ha” Miller, rolling in the gi, part of the surfer/jiu-jitsu interface, before the movie started. He was psyched to have Pat around, and he confided in me that he wanted to train, and maybe fight someday—even though he knew he would probably never have the time to learn enough.
After we trained, Paul and Oakley took Pat and me surfing on the break right beneath Paul’s place. We shrugged into borrowed wet suits and listened dutifully, the roles of teacher and student reversed. Pat had fins and a boogie board, but his body was so dense he sank it, and he swam like a lead weight. His buoyancy was about the same as concrete. I got the biggest longboard they had, and I lay sideways on it to protect my jacked-up ribs and paddled in the freezing cold, battling to catch a few waves. My favorite part of surfing is sitting out on the board, just watching the swells roll in, looking for the right wave. I shadowed Paul and Oakley, spending eight times the energy to get to the spots they easily paddled to, while Pat worked even harder, chopping away with the flippers, working against wind, waves, and his own nature. We sat there bobbing on the swells, in the cold wind and warm sun, and Pat and I watched Oakley and Paul catch a big wave. Their surfing styles were similar, with their arms cocked behind them. It looks so easy when someone else is doing it. Pat muttered, “This is pretty cool, dude—we’re surfing with Paul Walker.”
The most important thing a movie actor does is look good on camera; and it’s a weird phenomenon, how certain people just look better than others on film. On camera, Paul’s face picked up a definition and roughness, an edge that it didn’t have in plain sight. One of the stuntmen told me that Sharon Stone was crazy like that—you would look right at her and think, She’s pretty, and then look at the monitor and think, Who the hell is this girl? She’s amazing.
We wrapped the prison scene, and Tim and Ben returned to Iowa. Pat was working on two major fight scenes with Mike and Oakley and had sequenced them out in steps.
The first was between a bad guy, played by Stefanos Miltsakakis, and Paul, in a trailer down by the beach. It was going to be brutal, smashing the trailer to pieces, breaking windows, and generally tearing shit up. The second fight was to be filmed later, at a set the construction guys were building out in the desert, colloquially called Split-Rock in the script. That one would be Paul versus Pat, Rory Markham, and Robbie Lawler. They joined us on set, Robbie utterly laconic, while Rory was more excited; he shamefacedly admitted he’d taken acting classes in Chicago.
Stefanos was a fascinating character, a massive, craggy man who had played bad guys in several Van Damme movies but was also a real fighter; he was 5–0 in MMA. John Herzfeld had seen him fight in Los Angeles and hired him to be in his movie. He was Greek and had been on the Greek Olympic wrestling team in 1984. He’d trained with Rickson Gracie and had won vale tudo fights in Brazil. He was educated, European; he told me I had to read Emile Zola’s Nana, and I promised him I’d get right on it. He also looked great, an unbelievably rough, handsome, leonine face, massive hands, the steely blue eyes of a German U-boat commander. He was great for movies. He was forty-five and looking for a shot at the UFC. He had a deep respect for Pat, as well as lot of his own ideas about how the fights should go—some were good, and some weren’t. He wanted to maybe kick the gun out of Paul’s hand, but Mike shook his head: “That’s a little Charlie’s Angels for me.” There was a move that eventually got cut of Paul banging a pot on Stefanos’s head; Mike felt it was slapstick and said, “I didn’t know we were making a comedy,” and Stefanos replied immediately, “We’re not making Shakespeare.”
Fighters watch movie fights and are experts of a kind; they know what they like, and they know what a real fight is like. When Pat started working with Paul and Oakley, he wasn’t teaching them movie fighting, he was teaching them real fighting—the basics: footwork, balance, keep your hands up. Pat knew you had to teach feet first. “The arms are the chisel and the body’s the hammer,” he’d say, and you have to move your feet to swing that hammer. What Pat and I had to learn was movie fighting.
