ULTRAVIOLET - XLENT Action

by Dr. Craig Reid

Hong Kong action coordinators and fight choreographers have brought to American film one important influence that has gone relatively unnoticed but seems to be revolutionizing Hollywood's stunt industry. It's slowly corroding the dinosaurs of old-school personal glory and ego, and replacing it with the new-school acknowledgement and appreciation for stuntmen and stuntwomen. At the crux of this new-wave methodology is stunt coordinator Mike Smith of XLENTSTUNTS INC, who with his outstanding team of highly trained martial artists and fight choreographers is responsible for the far-out and outrageous action sequences featured in the martial arts actioner ULTRAVIOLET (directed by Kurt Wimmer and starring Milla Jovovich). It's called teamwork.

After Smith introduces his multifarious menagerie of fight choreographers (Mitch Gould, J.J. Perry, Ming Qiu, Robert Alonzo and Youlia Galenko), he first emphasizes, "Not one person can stand up here and say that he or she did all the action and fight choreography. It was a team effort from Kurt, to the producers and Milla who I must say was absolutely amazing. With all the films I've done (over 70; including SPIDERMAN, CHARLIE'S ANGELS, RUSH HOUR, BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER (TV) and the wild and wooly EQUILIBRIUM), I've never seen an actress work so hard. I mean, on Friday and Saturday nights when we'd all go out, Milla stayed home and practiced her forms and weapons. She's better than most stunt girls I've seen and probably hits harder than any of them."

When I first sought fight choreography work in Hollywood during the early 1990s, I'd send producers demo reels of the fights I helped ("helped" being the key word) choreograph while I was working in the Chinese martial arts film industry. Every single producer would ask me, "You did this?" I would always answer that it wasn't me, but a team effort of 3-6 guys putting the fights together. These producers would then ask me to send them stuff that only I did. I couldn't. It took me a while to find work because although on the surface the Hollywood attitude is about collaboration, when it comes to stunts, regardless of input and cool ideas from the whole stunt crew, most stunt coordinators take all the credit. It wasn't until someone like Sam Ramie came along, who understood how things were done in Hong Kong, that I got my break as a fight choreographer on his ABC TV show SPY GAME in 1996. But even then, the stunt coordinator took all the credit. It's not a complaint; that's just the way it was. It's filmmakers like Smith who are slowly changing this.

Smith continues, "Kurt wanted to put together a team of unique individuals, and the eclectic team before you created a different approach to the fights yet makes the action come across very artistic. It was about incorporating many different kinds of martial arts, and not just one style and one person can't do all the styles. So when you have so much talent in a room, each person brings something to the fight that you can derive from, and that is what we tried to do. Also, all the team members not only helped with training and rehearsal, but they all appear on film fighting Milla in the scenes that they trained her to do.

"It's the funnest group of people I've ever worked with."

Another thing that Hong Kong fight directors brought to the Hollywood filmmaking table was the idea of training actors to do their own fights. This of course started when Yuen Woo-ping jokingly told the Wachowski "Brothers" that he'd only do THE MATRIX if he could personally train the actors for three months. Yuen assumed the directors wouldn't go for it, thus he could have gracefully avoided doing the movie. Strange how fate works.

Since then, Hollywood feels this is the way to go. ULTRAVIOLET is no different...or is it?

Smith explains that they trained Milla 16 weeks in America before heading off to China to shoot the film, where the training continued throughout the film.

"At the time we were teaching and she was rehearsing for the film," Smith says, "she was doing RESIDENT EVIL 2. We'd focus on training her, and then, while she was gone, worked out the fights, then plugged Milla into the spots.

"The whole point of such a big rehearsal process was that Kurt wanted Milla's movements to be natural, off the page, so when it came to on-camera it would look normal for Milla to be doing these things. I hope you can see this in the film, because she really did work hard.

"In fact, because there were so many moves in each fight for them to do, we actually created a fight book. We wrote down each step for the actors so they could actually read them and go over the fights in their head like an actor would use for their lines. And the stunt fighters would also know each of their moves. So if anyone had a question, all they had to was check the fight book."

Smith shows me the book. Each diagram looks like one of those connect-the-dot games, where the centralized beginning dot of the puzzle is Milla and the ensuing numbers that one connects are the other fighters and the choreographed movement throughout the fight. So as you connect the dots, you eventually see the picture, and in this case, it's a fight scene.

Smith adds, "So also with this way, we could keep track of who dies, what movement is being done, what was the reaction and then we would know where to move the camera, different angles and keep the choreography in check."

After watching a 10-minute trailer of the film, Smith notes about one of the nine fight scenes that when one sees catfights, where females pull at each other's hair, the idea was hit upon to have Milla fight opponents and use their hair against them.

One of the hair fighters was martial artist/gymnast Mitch Gould, who since his work on MARTIAL LAW has learned the Hong Kong way of choreography, working closely with one of Jackie Chan's premiere fight choreographers, Andy Cheng. Gould is quick to blurt, "When we worked in China, we had some of the 'Who's Who' in the Hong Kong stunt world with us. I'd sit around and talk to the guys, recalling Jackie's movies, about a certain guy who'd fall three stories, and they'd say, 'That's him over there.' And I'd say, 'Oh my God, he's my hero.' All these guys working for us were our stunt childhood idols."

