Transcription
Are you ready to begin? I, I can barely stand. Death does not wait for you to be ready. I am going to stop you. You never did learn to mind your surroundings.
The very first time that I'd met with Chris after him asking me to play the role, he had said, you know, he really wanted me to be involved in the fighting technique so that it kind of looked organic and looked like something that I had invented myself. I wanted to take it back to a grubbier place, a place where you feel the punches a bit more and you're actually a bit more concerned about the violence on screen action.
I think there's been a, a lot of, very well, I think excessive use of, you know, wire work and martial arts and everything to the point where, um, the violence loses its threat because it's become a bit, I think, a bit dancelike, and we've become sort of comfortable watching it in that way.
You know, if you're in a fight situation, if Batman's got someone behind him and he can turn around and knock him out, headbutt him, why not? Why do a triple spin kick double loop, you know? Why not just knock him out? We were looking for something that when Batman threw a punch or a kick, it went through the person like a raging bull.
Once we started along those lines, and one of the stunt men, um, we had on the film, Buster Reeves, who's a jiu-jitsu world champion and extremely talented in martial arts, mentioned today for about a new martial arts system called Casey, um, or Casey fighting method.
[Music] Casey means from the heart, and it's also the nickname for the two founders of KFM, Hustto and Andy Norman. Andy and Hustto, they developed Casey over 20 years. They analyze tapes, they watch moves, all the different martial arts forms to develop it, put it together, and it's absolutely fantastic.
Take it away, boys.
Throughout all the fighting movies, we've seen the traditional Taekwondo, Muay Thai, the karate. We've seen all that, but we haven't seen KFM. In terms of martial arts, like Wu has been created over, um, hundreds of years. This is very, very new, and it's still evolving.
It's very much about being mentally aware of your environment, mentally aware of how people behave and respond to your actions and reactions. It's like, what do you want to do? Do you want to kill this man, or do you want to maim him? And that comes from you as a person. So, you know, it is a lethal art. It's very practical.
I mean, these guys actually train often in nightclubs and things, and they will smoke up the room, and it's all about using what's available and grabbing that ashtray and smacking somebody with it, or being able to have a fight with somebody while sitting next to them. And it's a really great fighting style. And we felt that was exactly what we wanted for Batman. Someone who, if he feels like he's going to headbutt you, that's what he does. It's just an emotional response.
We've had to kind of tame it down a bit. And it's to adapt their system into Dave Foreman's choreography and action. And because it's so tight and a tight fighting style, I had to adapt to make the moves bigger. So, so if I was throwing a punch to the face, I would, I would just make that bigger. I would just, I would just, you know, make the circle bigger.
The demonstration you just saw, I don't think you could actually break that down unless you saw that in slow motion. You couldn't quite see what was happening there, but the boys were actually breaking down each bone as, as they went up from the legs to the head. So it is something that you need a lot of control on, and, and so we move very, very slowly, and we build up layers till we feel very, very comfortable with it.
Wonderful. Well done, boys.
[Music] Christian has unbelievable stamina. I mean, I've seen his workload every day. And if he does get two hours off in the morning, he has to rehearse a fight.
Steph, it's not your fault. It's your father.
We had 16 fights in the movie for Christian to get through. There went bang.
Because he had such a heavy workload, we did a lot of blocking of the fights, um, with stunt guys and just liaising with Chris Nolan on tape. Then we'd bring, um, Christian in, put the acting element into the fight and perhaps tweak a few bits that felt character-wise like they should change [Music] and I would make the changes and then when we'd get on set, it all change again.
In terms of the fights, Christian learned every single fight. He did every single fight. The Casey fighting was very close quarters, so it was a very dangerous art. The hits were very direct to very dangerous parts of the body. Um, so we had to be very, very careful as not to injure our actors or our stuntmen.
Of course, [Music] a lot of the hits were like two, three inches away from the target. So every, every time [Music] I absolutely respect a stunt man. This is what they do, and they can obviously do any of it in a vastly superior way to what I can do. But I always like to try it, you know, and I like the possibility of being able to have some kind of stunt sequence and then you can zoom in and whatever, you know, and you see that it's the real person.
