas up until then, the action films had for the most part been near-superhuman hero of legendary capability—be it James Bond or Rambo—who is told, “Here’s your mission. We’re sending you here, there, hither, and yon.” It was always about the great hero going on the epic journey, the classic Herculean epic. Westerns are like that, and so are most of your action movies. They’re all about journeys and travel and going to strange lands and killing people there. McClane was a hero who didn’t have a reputation that preceded him. He’s just an ordinary guy. That was a real refreshing change. Not that we haven’t had ordinary-guy movies for a long time, but we hadn’t had them blended with the hyperbolic action movie.
DEREK KOLSTAD
Remember the poster of Liam Neeson for Taken, and everyone was like, “Who?” Or, “Die Hard?” When you think of Die Hard as being such a classic, the truth is that it’s almost impossible to emulate, because the camera goes away from John McClane for chunks of time. That’s because they had to shoot around Willis’s Moonlighting schedule. You spend time with the FBI, with the cop, far more with the bad guy than you ever did with the movies that had come before. And Alan Rickman had a weirdness to him, an unsettling kind of calm that you loved. When they shut down the electricity for the city block and the safe opens, and it’s BAM, BAM, BAM, BOOM, BOOM, everyone in the audience is like, “Where am I? What am I watching?” So good.
HARVEY O’BRIEN
McTiernan had a kind of clarity in approach which was neither overly pretentious nor campy and yet which was able to achieve the tone of epic and allow tongue in cheek without toppling the film over into bloat or self-parody (until that was his intention—Last Action Hero). To me, there seemed a measure of comfortableness in his major films that I guess you could say grew out of the fact that the action movie was reaching its eighties apex. McTiernan’s Nomads isn’t at the races, but with Predator, Die Hard, and Hunt for Red October, he was able to make sincere, honest action films which offered fun without condescension and scale without excess. In some ways, Die Hard was the apex of that, and afterwards, other films tried to out–Die Hard Die Hard, and the result was both excess and condescension.
LARRY TAYLOR
McTiernan was heavily influenced by the European style of Truffaut, having studied Day for Night in film school an entire semester. And he applied that sense of patient storytelling to kinetic action thrillers that allowed these movies to breathe and feel authentic. He was also focused on the orientation of characters on the screen, always having them play off one another and in the space in which they inhabited.
JONATHAN EUSEBIO
McClane went from the typical big action hero to more of an everyman so that people could identify with him more. Back then, it was Schwarzenegger, Stallone, and those guys, who all had the physique, like comic book guys. But Die Hard had a guy who was more normal, everyday, and became a hero. That just made people identify with him more.
BRUCE WILLIS
John gave me a lot of time on the original to find the character of John McClane and make it work as an actor. More than anyone else I’ve worked with, John uses the camera to tell a story; the camera becomes another character in the film.
HARVEY O’BRIEN
McTiernan has commented on his own on-screen violence and seemed turned off by it. Maybe he had become frustrated with the expectation of explicit violence and the extent to which it could shift the balance away from action storytelling towards graphic spectacle (on a body level). I mean, who could forget the bloody feet in Die Hard, though it is drawn from the novel—“human meat,” as [Roderick] Thorp called it? None of the subsequent films have anything like that level of graphic detail, although Die Hard 2 had a higher body count. He was happy enough dealing in a world of violence, or where violence is the answer—that which gives you agency, but that raises a deeper question about whether or not the representation of violence needs to come with explicit imagery of bloody bodily injury.
This brings us back to the old [Sam] Peckinpah approach and the argument that you need to see it to really understand it, and that can be true. There are films, including Peckinpah’s, where each impact from a bullet has emotional weight, and the consequence is pain and death with meaning. Tarantino gave us that in Reservoir Dogs—that sense of the slow, painful death from a bullet wound that Tim Roth’s character is suffering. But for many years and decades, violent acts as narrative and as spectacle didn’t necessarily ask to be taken seriously—the one-punch knockout, the guy who clutches his gut and falls out of shot—as just a point of plot. In Die Hard, McTiernan used bloody violence to remind us of how fragile and human McClane was—that he was, in Thorp’s words again, “human meat underneath and in both physical and existential pain.” Maybe McTiernan wanted to back away from that level of depth in representing violence and come back to simpler action storytelling, where violence is part of the furniture.
JOHN McTIERNAN
(director, Die Hard)
What we were trying to do is make the film fun for the audience. It’s like trying to fashion an amusement park ride. I can’t claim to have any higher moral intentions than that. You pay your money, have a good time, and come out feeling good.
HARVEY O’BRIEN
Die Hard, which lands just after Rambo III and has just enough tongue in cheek to defuse accusations of self-parody, but which delivers without excessive irony, seemed a kind of high point for the genre—fusing the disaster movie mode with action in a very particular way that both upped the stakes and took the action movie to the top floor. In a lot of ways, it distilled the collective protagonists of the classic disaster films into a single character, which chimes nicely with that strain of strong individualism proffered by so many of these films. Though there are other people who have significant roles, most of the real agency is given to McClane (albeit a panicked, reactive, reflexive agency). There’s always ultimately some kind of leader figure in disaster films, but there are usually sub-narratives and some of the “false heroes” (to use that old Campbellian chestnut) die. In The Poseidon Adventure, even the actual hero dies.
RODERICK THORP
(author, Nothing Lasts Forever, basis of Die Hard)
I thought The Towering Inferno was a typical Irwin Allen spectacular, a vertical Poseidon Adventure. After seeing that movie, I went home and dreamt about a bunch of bad guys chasing a good guy through a high-rise building. That woke me up, and I did something that I almost never do: I made notes. In the novel, violence begets more violence, and the desire for control always ends in failure. There’s a moment from the novel that’s missing from the movie. After McClane’s gotten through the window, he lands on the body of the first guy he killed. It was supposed to be this journey into the underworld.
RIC MEYERS
I don’t consider Die Hard a shift in the genre; I consider it an all-too-fleeting oasis. The thing I felt made Die Hard work better than virtually all the others of its kind is that it allowed the protagonist to show effort, emotion, passion, and compassion—even in the heat of battle. Subsequent sequels, and the majority of action movies since, have eschewed until most are now physiology-free video game characters, feeling no real pain and showing no honest emotions. Sad to say, those essential ingredients rapidly disappeared in subsequent “Lethal Die Weapon Hard” sequels, and even John Woo and Chow Yun-fat wound up being pecked-apart American studio ducks in the following years. In fact, The Replacement Killers, which was released in 1998, is a textbook example of how Hollywood copies all the style, but sucks all the substance out of something they “homage.” But too bad, Tinseltown. The dirty deed was already done. Gun fu was born, and while many did their damndest to dilute it, it remained a potent package that simply waited for the right people to come along and use its audience-galvanizing power wisely.