Gould started with Shotokan karate, Wing Chun, Wu Dung, and while living in Belgium competed in savate tournaments. During college when he was asked to teach professional wrestlers how to kick, he appeared in their show and that started his career.

Smith notes, "Mitch taught the bad guy (Nick Chinlund as Daxus) how to do his sword fights. I mean, this guy never touched a sword in his life and Mitch made him look like an expert."

When asked how, from his perspective, Hong Kong and Hollywood fights differ, Gould shares, "The Hong Kong style is a bit more rhythmic, where you have rhythm-rhythm-rhythm then stop, followed by a broken rhythm style of movements. But in this film, the fight style was a bit more Western, where the follow-through moves seems a little bit harder. The sword fights also emulate the Western-style swords and of course the East."

The other "hair-attacker" was tae kwon do and kali-escrima specialist Robert Alonzo; he's the one with long dreadlocks.

"That was like a five pound weight on my hair," Alonzo laughingly recalls. "Milla was using my dreadlocks against me. So they first corn-rowed my hair, then sewed a wig onto my head so she could actually pull on my hair...and she did it with muscle.

"What also makes the film more unique is the use of the guns, where when you shoot them, it's first long-distance-oriented (like tae kwon do), covering all the angles of shooting (like kali strikes) then when the distance is shortened, use the guns as trapping tool and hitting with them (mixture of close-in fighting of escrima and Wing Chun)."

Which comes to the cool gun-fighting sequences, an idea borne out of the incredible work Wimmer and Smith did with Christian Bale in EQUILIBRIUM. Again, another indicator of the teamwork ethic and giving credit where credit is due, Smith quickly points out that the gun-kata idea was Wimmer's creation, and Smith translated the action into movement. Most coordinators would blindly say it was their idea, knowing the reporter would never get to talk to the director about it. But not Smith.

"Kurt envisioned gun fighting at a different level," Smith elaborates. "First you have the Wild West, then the Shaolin Monks who spent years developing their movements. So the gun kata was derived from over 200 years of watching gun fights, and the kind of evolution of anticipating a gunfighter's move and that these characters in EQUILIBRIUM were of the highest level.

"So yes, we see similar gun ideas in ULTRAVIOLET. But the key was to choreograph fights for Milla's strengths and character and not what I thought would be cool."

To make Milla's fights look cool and different, Wimmer and Smith turned to rhythmic gymnastics, break dancing and wu shu, where they hired world champion break dancer Alicia Vela-Bailey and Russian rhythmic gymnastics team member Youlia Galenko to double for Milla, and had 7-time Chinese national wu shu champion Ming Qiu to train her.

"I worked with Milla to show her the basics of rhythmic gymnastics ? not so much the gymnastics part but the use of the different apparatus we use in competition," Galenko says, "and then translated those apparatus into weapons, like swords. Because in rhythm gymnastics we do lots of little throws, catches, tosses and elements like that.

"And when I'd do certain movements, I'd feel the choreography of the moves, then show Michael, who'd show Kurt, then they'd watch me do it; and if they like it, we'd discus how to process and incorporate the movement into the fight."

Smith interjects, "Youlia did 40 takes of one move to get it right. It just shows you what went into putting these fights together."

Smith and Galenko demonstrate the technique. When Galenko with a foam sword is attacked by Smith with another sword, she arches her back, throws the sword behind her, then while keeping her right leg planted, dips her body down, then keeping her left leg straight, circles the left leg up so it's pointing at the ceiling, then with her face and right arm inches from the ground, catches the sword, circles to her feet and blocks Mike's attack. Perfect, first time.

Smith adds, "Of course, in a real fight, you'd never let go of the sword; but in the film, it's not supposed to be real, it's a great rhythmic gymnastics movement and it's very different. So in this way, the sword fights aren't just hack and sack like in every other film. It's also not just wire work; we can't improve on that, but we can still be original."

Although typically pleasant and humble, Chinese wu shu specialist Ming Qiu put Milla through the rigorous trainings the only way she knew how, strict and serious. This according to Smith was definitely the hardest thing for Milla. "You've got these low stances and difficult movements," Smith says, "so this made the rooftop fight the hardest. You've got to remember that Milla has never done any of this. It takes years for people to develop their art and now you ask an actress to do it as an action roll in a few months."

Qiu impressively recalls, "Milla took all the punishment and me saying, 'Lower, lower (in reference to Milla's horse stances); faster, faster (to Milla's movements),' because she knew it would be better for her when she is on camera. I mean, if I'm nice to her and say things like, 'Okay, nice job,' even if it wasn't, it wouldn't help her and she knew it."

The tough thing about having women do fights in film is to make sure that their punches don't look like a wet noodle. To prevent this, Smith brought in fight choreographer and former tae kwon do fighter for the U.S. Army team in Korea, J.J. Perry.

"I'm not a big fan of women leads as fighters," Perry avers, "because it's hard to make a woman look good fighting men because they bounce right off us if we don't fall for them the right way. So my primary job in this film was to teach Milla how to hit someone and maintain her composure. I was impressed."

To describe the team effort, Perry makes an analogy: "Mike did an amazing job and really wanted to do something different. He chose the track and we all rode the train."

	Discuss this article online
	Milla Jojovich's ULTRAVIOLET

Written by Dr. Craig Reid for KUNGFUMAGAZINE.COM

Print Friendly Version of This Article