Basically, Christian learned fights very quickly. He'd go home at night and he'd watch the tapes, and he'd literally come in the next day and know the fight. He has a photographic memory. So I would show him a fight, and it sickens me because, you know, I'd show him 20 moves, and then within half an hour he would have all those 20 moves down. I can't do that, and I'm the fighter ranger.
I am the devil. You're not the devil. You're practice.
We all dream now that we can take on eight men at once and beat them all. And that's what the booise fight is like.
We see Bruce, you know, younger. He has no fighting skills whatsoever. There's no technique to him. He's adopted different styles, but he hasn't created his own style yet. We wanted to demonstrate that he had some skill, but it was really more about courage and brutality.
We brought, uh, 11 guys over from, um, Thailand, put the moves together, discuss them, say, "Oh, wouldn't it be nice if, or shouldn't he be stronger here?" He wanted, uh, eight guys coming at one guy all at once. And I had real trouble with that, you know, because for eight guys to attack one guy all at once is, is how am I going to put a fight? How am I going to choreograph them?
It was really quite hard to have them all coming at him so that he's having to work triple time to take care of them as opposed to people standing waiting to get up out the corner of the eye coming in taking their hit. We found what helped that was to keep him moving. So by keeping him moving, people could drop in his wake and then come into him as well.
Bang. Christian did the whole thing actually, and Buster sort of did, um, a few little inserts, but Christian did the whole fight.
We spent a lot of time determining exactly how much of Batman to show, how much of his fighting to show, and, uh, I had always looked to a representation of Batman that would be more from the criminals' point of views. You would see less of him. You would see him as more frightening. There would be more suspense as to what he was doing and where he was.
Where are you? Here.
And that meant showing less of him, cutting fight scenes very, very fast. So that Batman is seen as being blindingly quick and aggressive and almost animallike in the way he takes on the criminals.
You will never learn.
The Montreal was the biggest challenge because it was the finale, and we all wanted a big showdown. Batman is on equal terms now with Ducard. I think we feel that they are equal to each other. It was punch for punch, kick for kick, and that's what made it very intense and dynamic. Now we can really focus on using the Casey style at the end, and it's worked out really strong.
As a team, all of us, we all put that fight together and that energy together. Liam and Christian were keen to be involved to rehearse. In fact, you know, if they weren't doing anything, they'd actually call and say, "Look, you know, why don't we rehearse?"
Liam was a strong fighter. Casey is actually a fighting system where you use a lot of, uh, elbows and fists, and Liam's very tall, and I think he's 6'4" or 6'5". He's a tall guy. Um, so he has to go get very low in order to do the blows.
Ready and action.
We just wanted it to be as hard as possible. We wanted to show two men who are very highly trained and very highly skilled, very motivated. When I saw the enjoyment out of when Liam had finished the sequence and Christian, you could just see the glee in her face when they finished that sequence when they've just done 10, 10, 15 move sequence. And that's the best [Music] you guys. All right.
Scott, I was extraordinarily impressed with the speed and, and the degree of, of intensity that the actors were able to get into the, the action scenes by doing things themselves rather than having the stunt performers do things for them.
There's something in action and in fighting that is still very much performance. So, as a director, I, I find it to be a great advantage to have actors like Liam, like Christian, who are willing to just dive in and express the character's physicality even in the most extreme situations.
You ever learn to mind your surroundings?
My biggest challenge was to make the KFM, the Casey, work on screen, and hopefully it's new, creative, and that's what's good about the KFM. You can be creative with it. You can be very creative with it.
It was just kind of bizarre enough to get your attention and think, what, what the hell is he doing? And then absolutely vicious enough, but also practical enough to believe him.
KC reflected quite nicely our overall approach in terms of script and design of seeing Batman not as a glamorous sort of branded figure, decorative figure, but as a, a functional entity.