* * *
“It’s like Die Hard on a…”
That was the pitch used by dozens of Hollywood writers in the aftermath of that film’s successful release. And studio executives responded, green-lighting a wide array of high-testosterone movies that relied on the concept of an everyman hero trapped in a confined space with bad guys and their hostages. Beyond four sequels to Die Hard, there were films like Speed (Die Hard on a bus), Under Siege (Die Hard on a battleship), Passenger 57 (Die Hard on a plane), Cliffhanger (Die Hard on a mountain), Air Force One (Die Hard on the president’s plane), Under Siege 2: Dark Territory (Die Hard on a train), Sudden Death (Die Hard in a sports stadium), The Rock (Die Hard in Alcatraz), and Speed 2: Cruise Control (Die Hard on a cruise ship). And much to the amusement of many a studio executive, writers began inadvertently bringing things full circle with pitches of “It’s Die Hard … in a building.”
STEVEN E. DE SOUZA
There had been movies before where the ordinary guy becomes a hero, but they were small pictures. Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs is a good example. In Straw Dogs, Dustin Hoffman plays a professor who defends his house against these people who have raped his wife. It’s very claustrophobic and very psychological. And it was a terrific picture. Now, instead of defending your little house in the English countryside, it’s a skyscraper. With Die Hard, we joined these two different kinds of movies. We have the small, ordinary, accessible hero—which is almost the opposite of what a hero should be, if you look it up—and brought Hercules home to face the trials and labors of the unknown, forbidden, uncharted areas of the map right here.
J. F. LAWTON
(screenwriter, Under Siege)
It’s appealing for moviegoers to see a seemingly ordinary guy use or rediscover special abilities when faced with a difficult situation. If you look at Speed, the guy is a member of SWAT, which integrates him into the story in a very nice way. If you look at The River Wild—which you could say is Die Hard on a river—you’ve got a closed encounter on this river, and Meryl Streep is the one with the special skills she can use against the bad guys. In Die Hard, he’s a cop; in Passenger 57, he’s an airport security agent; and in Under Siege, he’s a former Navy SEAL busted to cook. That part of the storytelling is key.
STEVEN E. DE SOUZA
Also key is that it’s one man going up against a formidable but known enemy. When you send James Bond off on his mission, there’s no real clear delineation of how many people are working for the villain. All those guys in orange jumpsuits … I always wondered where they came from. There are all these guys living in the barracks of a volcano. Do their relatives know where they are? How did they get this job? Die Hard is grounded much more in realism. These guys are there to steal the money, and you understand who they are. One of the key elements of Die Hard is to let the audience know right up front that there are fifteen bad guys, they’re here, and they’re trying to do a specific thing, so in a way you can anticipate the hero’s journey.
GLEN OLIVER
The similarly skinned films which appeared in the wake of Die Hard were certainly exploitative of the “one man against a gang” scenario. But, even more so, many of the films utilizing that gag felt like they were more preoccupied with exploring the possibilities of the “action in a bottle” scenario Die Hard had so skillfully laid out and executed—rather than directly mimicking Die Hard itself. They felt like exploitations of conceits and settings, more than directly aping what had come before. The man-versus-gang similarities amongst them were certainly and legitimately noted, but at the time, those films felt less like Die Hard rip-offs and more like, “Oh, look, there’s another action movie set in a locked-down environment!” Which is a rip-off in its own special way, I suppose.
LARRY TAYLOR
Those other films were financially motivated for sure, but the setup is fertile ground. Set your movie star against bad guys in a single setting, and you can churn out a fairly passable thriller. The closest any rip-offs ever got to successful was probably Sudden Death, because director Peter Hyams gets it.
GLEN OLIVER
The only one of the Die Hard “inspired” films to achieve legitimacy in its own right was Speed—a hugely effective and entertaining film which holds up to this day. Jan de Bont brought a filmmaking bravado most similar films simply lacked. The chemistry between Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock was charming and involving and—most importantly—felt natural. The immediacy of the crisis on the bus set against the urban wasteland sprawl of Los Angeles was compelling. There were a lot of things going on in that movie—no matter what role Die Hard played in its actualization, Speed holds its own and remains legitimate filmmaking and storytelling.
STEVEN E. DE SOUZA
The reason that the premise, or basic idea, works over and over again is the same reason that the great heroic myths endure. Going back to when they would tell the story of Hercules around a campfire, everyone knew how it was going to turn out, but everyone wondered, “How is it going to be told this time?”
GLEN OLIVER
John McClane—especially in the earlier Die Hard films—was a relatively unique pattern for an action hero. I think it would be possible to find some of McClane’s qualities in previous on-screen leads; for example, whenever I watch a Die Hard movie, McClane being essentially a hard-boiled Buster Keaton often springs to mind. But, on the whole, I think Bruce Willis and company set the gold standard for action heroes whose heads we could get into. As magnificently made as the original Die Hard was, and as fun as the first couple of sequels were, the accessibility of McClane was a major contributor to their success. His in-action expostulations, his stream-of-consciousness mini-monologues, all of the little personality quirks and reactions which gave us insight into who and what he was very much informed our perception of him as a “hero.” And when we got to know him? He really wasn’t that different from the vast majority of us. Hence he was accessible, and his reactions and acknowledgments of the goings-on around him rendered the circumstances he was in—no matter how dopey they may’ve been at face value—more credible as well.
STEVEN E. DE SOUZA
We had a unique challenge with Die Hard 2, which was to keep McClane human and fallible, because he had accomplished the near impossible in Die Hard and the audience was now expecting it of him. So we had to have him fail in the middle of the movie, being unable to stop a plane from crashing, resulting in the death of hundreds of people. The audience was stunned, because that’s not the kind of thing that’s supposed to happen. The studio executives were very nervous and felt the audience would hate McClane. I said, “No, they’ll love him, because he tried.” He’s not Superman. There’s no way he can stop the plane from crashing. But he feels so guilty that he becomes the guy from the first movie again, a man against impossible odds. We had that excess baggage from the first movie, because he did all those amazing things. We had to overcome that, because the audience is confident, and you have to make them nervous again.