“The difference between movie fighting and real fighting—the big difference—is that in a movie fight, the guy getting hit is more important. It’s a dance, you have to have a good partner or the fight won’t work. The person getting hit—he’s got to sell it. Or it looks fake,” Mike told us.
Oleg Taktarov had a funny story about that: He was doing a Russian film, and one of the extras told him that he really admired him and was thrilled to be working with him; in a scene where Oleg was getting beaten by five or six guys, that same extra kicked him in the face, hard, trying to make the scene look real. Oleg laughed and said, “That was the only kick that looked fake, because it surprised me so I didn’t react properly.”
Communication is critical between the parties in a movie fight, and you have to maintain eye contact. In a real fight, you don’t do that; or maybe you use your eyes to mislead, look high and kick low, but in a movie fight, you need to telegraph your punches, not only for your partner but also for the audience. When Chuck was beating up an extra in the prison kitchen, he momentarily forgot and did what he normally did, which was use his eyes to mislead. He threw a light slap that the extra didn’t expect, and that one, although it landed, looked fake, because the extra wasn’t ready to sell it. Oakley had done sword fighting on Timeline and said, “For swords, eye contact is really key, because now you’ve got actors with weapons.”
The other big part of shooting a fight scene is where the cameras are; profile on the actors is the worst, the hardest to sell. You want to be either in front or behind, or at some kind of three-quarters view, so that the camera flattens out the distances and the punches appear to connect. Matt, one of the main cameramen, said, “You always want the action coming at you, move the camera into it. It’s a game of angles.” They do a lot of messing with the speed, the frames per second, too, depending on the type of action, and whether it will be slow motion or ever so slightly speeded up. Normal speed is twenty-four frames a second, and action might be shot at something around twenty, while slow motion is ninety-six. But there are all kinds of in betweens and exceptions, and Mike said, “Certain action looks better at different speeds.”
The shoot continued, unabated, and the whole crew moved from Rosarito to Ensenada, a few hours down the road south, to be nearer to the hacienda. The shoot moved to a fancy vineyard where American owners were making serious attempts at turning this part of Mexico into a wine name. We drove in, down washboarded dirt roads before sunrise, the warm blue of the sun still down below the horizon, the light suffusing and lifting details one by one from the rugged countryside. I remember passing a Mexican man on his bicycle—he paused as we dusted him out (our Mexican drivers would never slow down)—an older man in his mid-forties with a mustache and a hooded sweatshirt against the morning chill. He watched us roll past with utter indifference, and I wondered where he was going at five in the morning, deep in the desert mountains before the sun was even up over las monta?as. He probably had a family out here in the scrubland, in one of the dirt shacks.
That night, Pat and I were back in Ensenada, working on the trailer fight scene with Oakley, Mike, and Stefanos. Paul and John were going to show up later, for a serious rehearsal.
Between us we had worked it out over the past week, sometimes with Stefanos, sometimes with Oakley, and I had necessarily stood in for whoever wasn’t around. Paul, the leading man who was in nearly every scene, was constantly busy, and when he wasn’t, he was exhausted. Being a movie star isn’t breaking rocks in the hot sun, but it isn’t a cakewalk, either. The shoots are long, nonstop, thirty or forty days of shooting, all of them twelve or fifteen hours long; you have to be present, focused, and powerfully active. The money, of course, is ridiculous; so it’s worth it—but it’s not easy.
The fight scene started with Stefanos disarming Paul, and then went back and forth with kicks and punches, head butts and fishhooks, body slams, triangles; the kitchen sink was in there. It ended with a spectacular neck break from Paul, dispatching the monstrous Stefanos. It was something like sixty separate steps, broken down into beats of four or five exchanges, where we would cut, reset, and rehearse the next beat.
Paul and John showed up and we had a real rehearsal. John was raring to go. “If I can’t make the violence rough and raw with you guys, I can’t do it,” he said. We started to go through the scene. Pat would walk Paul through the beats, and then Paul and Stefanos would run them. Stefanos was tough—he was a real fighter—and he move