As some of you know, a while back I mentioned that I was going to be involved as an actor and a fight choreographer in an independent film about King Alfred the Great. Shooting finally wrapped this last Saturday. I had done a few films before, but this was by far the largest and most demanding one yet. From it, have learned many more valuable lessons that may be of some interest here.
My Job: As a fight choreographer it is my job to flesh out what the director sees in his head. Sometimes the director will be open to whatever you want to do and other times he or she will have very specific things in mind that they want to see. Bottom line is that you are there to make them happy. Often times that means sacrificing historical accuracy in order to keep your job. Lucky enough, the director was fairly loose on letting me do what I wanted though many other issues lay as barriers to what I envisioned. There were, however, several occasions where I had to alter things to make it 'fit' with his vision.
The Budget: With any film, especially with inde films, budget is of huge concern. Almost every sword related film I've worked on the director vastly under-estimates how much weapons will cost. Most will go on eBay and find a bunch of "cool looking" $20 swords and think they have enough money for plenty of those. Then I come on and let them know the huge danger and waste of money that would be- no even to mention that 99% of the time the swords they are looking at are not appropriate for the film (more on this later). Even the cheapest of swords that can actually take a beating is 5 to 10 times what they had planned on spending. This usually results in fewer swords being bought as opposed to more funding allocated to the weapons budget. This is also felt across the board in the areas of costuming and set design. I often had to mention very casually that certain things weren't exactly period accurate that weren’t in my job description. Sometimes this is a risk and sometimes it’s ok to do. More often than not it’s met with, "well that's all that we have to work with, with this budget". For this film, we had hoped to have at least 8-10 swords to use for the strong fighting to be done in the forefront of the screen. The director originally wanted a variety of swords to reflect each of the lead and supporting characters personalities. We ended up with 3 CASI practical Vikings and 2 axes that had no business being in a film set in the late 800’s.
The Talent: We all know swordsmanship is an art and a skill. It takes lots of practice and training before you feel comfortable. In film, you don’t have that time. Before we started shooting I had about a total of 2 1/2 total hours to train these guys (about 6 people) how to use these things. Most had never held a sword before in their life. One guy had been involved in a really bad stage combat class geared towards "rapier". Though he was more difficult than the others in getting him into a proper non-"look at how graceful I am on stage" stance. In addition to a few duel scenes, this film was to feature a "big battle" towards the end. This meant lots of extras that I wouldn’t see until that day. More on this later... Needless to say, getting complete sword newbies to look like seasoned warriors is quite a daunting task. Some people picked it up faster than others and some just never really got it. So I had to be prepared to somehow fix it and make it work. This fix was usually done by simplifying the fight or using trick or stylized cinematography. People are rarely cast on their fighting ability. In fact, there was someone that was supposed to have a supporting role in the film that had loads of ability, but ended up getting bumped for a relative of a Producer. It's all politics.
The Story: Fights should never exist in the movies just for the sake of fighting. The purpose of a film is to tell a story. The fight should be treated as part of the dialogue and be used to tell and push the story forward. Often times this means that situations might arise where what you need to do for the stories sake is not necessarily how things may have been done in history. If we need to see a characters change in attitude during the fight, we have to make it long enough to show that well. This may mean a few things happening to draw it out more than what real life might be. There could be a place for totally accurate fighting situations, but most stories can't use that. For this film the good King gets in several scraps and has this nasty habit of leaving everyone alive. So I have to come up with a way for him to defeat all these people but still leave them functional. This of course will alter what kind of techniques you use.
The Shoot: Nothing can prepare you for the stress and chaos that is the live set. No matter how much you prepare problems will happen. For instance, for the "big battle" that we were supposed to have for this film we had about 40-50 extras slated to show up. The day of the shoot arrives and about 17 show up. Not only that, about half of the weapons and equipment that we were supposed to have doesn’t get to us in time. Thus, the director frantically threw anything with a blade and a body into frame to fill it up- despite historical inaccuracies. I was desperately trying to communicate with the Director of Photography about where the depth of focus was so I could know where to try and stash the more historically offensive "weapons" into the background. So rather than having several dozens of well equipped soldiers fighting, we have a flurry of sparely and dubiously armed armatures pawing at each other. To compensate, the camera comes in on the few people that did have a little training and leaves everyone else in the out of focus background. Another dilemma came when we got on set and the location changed. Instead of having a 2 on 1 fight in a large clearing, I have to make do with a 2 on 1 fight in an area the size of an apartment bedroom. Things had to be changed and trick photography came in handy there too.
The Conclusion: Even with all these dilemmas and drawbacks this is a very fun thing to do. I feel this project fell a little short of its potential but isn’t a total embarrassment. It was shot very well and I have confidence in the editor to bring out the best of what we did. I hope to continue doing these projects and hopefully someday we can find a group of martial artists that know some acting and can find a story where our skills can fully be displayed and appreciated. Until then, baby steps... <img src="/forum/images/icons/smile.gif" alt="" />
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