GLEN OLIVER
McClane’s interesting qualities hardened over as the franchise progressed—he became less accessible as both a character and action persona. He accepted the absurd a little too easily, his responses and actions became increasingly predictable. McClane felt tired and uninvested—and he took the audience and story with him into that sad hole. Which is a chief reason (although far from the only reason) the quality and heart of the franchise drifted as time went on—the series had effectively lost its anchor.
HARVEY O’BRIEN
I think Die Hard’s progeny were all riding on the coattails of what had, in many ways, peaked, and it was just a few years before the genre had moved into adventure spectacle and the years of parody and HK-influenced wire fu and gun fu. When John McClane was swinging off of the jet in Live Free or Die Hard, everyone knew this wasn’t Die Hard anymore, and that was it for most people in terms of the character (I know people who don’t even acknowledge the fifth one even exists … like Indy 4…). True Lies had already done all this kind of thing with its tongue so far in its cheek that you’d have had to be deluded to think it was the same genre it had been five years earlier. Anyway, yeah, sure, the one-man-army thing predated Die Hard, reached an apex with Die Hard, and then stayed around with ever-decreasing returns until the superheroes took to the skies. And, sure, John Wick is part of the Die Hard heritage insofar as the modern action film has such a strong reference point in Die Hard, but John Wick is also part of a much older strain of hit man films with lone warriors on a mission of vengeance, seen a lot in Eastern cinema and, of course, Melville’s Le Samouraï. In fact, the very low-key tone (between explosive action scenes) is very much in that Bresson style of close observation of small detail and the rituals of loneliness, and then you move from East-West meditation into Eastern-style heroic gunplay in the John Woo/Park mold. But the audience also expects a bit of scale, and that’s the Die Hard effect. The result can be that it goes too far and you end up with too much, as I think kind of happened in John Wick: Chapter 3 myself.
JASON CONSTANTINE
You can certainly say that John Wick, while it’s drawing from so many influences, one of those is the tropes of the Western certainly. And while this predates the eighties, Asian action cinema has highly influenced American action cinema.
MIKE HOSTENCH
There are several stages in the Asian kung fu film that paved the way for films like John Wick. Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai is an action fest. Toshiro Mifune actually stops a horse that is charging against him. You can see this with your own eyes. The action scenes and stunts at the final battle are mind-blowing even for today’s standards. Some critics treat this movie as the absolute masterpiece it is, but emphasize on the excellent drama, forgetting how fast-paced and thrilling it is.
JASON CONSTANTINE
If we go way back, look at the influence that the Western genre had on the samurai genre being made in Japan. You literally had Kurosawa and Western directors in the United States going back and forth remaking each other’s stuff. Seven Samurai/Magnificent Seven. Then you could argue that the influence of Seven Samurai/Magnificent Seven is felt in every mercenary movie that’s ever made in the eighties and nineties. You could feel the Seven Samurai/Magnificent Seven influence in the first Expendables movie. Which in itself is a throwback to the early eighties action movies.
MIKE HOSTENCH
The 1960s and 1970s were the glory days of Hong Kong kung fu movies. Jackie Chan in the 1980s with his fusion of modern action and gymnastics martial arts. The late 1980s and 1990s “New Wave of Hong Kong Action Cinema,” with choreographers and directors such as Yuen Woo-ping, Donnie Yen, et cetera, and their slick, innovative way of understanding and shooting fight scenes, either period pieces or modern action. The “Hong Kong Heroic Bloodshed Genre” in the 1980s and early ’90s. Directors like John Woo, Ringo Lam, Johnnie To, and even Wong Kar-wai (watch his first movie, As Tears Go By) took gangster violence to a next level with their Sam Peckinpah–inspired/Jean-Pierre Melville–spirited unforgettable poetic hemoglobin-drenched movies.
JASON CONSTANTINE
Look at how the Wachowskis knew absolutely very early what they were doing. Intentionally drawing on Asian action cinema and putting it right at the heart of The Matrix.
RIC MEYERS
This groundbreaking combination of a science fiction film and superhero epic was revolutionary and revelatory at the same time. It also literally combined kung fu and gunplay (including the now-famous “bullet time” effect) to fashion the purest gun fu so far achieved in the Western world. Just a shame that it ended there, as the sequels dropped the ball rather egregiously.
AUSTIN TRUNICK
My personal experience walking into the theater and seeing The Matrix was as an anime fan. I didn’t get into Hong Kong action films until I moved to New York City and had better access to them than I did in rural Ohio. With The Matrix, I remember being so impressed by how it created a believable cyberpunk world for the first time in a live-action space. It wasn’t the first to attempt it by any means, but most of the movies that came before it—I’m thinking of stuff like Lawnmower Man and Virtuosity—were pretty cheeseball. On the other hand, I was able to buy into the world of The Matrix just as easily as the ones I loved in animated films like Ghost in the Shell and Akira, or in the William Gibson novels I was devouring. It was the first time, for me, where the technology and special effects were able to rise up to the premise.
MIKE HOSTENCH
The martial arts sequences and shots in The Matrix were all designed by Yuen Woo-ping. Keanu Reeves’s iconic phrase “I know kung fu” impacted in the nineties generation of young moviegoers as Bruce Lee’s trademark fighting-cries did in the seventies. The Kill Bill saga was also extremely influential in films like John Wick. Quentin Tarantino, himself inspired by the Hong Kong and Japanese masters, created a postmodern marvelous ecosystem of violence that left in awe all action buffs and cinema savants the same.
JASON CONSTANTINE
What’s interesting is that as soon as you have these movies, when people are imitating or referencing those movies, some of them aren’t always even aware what the source was. Was the source Asian? Was it a samurai movie? Was it a Western movie? Was it a kung fu movie?
MIKE HOSTENCH
Another part of it was the action films were that of the “New Korean Cinema.” In 1999, Kang Je-gyu’s Shiri made the whole film industry realize there was a new hotbed for modern action in South Korea. A superslick, North-versus-South spies, ultraviolent story, this film has all the human drama, emotional intensity, and lead-led action that made this Korean subgenre so popular in festivals and film markets. In Shiri, you can also find all the Korean faces now so popular worldwide two decades later: Choi Min-sik (Oldboy), Kim Yun-jin (Lost), Song Kang-ho (Parasite), Han Suk-kyu (The Berlin File).
