With the release of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings on home video, the film’s action designer, stuntman, and filmmaker Joseph Le, sat down for an exclusive interview with PopWire to talk about the film’s numerous fight sequences, filming and choreographing the fights and the reaction to the film.
Le began his career as a stuntman by filming YouTube videos recreating fight scenes from Jackie Chan films but adding his own twist to them.
“I was doing my own little indie action films on the side during my day job as a graphic designer,” Le said. “Little by little, my action films got more views on YouTube, some of them became viral. We added our own breakdancing moves and moves that Jackie Chan didn’t use… We added stuff we saw from video games and anime.”
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings was Le’s first film job. During the training of star Simu Liu, the film’s second unit director and stunt coordinator, the late Brad Allen, was looking for someone to help design the film’s fights. “There’s a group called Martial Club that was training Simu at the time and Brad Allen was asking around, ‘Who can shoot anime-style mixed with Jackie Chan flavor?’ Through the strength of my YouTube videos, my name got brought up multiple times. The video that got recognition was called ‘Afro Samurai Champloo.'”
In creating the fight sequences for the film, Le and his team made sure that no two fight scenes were alike. Various styles and locations influenced each fight. “The scaffolding fight and the Death Dealer fight wasn’t in the original script,” Le revealed. “We wanted to put the audience in Shang-Chi’s view as he’s trying to rescue Katy. So the camera is weaving in and around the bamboo. We wanted the audience to feel like they were there. We were trying to innovate in the same way ‘The Matrix’ did with the rotating shot as he’s dodging the bullets. We wanted to do our version of that.”
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The famous bus fight sequence early in the film was a personal favorite of Le’s because, “It felt like the unmasking of a new hero. It’s the first time we see Shang-Chi fight. And there are external stakes because the bus is falling apart and speeding down the streets of San Francisco and there’s comedy and character.” Le and his team looked at Jackie Chan fights and the “Ip Man” films for influence and also spliced scenes from the film “Speed” into their pre-visualization, or pre-vis, videos of the fight.
Le also listed other famous martial arts films as influences on the action in the film. “Our stunt team worked with Brad Allen on other films like ‘Scott Pilgrim’ and ‘Hellboy 2,’ but their experience is more mainland China type of action cinema. A lot of Chinese film heavily influenced the fights, like ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’ and Jet Li’s ‘Once Upon a Time in China’ series and how that main hero often used the fighting style Hung Gar, which we wanted to emulate for the Mandarin. A lot of stuff was influenced by Yuen Woo-Ping, who did ‘The Matrix’ and ‘Kill Bill.'”
Even though the film is set within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Le and his team were given complete creative control over the action and were not pressured to fit within the previous Marvel films’ style of fighting. “We had a lot of time to prepare,” Le said. “When you watch Hollywood action films, the action is very choppy and that’s because they didn’t have time to prepare, or they didn’t know how to shoot or edit action. With this, we had a lot of prep time. Most of the fights, there was one way to film it and that’s what we stuck with.”
Le described the global reaction to the film and the overwhelming praise for the action set pieces as, “A huge relief. After ‘Forbidden Kingdom’ and the series, ‘Iron Fist,’ we thought that martial arts would be given the respect it deserved and they didn’t deliver that. This film had such a strong story about Asian-American experience and heritage and forging your own path and that message was very beautiful. Especially right now, I know it’s still going on, but with ‘Asian Hate’ in 2020, this film just came out at the perfect time. We needed this film.”
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is now available on a variety of formats.