Name: Aquaman’s Director Breaks Down Jason Momoa's Fight Scene | Vanity Fair
Uploaded: 2020-03-15T02:41:00.000Z
Duration: 11 min 17 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Hi, I'm James one, and we're about to do notes on the scene.

And this is the scene is from my latest film, Aqua Man, and let's do it, Let's get into it way fellow Arthur and Mera through, then journeys through the Seven Seas.

For a moment in the film, we take a reprieve out of the ocean and we come out onto land.

And here we're about to go into one of our very big action scenes, where they confront Black Manta and these Atlantan commandos that are hunting them down.

So if I have characters that are doing things in one location and something else has happened close by, I like to sort of find ways where my camera allows me to sort of connect them together.

And we shot Jason stunned double here in the foreground, getting blasted onto the roof and tearing up the roof tiles.

Meanwhile, the camera is on, a crane pushes possum.

We hook up to another element shoot that is happening in the background here with Mera, and so in this one shot, it allows me to go from one character to the next one, using crane and spotted camp to hook the two separate locations into one.

And they obviously using visual effects that kind of like marry them together.

Ultimately, what I'm looking for here is an action scene that might seem somewhat familiar, but it's taken up a notch and can't create a ah fun action set piece that we have never quite seen before.

And that is our philosophy from day one to create things that we haven't quite seen before.

So one of the things I wanted to do with this was and you want it to be kind of like a classic foot chase sequence through the rooftop, but I want to kind of, like, kind of mix it up a little bit.

So I came up the idea of Maybe it's a foot chase sequence that's happening on two levels.

For the first part of the chase, I can follow the bad guy.

It would be really fun to see elite character here, buster own wool.

Find someone who's in the midst of shaving in the shower, and then if we continue, we see we come out into someone's living room and someone's kitchen.

And the concept is, we continue with the chase and don't do it without a cut and kind of let it just take us all the way to the next moment.

And so when we go back to do the second take, we try Thio roughly sort of keep the look of it.

It's busted, you know, like the way the holes in the walls kind of busted in all kind of raggedy, and we just sort of, very simply cannot market back up just so That stunt a guy can have something physical for him to hit into.

And then what we do then is we use visual effects, the coming and complete other, the wall or the doorway and and make it look like it's brand new.

Nothing I do want to talk about is is the photography of this shot.

The camera, it's of is hooked to a line because the camera is pretty heavy and, you know, we strip it down to like two.

Tamika's compact as possible, but it still has a lot of weight, and the guy who is technically actually shooting the shot right now is a stunt performer as well.

So much jumps off the balcony lands, and the camera follows it very smoothly.

The camera operators also hoped, Your Highness, it's local that when he jumps down, he lands perfectly with the stunt guy.

That's the only way to achieve a shot like this.

You don't put your camera operator in there.

You put someone who actually understands stunt movement.

That first half of that shot ends with a camera operator basically going out the window of the whole way.

We just we built like the section that we know we need to photograph.

And when the camera leaves the whole way out the window, we're pretty much going into, like nothing.

If you see what's out there, you little literally see that it's the parking lot where we shot the sequence in.

Obviously, then we use visual effects to then hook us up into the next section of the shot.

And so the next section of the shard we built the rooftop right that the actor or the stunt performer will run on when everything is on scar fording that I really only like two or three feet off the ground on the parking lot don't want to give it away, but that's how we did it.

And and then visually fix comes in and and ads in the entire environment around it to make it look like it's all the way up there and to complete the world when now, about to go into the third portion of the shot.

At some point during this corazon to chase sequence, we did what we call a Texas switch.

You have two people, kind of like playing the same character, and and you literally have them go behind something and then the other person comes out the other side.

And so, in this case, we use a very similar approach here, where we had stunt performer number one.

She's she's running, running, and then she goes behind that pillar, and once we go behind it now, this is stunt performer number two, taking over the rest of the run.

The reason why we did that is because she was running vertically in this direction and her character is hooked up to a safety line and so we cannot unclip.

And so now we need to take the running action she needs to be running towards us.

And so that's why this particular person needs to be encumbered from the safety line so that they can then run forward towards us as we pull back away from her.

In this sequence, we have another set, built a different location.

Camera starts on the other side, through the window of the bell tower and shooting into like a blue screen.

And then the camera pulls back and you time it perfectly.

Thio Jason's action and he dives out of the way as the explosion go off and again.

You know, this particular bell tower was built in a parking lot and basically just rigged to blow up.

And then, of course, this particular guy here is not a real person.

The explosion itself is really That's really how I like to, you know, do most of my stunt sequences is I live to try and shoot as much of the actual action in cameras I can and ultimately, usually using visual effects that helped me steep stitch moments together, stitch elements together to create the one final shot.

The more practical you can photograph, the better and more real it looks.

And so this shot here, you know, we have a digital double flying to the foreground, and then at some point right there is when it becomes the rial stunt person.

So the flying towards the camera is a digital double.

But then the rest of this action off this guy clipping the edge off this rooftop is a real stunt performer.

And so that that way we can get, you know, the roof tiles to interact properly when he hit it.

And then And he's actually gonna want that, you know, no safety once it's spun around him so that when he clips it, he can kind of uncoil in a roundabout in around way.

And so that gives it a really interesting sort of look for when he sort of eventually hits the ground.

No, we put a a punching bag basically right in front off this young little go he and and then the stunt guy basically runs and body checks.

The thea that body bag and and then what we did is we just replace the body back with this giant digital things shot he was done with on a cable camera.

Spotted came with chemist that's low on the ground, and then the cameras zip upwards to then hook up with the action that's happening above he and again, you know, coming back to my philosophy of loving physical link my characters together with with the camera work that always kind of lets you know where everyone is at and ultimately just gives you a better geography.

So meanwhile, yeah, America's do down the chasing after her leading up to this particular shot.

This shot took, ah, lot of timing to get right, as you can imagine, because when she jumps and then he comes running in and jumped out of the balcony across to the other building as well took a lot of correct timing.

You know, they're on different planes, literally like she's above, and his down there one floor down and then on top of that, we have the difficulty of trying to time the camera with the action as well.

And so we're zipping in as the action's happening, and then the camera has to sort of pan with the action as it pulls away.

And so that kind of stuff takes a lot of work to get right and, you know, and you just keep doing take up to take to you get it right And so we have multiple cameras going on at the same time as you can imagine.

And and this sequence he literally has stunt performer with the safety cable around has looped around her body so that when she goes flying, she spends through the air like Alec.

It's using the cable around her body, come pulling her like a top, if you can imagine a spinning top.

And that's ultimately how we get had to spin through the A.

So again, the stunt Israel, her flying through the air, Israel and ultimately, what happens he is.

She lands right on a safety pad so she doesn't actually fall through the roof in that moment.

When we're doing action scenes like this, you know it's so involved and and it's just great to have these actors that are so excited about wanted to do it and and to do it right and just really can't get into it.

We were very passionate when we made this film.

 And I think, you know, you see that love and passion, you know, in every frame of this film. 