Actor and martial arts master Jung Doo-hong is behind a big chunk of this two-decade wave of Korean action, designing and choreographing dozens of them, including such recent milestones as Jung Byung-gil’s The Villainess. Mr. Jung owns and directs one of the best film-stunt academies in the world, the Seoul Action School for Stuntmen (right by the border with North Korea), with a strong percentage of female pupils. In my opinion, the closest relative John Wick has in Korea is The Man from Nowhere, the superb revenge movie Lee Jeong-beom directed in 2010. A rock and roller of a movie. And finally, the recent wave of Indonesian action, with Gareth Evans as the director/deity and Iko Uwais, Yayan Ruhian, and Julie Estelle as their fighting prophets. Evans took the hand-to-hand/man-to-man action drama to a level never seen before and setting the standards of how a martial arts scene has to be shot. Also, Timo Tjahjanto, known for his excellent horror movies, recently directed fabulous extreme action movies such as The Night Comes for Us and Headshot, also starring Julie Estelle.
DAVID LEITCH
Even before I started doing stunts, I was a fan of Hong Kong cinema, and it’s weird, I guess, for a kid from Wisconsin being a fan, but going to the video store and scouring the bottom shelf to find Jackie Chan movies was incredible. Police Story and Armor of God are two of my favorite action films. If you look at them, most of the stunts in the ’90s and early 2000s were sort of pirated from what Jackie had already done. You also have to look at The Bourne Identity which is a reinvention of the genre at that time in 2002.
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In 2002, director Doug Liman’s adaptation of Robert Ludlum’s page-turner The Bourne Identity about an amnesiac super-soldier, which had previously been adapted to much less success, gets reinvented for the aughts and transformed the conventional action film again in the most dramatic break with tradition since The Matrix and would shape the approach of filmmakers for the next decade. Even the James Bond films would themselves begin to emulate the hyperkinetic, quick-cutting montage of the Bourne movies, which was further refined by its sequel, The Bourne Supremacy, directed by Paul Greengrass.
J. J. PERRY
(stunts, John Wick; supervising stunt coordinator, John Wick: Chapter 2)
With The Bourne Supremacy period, it was that disheveled kind of three seconds and cut, three seconds and cut, three seconds and cut, with a multitude of angles that weren’t filmed. It was like there was no screen direction, and it was, like, poke in the neck, pain in the throat, thrown on the floor, but you can’t see what’s happening. There’s just too much going on there. It’s just bullet point, bullet point, bullet point with no information. I used to call it “fight choreography for the ADD.” I think they do that because the actors don’t train hard enough, didn’t train for the choreo, and didn’t rehearse a lot. They show up and it’s like, “Okay, we’ll make this work. We’ll just shoot it all with the double. We’ll shake the camera. We’ll be all over the place. They’ll never know who’s doing it.” That’s a way to do it, but that’s not what’s going to be cool. At the end of the day, it’s not going to be memorable. Like, can you remember anything cool from Quantum of Solace? There was the great sequence with the free-running in Casino Royale, but then from Quantum? Nothing memorable.
DAVID LEITCH
I worked on a couple of the Bourne films and doubled Matt Damon on Bourne Ultimatum. The Bourne Identity changed the way people saw not only action but the spy genre. You had someone who was really empathetic and grounded, and someone who is a victim of the system and then reels against it. It just hit at a time and place that resonated with people, and the way that they shot the action was refreshing at the time. Even Bond got in on that with Casino Royale and, especially, Quantum of Solace. Somebody sort of breaks the mold and hits the jackpot on what’s really going to resonate in the zeitgeist, and then everyone jumps on.
J. J. PERRY
For us action guys, there were a couple of moments for me that were significant since I started in 1990. Chad Stahelski and I worked in Hong Kong quite a bit. I worked with a lot of the Chinese action directors before they came to America on The Matrix. And Chad worked with them on The Matrix. There was this big Chinese wave after The Matrix with all of the wirework and kung fu. But then the next significant moment for me was Ong-Bak starring Tony Jaa. Tony Jaa’s a Thai action star. It was a million-dollar budget movie with no wirework and no visual effects, but this Thai boxer kid with amazing athleticism is kicking the stuntpeople full blast in the face. He’s just knocking people out and they’re filming.
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Despite the Hollywood-ization of the action genre, some of the most interesting action films of the era were still being made on shoestring budgets out of Hong Kong, Thailand, and, in the case of Gareth Evans’s groundbreaking The Raid, Jakarta, Indonesia.
DAVID LEITCH
With Bourne, we were in this moment in time where the style of martial arts was changing. I happened to be there when martial arts became really relevant in Western cinema, and then I was there in a couple of spots when it changed and was part of that. The other was 300, and I think what Zack Snyder was trying to do with the style of action and super-heightened, sort of comic book style, playing with reality, and the sword fights, was just showing you that you don’t have to put things in a box. You can take these big risks and make things look different, and the only time that you can change the mold is when you take a big risk. Not unlike what we tried to do with John Wick in these longer takes or what I tried to do with Atomic Blonde, where we made this crazy heightened world of ’89 Berlin and then tried to do this incredibly long sequence with Charlize Theron. You make bold choices, and that’s how you change a genre.
Another movie that did it really well, but didn’t have huge commercial success, but affected people, was The Raid. No one had seen martial arts that way in Western cinema in a long time, even though it’s sort of a genre film made in Indonesia, but it crossed over and affected people. Another movie I think that was hugely impactful, for me, that’s not a Western film or a film I worked on, was Ong-Bak. Watching Tony Jaa perform and just realizing that raw human talent is probably the most important ingredient in anything that you do, whether it’s just acting or it’s action. If you have someone who can pull it off, you can put the camera anywhere. And in Ong-Bak, it’s like these wide shots. They’re on sticks, they’re not even on a dolly, and he’s kicking somebody in the head, and you’re like, “That is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.” It’s like when you’re watching Jack Nicholson deliver a monologue, and it’s just talent. It might be direction in terms of picking the moment or giving the inspiration, but it’s raw talent. That’s the most important ingredient.
J. J. PERRY
Ong-Bak proved that you didn’t need a hundred-million-dollar Matrix budget to make badass action. You just need to be clever about how you film things and frame it up correctly. So this was a significant moment for me as an action movie. We all came up on Bruce Lee in the seventies, Jackie Chan in the eighties, Steven Seagal towards the end of the nineties, and then Van Damme. I think Van Damme and Seagal muddied the water. I didn’t care for their movies, and I didn’t like their style, but they did well, because they were Western stars that were good-looking and had bigger budgets, bigger studios pumping them with a whole big-budget machine. And then The Matrix hit, which changed everything on a dime. The Hong Kong style, or the Chinese stock, came to America, and I was glad to see it.
