Aquaman’s Director Breaks Down Jason Momoa's Fight Scene

Hi, I'm James Wan and we're about to do Notes On a Scene

and the scene is from my latest film, Aquaman

and let's do it, let's get into it.

[Atlantean] You owe me blood!

How'd you find me?

Your lady friend has people who like to keep tabs on her.

We follow Arthur and Mera

through their journies through the Seven Seas

for a moment in the film,

when 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 Atlantean Commandos, that are hunting them down.

[Arthur] Uh!

[suspenseful cinematic music]

I love to sort of tie my action together,

so if I have characters that are doing things,

you know, in one location

and something else is happening kind of close by,

I like to sort of find ways, where my camera allows me

to sort of connect them together

and we shot Jason's stunt double here in the foreground

getting blasted onto the roof, tearing up the roof tiles,

he comes in this way.

Meanwhile the camera is on a crane,

pushes passed him, 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 a crane and Spidercam

to hook the two seperate locations into one

and then obviously using visual effects

to kind of 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 kind of create a fun, action set piece

that we've never kind of quite seen before

and that is our philosophy from day one

to create things that we haven't quite seen before.

[suspenseful cinematic music]

[growling]

Hey!

[woman screaming]

Oh!

[screaming]

[rapid upbeat music]

So one of the things I wanted to do with this

was I knew I wanted it to be kind of like a classic

foot chase sequence through the rooftop,

but I wanna kind of mix it up a little bit,

so came up with 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,

I thought it might be really fun

to see a lead character here bust through a wall,

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,

we do it without a cut and kind of let it

just take us all the way to the next moment.

Oh!

[screaming]

And so when we got back to do this second take,

we tried to roughly sort of keep the look of it,

so we keep the way it's busted, you know,

like the way the doors and the walls are kind of busted

and all kind of raggedy and we just sort of very simply

kind of mock it back up, just so the stunt guy

can have something physical for him to hit into

and then what we do then is we use visual effects

to come in and complete either the wall or the doorway

and make it look like it's brand new.

Another thing I do wanna talk about

is the photography of this shot.

The camera itself is hooked to a line,

because the camera is pretty heavy and we strip it down

to try and make it as compact as possible,

but it still has a lot of weight

and the guy who is technically actually shooting this shot

right now is a stunt performer as well.

So Murk jumps off the balcony and lands

and the camera follows it very smoothly.

The camera operator is also hooked to a harness as well,

so that when he jumps down, you know,

he lands perfectly with the stunt guy,

that's the only way to kind of achieve a shot like this,

you don't put your camera operator in there,

you put someone who actually understands stunt movement.

But that first half of that shot

ends with our camera operator

basically going out the window of the hallway

and that's really all we had built,

we built the section that we know we needed to photograph

and when the camera leaves the hallway out the window,

we're pretty much going into like nothing,

if you see what's out there,

you'll 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 shot,

we built the rooftop, right,

that the actor or the stunt performer will run on,

but everything is on scaffolding,

that are really only two or three feet off the ground

[laughing] on the parking lot,

don't really wanna give it away, but that's how we did it

and then visual effects comes in

and adds in the entire environment around it

to make it look like it's all the way up there

and to sort of complete the world.

[suspenseful cinematic music]

We're now about to go into the third portion of this shot.

So one thing I wanna point out here,

at some point during this horizontal chase sequence,

we did what we call a Texas switch,

you have two people kind of like playing the same character

and you'll literally have them go behind something

and then the other person comes out the other side

and so in this case, we used a very similar approach here,

where we had stunt performer number one,

she's running, running, and then she goes behind that pillar

and once we go behind that pillar,

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 her

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 unencumbered from the safety line,

so that they can then run forward towards us,

as we pull back away from her.

[suspenseful cinematic music]

Argh!

[chiming bell]

Argh!

Uh!

Uh!

Uh!

In this sequence, we have another set

built at a different location,

the camera starts on the other side

through the window of the bell tower

and shooting into a blue screen

and then the camera pulls back

and you time it perfectly to Jason's action,

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, it's a digital version of Jason.

The explosion itself is real

and that's really how I like to do

most of my stunt sequences is I love to try and shoot

as much of the actual action in camera as I can

and ultimately using visual effects

to help me stitch moments together,

stitch elements together to create the one final shot.

The more practical you can kind of photograph,

the better and more real it looks.

[Arthur] Argh!

Uh!

Uh!

Uh!

[chiming bell]

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 real stunt person,

so the flying towards the camera is a digital double,

but then the rest of this action

of this guy clipping the edge of this rooftop

is a real stunt performer and so that way,

we can get, you know, the roof tiles

to interact properly when he sort of hit it

and then he's actually on a safety wire,

it's spun around him, so that when he clips it,

he can kind of uncoil in a roundabout way

and so that gives it a really interesting sort of look

for when he sort of eventually hits the ground.

Uh!

Uh!

[chiming bell]

No, kid!

Uh!

We put a kind of like a punching bag basically

right in front of this young, little girl here

and then the stunt guy basically runs

and body checks that body bag

and then all we did is we just replaced the body bag

with this giant digital bell.

[suspenseful cinematic music]

This shot here was done on a keyboard cam,

a Spidercam starts low on the ground

and then the camera sort of zips upwards

to then hook up with the action that's happening above here

and again, coming back to my philosophy

of loving to sort of link my characters

together with the camerawork,

that always kind of lets you know where everyone is at

and ultimately just gives you

a better sort of geography look of the environment.

[suspenseful cinematic music]

So meanwhile, yeah, Murk is down there chasing after her

leading up to this particular shot,

this shot took a lot timing to get right,

as you can imagine, because when she jumps

and then he comes running and jump 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,

she's above there and he's 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 what, you just keep doing take after take,

till you get it right

and so we have multiple cameras going on at the same time,

as you can imagine

and this sequence here literally has our stunt performer

with the safety cable around her,

sort of looped around her body,

so that when she goes flying, she spins through the air

like the explosion threw her across the air,

it's using the cable around her body,

kind of pulling her like a top,

if you can imagine, a spinning top

and that's actually how we get her to spin through the air.

So again the stunt is real,

her flying through the air is real

and then ultimately what happens here

is she lands alright on a safety pad,

so she doesn't actually fall through the roof in that moment

and then we cut to the next shot.

When we're doing action scenes like this, you know,

it's so involved and it's just great to have these actors,

that are so excited about wanting to do it

and to do it right and just really kind of get into it,

we were very passionate when we made this film

and I think, you know, you see that love and passion

in every frame of this film.