RIC MEYERS
To this day, I don’t know if I was the first person to coin the name “gun fu.” I may have been the first to use it in print as an editor and columnist for Inside Kung-Fu magazine, but really, I defy any fan not to have immediately thought of the term after seeing A Better Tomorrow, its 1987 sequel, and Woo’s follow-ups, The Killer (1989), Bullet in the Head (1990), and Hard Boiled (1992). Woo told me that he had merely replaced the swords of his emotional 1979 wuxia (“heroic chivalry”) film, Last Hurrah for Chivalry, with guns, and that made all the difference. Suddenly, the gun, like the sword, became an emotional part of the user. And then there was his star/muse, Chow Yun-fat. A few years later, the actor and I discussed his performance, where he made it clear that he never pulled the trigger as if it were easy. With every bullet fired, you could see fear and power fighting on his face.
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In the wake of thousands of low-budget, uninspired, direct-to-video actioners, it’s easy to forget that the action film has endured over the decades as a uniquely cinematic genre because of the auteur practitioners who have brought an artistry that distinguished its quality over the years. Perhaps no filmmaker has elevated the genre of action to art more so than the legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa with such films as The Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, The Hidden Fortress, and, later, Ran, his late-period adaptation of King Lear.
RIC MEYERS
Although there were many fine craftsmen in the Japanese film industry, Akira Kurosawa (1910–1998) elevated them all by bringing cathartic artistry to the chambara genre—communicating to anyone who saw his action films how the samurai considered their swords not just as killing tools but as extensions of themselves, which created a firm foundation upon which gun fu could be built. His classic Seven Samurai and Yojimbo begat The Magnificent Seven and the Man with No Name spaghetti Western series—all of which translated powerful, personal sword action into kinetic gun action, setting the stage for all the gun fu that followed.
An often overlooked or ignored ingredient that makes the gun fu genre special are the holders of the weapon and how using the weapon affects them. The best gun fu is a balance between the gun and the gunman, as well as how they interrelate. The master of showing that by guiding unforgettably nihilistic warriors was Kenji Misumi (1921–1975), the soft-spoken, self-deprecating cinematic craftsman who might not have been capable of Kurosawa’s genius but was capable of anything. Although there was a fistful of fine Japanese action film directors, Misumi stood out by shepherding the best, and first, installments of several of the most powerful and influential samurai film series—including Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman, Lone Wolf and Cub, and Son of Black Mask (who appears to be a direct ancestor to John Wick in look, attitude, and behavior). Misumi’s artistry is on full display in what remains my favorite samurai film of all time, Baby Cart in the Land of Demons, the fifth in the Lone Wolf and Cub series, whose every frame is superlative.
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However, if there’s a true spiritual forefather to the gun fu genre, it must be the late, great Western director Sam Peckinpah, whose 1969 classic from Warner Bros., The Wild Bunch, pushed cinema to a new level in the wake of the end of the Hays Code and the freedom the new ratings system provided in the late sixties and whose subsequent films such as Straw Dogs, The Getaway, and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia would push the limit of what was considered acceptable violence in mainstream cinema even further.
RIC MEYERS
Sam Peckinpah was the man who made screen gunplay a masterpiece of splatter art in the seminal The Wild Bunch, which splashed the screen with lead-torn blood in sustained ways that had hitherto only been momentarily hinted at in the execution climax of Bonnie and Clyde in 1967. It was as if the director, who had worked his way up the entertainment ladder in TV Westerns, wanted to make up for all the sterile, bloodless, glamorized movie gun deaths of the previous sixty-six years in the space of 145 minutes. But like Sergio Leone before him, he was not going to waste the effect with just an artless orgy of torn limbs and rended flesh. Like Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, he had his antiheroes—remnants of a disappearing era—flail about against their inevitable end, getting it as badly as they gave it, using all the skills of the cinema to create a true guilty pleasure. It opened the floodgates, and from that moment on, all gunplay bets were off.
HARVEY O’BRIEN
American film theorist David Bordwell points out that though people assume that rapid cutting and frantic action come from the East, really because Hong Kong action stars performed their own stunts and pretty much took their chances with insurance, the relentless bustle in editing in nineties U.S. films is because they’re trying to compensate for not being able to really show frantic action. Instead, they cut around it and mix stunt double action, close-ups, and explosions conducted from a safe distance under all applicable safety regulations to try to replicate the feel of the unfettered HK style. Yes, in time, Western films began to use performers who could actually do real martial arts stunts, but still there had to be some restraints based on insurance needs, so the style of American films emulating the East was a kind of pale echo. There was a compensation in the form of, as I said before, bigger budgets and so bigger explosions and bigger production design, but it also came with bigger close-ups on actors being paid a lot of money and a painful overuse of slo-mo. Sure, Peckinpah used it, and it was used to emphasize spectacle before the eighties/nineties trope became tiresome, but somehow no one was able to use slo-mo quite like John Woo.
RIC MEYERS
Truly the father of what is now known as gun fu, John Woo Yu-sen, born 1946, is a soft-spoken auteur who cut his cinematic teeth on Hong Kong television, then helmed comedies, historicals, romances, wuxia, and even an early Jackie Chan kung fu film (Hand of Death) before writing, producing, and directing the action thriller Heroes Shed No Tears in 1986, which etched the schematic for his groundbreaking A Better Tomorrow, which was released later that same year. Heroes Shed No Tears established the sweaty, highly emotional, extreme nature of the predominantly gun action, but A Better Tomorrow went one step further—replacing the swords, hands, and feet of kung fu with literal firepower without changing the emotional connection the fighters felt. The result, before his artistry was diluted by his move to Hollywood in 1993, was an energy audiences had not experienced before.
MIKE HOSTENCH
John Woo started directing period kung fu movies in the late seventies, like Hand of Death starring a young Jackie Chan and the absolutely marvelous Last Hurrah for Chivalry. Woo transplanted the chivalry swordplay and kung fu stories to the 1980s Hong Kong gangster universe with the seminal A Better Tomorrow, starring Chow Yun-fat and Ti Lung, the first coming from being a matinee heartthrob and the latter a superstar of the Shaw Brothers kung fu and swordplay portfolio. After the massive success in Asia of these movies, he directed The Killer, produced by another iconic figure of Hong Kong: Tsui Hark. The Killer was the film that put the new Hong Kong action cinema on the map, making a big impact on future filmmakers from Mainland China (Zia Hang-ke) to the U.S. (Quentin Tarantino). Then came other milestones of the genre, like Hard Boiled and Ringo Lam’s City on Fire, the inspiration of Reservoir Dogs, and Full Contact, all starring Chow Yun-fat, who shared the spotlight with other Hong Kong big names like Simon Yam, and even former Shaw Brothers Studio kung fu stars like Taiwanese actor Kuo Choi. So the kung fu connection with the new HK action cinema was always there.
HARVEY O’BRIEN
He seemed to have a good instinct for what needed emphasis, possibly based again on his sense of what’s important outside the act of action but important to the emotion of it. Yeah, Ringo Lam was another one brought over during the HK exodus, and in his own way, Ang Lee was part of it, though he didn’t go gun fu. The turn to the East was certainly palpable, fueled by political change in Hong Kong and the often temporary self-exile of HK practitioners (eventually lured home in many cases), and it was a question of trying to find a way to capture the dance-like rhythm of classic wuxia and the armed variety that came from it. Fundamentally, that style-versus-style—action-reaction-blow-block—dance you see in the old Shaw Brothers films and the like is putting the emphasis on those beats as an exchange of views—techniques in conflict expressing history, ancestry, training, and skill. Speeding them up was part of what made Chan important, and he was, of course, drawing on classic silent comedy, as is well known, finding ways to pace the ritual that were both thrilling and comical. When gun fu emerged, those kinds of interpersonal actions—hand to foot—were shifted onto gunplay, but in Woo, again, the emotions behind each image were still consistent with having something to say about character.
RIC MEYERS
Finally, after a twenty-four-year gestation, the birth of the genre came in 1986. I was in Hong Kong, celebrating the publication of my pioneering book on martial arts movies, when I was introduced to the soft-spoken, unassuming director named John Woo and shown the poster for the movie he made that was premiering that very night. It was called A Better Tomorrow, and the poster made it look like some sort of comedy-drama about high school teachers. Given that he had signed the poster for me, I figured I should see the movie even though I would normally choose a kung fu film to watch. I began to suspect that something was up when even the staff of the film company he worked for couldn’t find a showing in the entire city that wasn’t sold out. Finally, at the very last, specially added, showing all the way on the other side of Hong Kong island, they found me a seat. I quickly discovered that it wasn’t about high school teachers. Seeing A Better Tomorrow on opening night remains one of the greatest experiences of my movie-watching life. In ninety-five minutes, I watched the audience change. Having seen hundreds, if not thousands, of kung fu films with international audiences, I had never seen a crowd react the way the normally reserved, even jaded, Hong Kong filmgoers did to this somehow familiar yet totally different experience. I, too, was gobsmacked by its cathartic energy and distinctly remember trying to comprehend its effect by blurting to the studio staffers, “That’s not kung fu … That’s gun fu!”
J. J. PERRY
I don’t know where the phrase “gun fu” came from, though I think it’s from John Woo and from Equilibrium, which was a big motivation for all of us. But the John Wick style is from 87eleven in 2011, and the people who were there when we did it were Jon Eusebio, John Valera, myself, Danny Hernandez, Jackson Spidell, and then later came Eric Brown, the Machado brothers, and [armorer] Taran Butler. And, of course, Chad Stahelski being an action master knew where the cameras should go and how to manipulate them into that style. And I’ll tell you, Chad himself probably is the closest one of us to John Wick, because he’s great at judo, great at jujitsu, and he’s a gnarly fucker that could probably kill you every which way to Sunday with a pencil. That’s Chad.
JONATHAN EUSEBIO
I describe it as balletic violence. It’s something that’s as brutal as someone shooting someone with a gun, but somehow, the way Woo filmed it, he made it look very elegant in a weird way. It’s almost a juxtaposition of the intent and the method, the way he did it. It wasn’t just that you shoot, then you cut to another guy in a close-up and he gets shot. Instead, it’s everything in the same shot, playing wide. And there’s the fact that the guns never run out of bullets. They never reloaded, and they stayed in wide shots, shooting multiple opponents at the same time. A lot of what we did on John Wick was influenced by that. But we also knew the nuances; we had the reloads, because that’s what’s proper, but John Woo was a big part of my adolescence. Almost every time a movie came out, I waited at the Chinese video store and tried to rent them. He’s the one who started that genre, so you have to give him that respect.
RIC MEYERS
With A Better Tomorrow in 1986, John Woo took the screen lessons taught to him by kung fu, chambara, wuxia, and Westerns (both the genre and the continent), and decided to up the intensity, melodrama, passion, emotions, and violence until they were a swirl of rolling energy that washed over, and then washed away, the audience. The knowledge that the audience’s love of screen firepower had been repressed until that moment may (or may not) have been a happy coincidence. A year later saw the release of A Better Tomorrow II, which should have been subtitled Backfire, because John Woo did not want to make this sequel. But the original’s box office receipts demanded it, so Woo endeavored to overdose the audience with even more explosions of guns and emotions until his cinematic aversion therapy cured them of their bullet lust. Karmically, it backfired, of course, because the world audience lapped it up and howled for more. Wanting to have his cake and eat it, too, Woo crafted 1989’s The Killer, the tale of a remorseful hit man who accidentally blinds a pretty singer as an homage to Martin Scorsese and [French director] Jean-Pierre Melville—while still cramming in enough gunfights and blacker-than-black humor to choke a horse. Also in 1989, Hong Kong’s devil-may-care schlockmeister supreme Wong Jing hit upon a seemingly doubtful idea in the form of God of Gamblers. What would happen if the gunslinger of John Woo’s heroic bloodshed films was played by the childlike title character of Rain Man (1988)? The stars aligned for the result, which turned out to be inspired, largely because of the participation of Chow Yun-fat and superstar Andy Lau, as well as Jing’s devil-take-the-hindmost approach to gun fu action. Many maniacal sequels followed, but none as potent as the original.
A Better Tomorrow is without question, and without doubt, the true beginning of gun fu. What separates gun fu from action movies with guns is the protagonist’s emotional connection with his weapons. Just as you can’t really separate a samurai from his sword and you simply can’t separate a kung fu fighter from his kung fu (even if you take off his arms and legs), the gunman (or -woman) must be seen or sensed as being “one with the gun.” That’s the difference between Chow Yun-fat in The Killer and Chow Yun-fat in The Replacement Killers. One is a balance of style and substance (yin/yang, anyone?), the other is all style (and actually pretty poor style at that).
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But it is The Matrix that proved to be the most significant film in presaging John Wick, both because of its Americanization of Asian gun fu films and chopsocky kung fu but also because it cemented a relationship between its star, Keanu Reeves, and his stuntman, Chad Stahelski, who would go on to codirect John Wick with David Leitch.
RIC MEYERS
The Matrix in 1999 is a groundbreaking combination of a science fiction and superhero epic that was revolutionary and revelatory at the same time. It also literally combined kung fu and gunplay, including the now famous “bullet time” effect, to fashion the purest gun fu so far achieved in the Western world. Just a shame that it ended there, as the sequels dropped the ball rather egregiously. The following year, Versus gave us a mash-up of samurai, gun fu, and zombie films that brought the genre full circle, back to its blind swordsman and baby cart roots, while still creating something new, exciting, and unforgettable.
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The introduction of gun fu would essentially lead to the creation of the John Wick franchise, with Leitch and Stahelski having formed the company 87eleven to essentially capture exactly what The Matrix did with cast members front and center in terms of the action. The company hyperbolically (albeit accurately) describes itself as follows in its corporate press materials: “David Leitch and Chad Stahelski were two stunt performers with a vision. Fast forward to the present, where they’re now known for action design and accomplished as film directors, and 87eleven, itself, has grown into an industry-leading company for stunt equipment and facilities rentals and stunt training services.”
Much like how companies like the Thirteenth Floor pre-visualize visual effects and storyboards using elaborate animatics, 87eleven creates, shoots, and edits original stunt sequences that are then pitched straight to a project’s director. After being hired on to a film, 87eleven works on getting the film’s stars into physical shape and spends the time training them on preplanned fight choreography. When the company began, before both men became A-list Hollywood directors thanks to John Wick, Stahelski and Leitch would serve on set as the film’s stunt coordinators and fight choreographers, and their crew would perform as the stars’ stunt doubles as well as henchmen. Some of their many credits include The Bourne Legacy, Expendables 3, the Hunger Games series, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Jurassic World, Wolverine, and Dracula Untold prior to the first John Wick. Since the first John Wick became a sleeper hit, Leitch directed Atomic Blonde and Deadpool 2 as well as the forthcoming Brad Pitt film Bullet Train. In addition to directing the fourth and fifth Wick films, Stahelski is developing the remake of Highlander.
CHAD STAHELSKI
(codirector, John Wick; director, John Wick: Chapter 2 through Chapter 4)
I was very fortunate years ago. I was recruited into film at a very young age. I was a competitive martial artist at the time and did a bunch of kickboxing, getting kicked in the head for a lot less money. Turns out, there’s a stunt guy out in the audience who was very good and very acclaimed. He asked me if I wanted to be in film. I said sure, and he kind of trained me over the next couple of years. That led me into all kinds of opportunities. Then we met Keanu on the first Matrix, but we all come from that kind of camp, and it was an incredible learning experience. You can’t help but be saturated by some great filmmakers.
From there, I got my opportunity to be an action director through Warner Bros. and the people we met. I started directing a lot of the fights and action that led to other opportunities. Next thing, my partner [David Leitch] and I ended up becoming fairly successful second unit directors, working for David Fincher, for Zack Snyder, for Guy Ritchie—some of the biggest action movies on the planet. And that kind of rubs off on you. Now I shoot what appeals to me, and hopefully people like it. I would like to take some of the credit, but it all comes down to the people I work with.
DEREK KOLSTAD
One of the things that has been a blessing of working with 87eleven is that I write out action, and they make it better. So when I saw the first cut of both John Wick and John Wick: Chapter 2, to actually see stuff that I wrote down on the script on-screen but better, makes you happy. I like snapping limbs and kicking in knees and that kind of stuff. I don’t know shit about guns. I had to call a lot of people.
J. J. PERRY
Our question was, how do we create something new? Chad got this movie called Safe with Jason Statham. Chad left for Philadelphia and New York, where they were going to shoot it. I was going to come out there, and he was going to direct second unit and I was going to coordinate it, but he was going to do the prep coordinating on the East Coast while we did the pre-viz prep on the West Coast. So John Valera, Jon Eusebio, Danny Hernandez, Guillermo Grispo, and myself started mixing the jujitsu that I’d been doing on Warrior. They’d been on their own shows with the gun work. So I don’t call it gun fu, because, technically, it’s not gun fu. It’s gun-kitsu. When you watch it, there’s no kung fu. When you watch the movie Equilibrium, you could call that gun fu, because it’s ambiguous. What we did was we took all of the jujitsu work and sambo work—“sambo” meaning Russian leg lock—but instead of using them for submission, we would use those limbs with one hand to pull us into a transitional move that puts us back on the gun. So basically all jujitsu was done left-handed so you could shoot right-handed. You can see the John Wick movies in there, but Jason didn’t want to do any of those moves when we got there. He wasn’t feeling that style. He wanted to do more of what he was used to, so we ended up throwing it on the shelf, but it was created, and we all knew it was something new and sick and badass. Chad and Dave got John Wick shortly thereafter. They were already haggling for it while we were doing Safe, so it was all kind of in the mix.
DAVID LEITCH
When we did the Matrix films, my John Wick directing partner, Chad Stahelski, was doubling for Keanu Reeves. On the first Matrix, I was working on a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie, and Chad called me from Australia and he was like, “You’ve got to see this film that we’re making. We’re actually doing these Hong Kong fight sequences with the real actors. Laurence Fishburne and Keanu learned all the choreography, and they’re doing it themselves. It’s like watching Jet Li and people like him doing a fight.” And I was like, “No way.” Normally, it’s stunt double, close-up of the actor, stunt double, close-up. And sure enough, the movie comes out and it’s a hit. Then everybody jumped on the bandwagon, saying, “This is what we want to do. We want to see the actors do the action. We want to see the actors do the fight scenes.”
Chad and I formed 87eleven to facilitate that desire people had for the actors to be more involved. Train actors, get them to do the choreography, teach them real martial arts, get them far along in the process so we could actually shoot the action in a compelling way that people wanted. So, The Matrix was hugely influential on my career and Chad’s. Like the trajectory of martial arts being really relevant in Western cinema, we just happened to be the two geeks that loved martial arts movies and were in the stunt business, and we knew how to make it happen. As a stunt guy, you become a mini-director. You’re talking to actors about performance. The way you present a stunt is tied in to the way you photograph it, so you’re hanging out with the cinematographers. You learn tricks to make action look more dynamic, having the fight come toward you or shooting on a longer lens to compress the speed.
CHAD STAHELSKI
Honestly, I’m a bit more old-school about how I grew up and the directors I chose to emulate. I’m a two-camera guy for most of it—A and B cameras, and then we’ll have a third on standby for inserts or other things. Action’s a slightly different thing. For the car chase sequences and stuff, we use a minimum of three, but sometimes we have as many as seven or eight cameras on set in different rigs that you’ll have to change over time. We found that early on the actual day, some people have five cameras or three cameras ready to go. We’ll call it the three-camera stack, and what happens is, because the cameras are big, when one of them is trying to get the medium shot, one is trying to get Keanu, one is trying to get the other guy, they end up bumping, and you can’t get the organic-ness of what you’re trying to get. I’d rather have two cameras and do more short takes just to get a little bit more freedom in the camera so they can move. I like a little bit of movement.
J. J. PERRY
If you think of the movies from the eighties, like Rambo, they’re cool action movies now, and I watch them because I’m nostalgic. But if you were to show them to kids now, it doesn’t hold up. Why? Kids play fucking video games now that are real … it looks like real life. The target market has changed. They’re more educated, they’re more savvy. They call bullshit. And they also want instant gratification; this younger generation doesn’t have the same attention span. These young kids, they get all of their knowledge from the iPhone, and that knowledge comes quickly, and knowledge that comes quickly that isn’t earned comes without wisdom. So they want instant gratification, but they also can YouTube something right away and see if it’s bullshit. Like a good hunter or a good soldier, you have to be aware of your target market or your target or the animal you’re hunting. You have to know that animal, and you have to know yourself if you’re going to bag it.
Part of it is keeping your finger on the pulse of the target market, what they like and love. And I have a menu of people—a bunch of nieces and nephews—that I call back home in Texas, where I’m from. Then there’s a bunch of people that live in my neighborhood that I ask that are video game geeks and comic book geeks. So I pressure-test a lot of this stuff; just because I like it doesn’t mean it’s going to be great. I go out there and I ask opinions. Back in the eighties, you could get away with a lot more—and it was a lot cheesier. Then in the nineties, it was a bunch of way over-the-top stuff with wirework. And then, after the millennium, we started getting more clever about it, because that’s when video games really started taking off and the technology of video games (and the technology of moviemaking) just got better and better. In the John Wick movies, there’s no muzzle flash or squibs. That’s all done in post with visual effects, because if we’d had them live, it would have taken ten more days to film the movie. So just the evolution of technology has a lot to do with the evolution of action movies.
JONATHAN EUSEBIO
So much of it is about how you design action. When you look at the Marvel machine, you get all these variables before it gets on-screen. When you work on those films, you really have to bear in mind the visual effects aspect of them. The characters are already set, since they’ve been around since the forties, fifties, and sixties, so you can’t really differ from how they would do things in general. Sometimes it’s better to get to do films that are a little bit more grounded and where you’re relying on the physicality of the actors. They’re doing everything and aren’t aided by visual effects or wires. Sometimes those movies are fun to do, because you really have to figure it out and make it look nice. The comic movies are going to look good no matter what, because you have all these other variables that can help. But when it’s just them, and their physicality versus another person’s physicality, it’s all about making that action just as dynamic as something in the Marvel movie or Star Wars movie.
J. J. PERRY
I don’t like watching the Marvel films or the DC films, because you look at them and they turn into cartoons. Half of it is not real. Half of it’s CG. That’s why I like doing Fast & Furious movies and John Wick movies—we’re on the street going ninety miles per hour, smashing real cars on a location somewhere. For me, that’s filmmaking, because we come from the nineties, and it’s the reality of actually solving the problem in camera. I feel like that art is dying right now. And pretty soon, you won’t need to do it. They’ll be able to animate cars and animals, people. It’s a dying trade. I will be long gone, bro, before it’s over. I’ll be retired. I’ll be fishing by the time they’re done with me.
JONATHAN EUSEBIO
After The Matrix, you started seeing A-listers doing longer takes and more action pieces. The Matrix was the first time you see Westerners do that style of film fighting. I worked on Bourne films. When we did that one, it was the same thing. I went in the room, and there are all these execs there, even Matt Damon, and we were trying to make a new style for him. I demoed a bunch of different things, Hong Kong–style things, Jackie Chan–ish things that I grew up on. Then I would do grappling and throwing and wrestling, which is kind of the precursor to Wick, but they weren’t ready for that style yet. They’d go, “Oh, that looks painful, and it takes too long.”
DAVID LEITCH
For the good actors and the committed actors, I think they look forward to it. The fun thing if you talk to actors and all performers, especially in movies, is that every four or five months, you get to play something different or learn a different skill and get paid to do it. So, there’s not a lot of actors that complain when you’re like, “Okay, they’re going to pay you a large sum of money and you get to learn martial arts.” Usually, it’s the other way around: you have to pay for the lesson, and here you’re getting paid to learn. Most are excited, not all—“What? I’ve got to sweat?”—but most. The good ones put in the time, and they’re there to work. They’re professional, and they take their job seriously, and those are the people that usually rise to the top.
HEIDI MONEYMAKER
(stunts, John Wick: Chapter 2 and Chapter 3)
Having the actor in much more of the actual fight scenes makes it harder for stuntpeople in prep, but easier physically during the show. You’re still there emotionally and you’re guiding them through it the whole time, so you’re still really in it. I actually think it’s harder for a stunt double, because we go in there, we train, we perform, we do our thing. For me, if I walk on set and we have a whole fight scene worked out, I can change it at the last minute or I know how to move perfectly to make sure that the camera catches this hit or that hit. Whereas even if you take six months to train them, it’s a little harder for them to get used to it. Unless it’s someone like Keanu, who’s been doing it for so long.
DAVID LEITCH
87eleven has served us both really well. We started it on the heels of the Matrix movies. We had another partner, Damon Caro, when we were the choreographers on 300. Then it just really took off from there, where we were hired to design action sequences for films, train actors, we were stunt-coordinating films, and we were building up a team of stuntmen to work under us exclusively. The machine still runs, even though Chad and I are now directing, and we have stunt coordinators that work out of our company. And we still have our choreography team. Chad had some of our choreographers on John Wick: Chapter 2, and I had some of our choreographers on Atomic Blonde. And it’s sort of become its own monster in that our choreographers who have trained under us have gone on to have their own careers. They’re working on all the Marvel movies—there are very few movies in the action space that haven’t been touched by 87eleven’s choreography team in some respect. A lot of them are still working with us, or when we’re not working on a film and they need to work, they’ll go and do their own thing. But it’s kind of a family. When we’re up and running, they come back, and we’re ready to work.
THEY SHOULDN’T HAVE KILLED HIS DOG. Copyright © 2022 by Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman.
