'Shang-Chi' Director Destin Daniel Cretton Breaks Down the Bus Fight Scene

If there was a moment in this movie

where you are like,

Oh yes, I am watching a Marvel movie,

the moment that that razor comes out is definitely that.

If this was a three-act structure to this fight scene,

this would be the act one turn.

That's the moment that the [beep] hits the fan.

Hi, my name is Destin Daniel Cretton.

I'm the director of

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,

and this is Notes on a Scene.

You have the wrong guy!

Does he look like he can fight?

Come on bro! [groans]

[Shang-Chi groans]

[tense electronic music]

This scene, from the very beginning,

was an exercise in upping the stakes

of a fight sequence

and when I initially pitched this to Marvel,

it was just a lot of, what if scenarios.

What if, instead of just a one-on-one fight,

there were six to 10 assassins fighting Shang-Chi?

What if, instead of them being in a park,

they were on a bus?

And then, what if the brakes of that bus

went out and they were careening down

a very steep hill in San Francisco?

[speaking foreign language]

[speaking foreign language]

You have the wrong guy.

Does he look like he can fight?

Come on, bro. [grunts]

In a Marvel movie, you never know

what's real and what's fake.

Some of these poles are fake

and put in after the fact

to give us some space for the physical moves

that were happening.

Everything outside these windows, fake.

This, very real.

I mean, she played it so convincingly

that we were all scared after.

Right after the take,

everyone was asking if she was okay

and she said she was fine, thank goodness.

We were all like, Oh my gosh!

Was that real?

And she was like, It was kind of real.

It actually really works for the scene

because everybody gets jolted into that,

the violence of this push.

It makes Shang-Chi's next reaction very warranted.

[Shang-Chi groans]

[tense electronic music]

Love this expression. Awesome!

This moment, I believe it was shot

at 120 frames-per-second,

which makes it very slow.

One of our action designers, Chris Cohen

came up with this moment.

That's one of the things,

when you see an action sequence like this,

it's the brainchild of a whole lot of talented people

coming up with different moves

and constantly exploring the physical space

and trying to come up with moments

that would be memorable.

I think every choreographer on our team

has their hands in this sequence

in one moment or another.

[tense electronic music]

You okay?

A lot of character beats in this movie

are told through just two people

looking at each other.

Shang-Chi is, through his eyes saying, Sorry,

and Katy is saying something like,

So this is kind of the first moment

that Katy sees that her entire relationship

with this dude, who she considered her best friend,

was potentially a lie.

The other important thing that we wanted for this moment

is for people to really know

how much they care about each other

and how much Shang-Chi cares about her.

So that's why after this, says, Are you okay?

I wasn't hired to direct this movie

because I didn't have a lot of experience in action.

What I pitched them was a family drama

and a character-driven story

that was wrapped in a Kung Fu movie

and a martial arts film and a superhero movie.

And so, it was really important,

even in the midst of a big

action-packed sequence like this,

to find these key beats

where we are reminded of the emotions

between the characters, of who Shang-Chi is.

[men grunting]

[tense electronic music]

[men grunting]

So, there's three shots in a row,

and each of those were choreographed

by a different one of our choreographers

who are all trying to explore how to use

Shang-Chi's reversible jacket.

This is, kind of, the first reveal

that it is a reversible jacket.

You know, they went through a bunch of different

creative ways to do a jacket gag,

which was an inspiration from our hero, Jackie Chan.

My favorite things about Jackie Chan fights

are the setting and the props,

and how he uses both of them very strategically

to create a very clear narrative.

And that was also one of the main things

that we talked about with our incredible stunt team,

was how we can really utilize every inch

of the space of this bus in creative ways

and use all of the props

that we had available to us on this bus.

And this jacket was one of those props,

and this became a very memorable moment.

Yo, what up, y'all?

It's your boy Klev coming at you

live on the bus.

I actually did take a little bit

of martial arts as a youth.

So, I'm going to try and grade this fight

as we're going.

The way that we shot him

was really, just letting him improvise, like a ton.

But this turns out to be

a very important story element

because what he is recording on his cell phone

is a set up to people knowing who Shang-Chi is.

This was probably our most

technically complicated sequence to shoot

because we shipped two of these

huge accordion buses out to Sydney, Australia

from California.

One of the buses was meant

for whenever the bus was on level ground

and it could shake and move.

And then another bus

was on a mechanical gimbal that was 20 feet up in the air

and was able to go at a 45-degree angle,

shake, twist, turn,

and do everything that we needed the bus to do

as it was careening down the hills of San Francisco.

We shot this scene for about a month

and I really commend these incredible actors.

I'm going to put hearts here

because I love them so much

because every day, for a month,

they would show up, climb 20 feet into the air,

into this claustrophobic barf machine,

and somehow do believable performances

over and over and over.

I actually went up into this thing

for about two minutes

and thought I was going to throw up on people

and I smiled and said,

You guys are doing a great job.

And I got the hell off that thing.

[fighters grunting]

[tense electronic music]

Holy-

Who are you?

One of the beauties of this process

is we have the time to edit our footage together

and realize that we need certain character beats.

And we were able to go back into the plates

and re-shoot Katy.

This shot was Katy on a green screen

that we put into this plate.

This was shot in Los Angeles.

The rest of the interior of the bus was shot in Sydney

and everything outside the bus was shot in San Francisco

all to make this one shot.

[tense electronic music]

So, during the choreography process

of trying to figure out what

all of the action beats are for this movie,

what nobody anticipated was how big Florian is.

Here's Florian.

He was about an inch from the ceiling of the bus,

and there were many times when he would just

give a little hop and hit the ceiling.

It actually made the choreo that they had created

much more difficult,

but thank goodness Florian actually is a professional boxer

and he's an extremely physical human being.

His size, in this space, made all of his moves

much more fun to watch.

[Klev] You got this, bro!

[passengers gasping]

My bad.

[tense electronic music]

[men grunting]

If there was a moment in this movie

where you are like,

Oh yes, I am watching a Marvel movie,

the moment that that razor comes out

is definitely that.

If this was a three-act structure to this fight scene,

this would be the act-one turn.

That's the moment that the stakes are very raised

and the shit hits the fan.

What we actually had here when we were shooting

was a green sleeve that Florian wore on his arm,

and it had this long flexible wand that came out of it

like a rubber dangly wand that was ridiculous

because it kept flopping around every time he would swing,

which made it really hard

for Simu to keep a straight face

'cause what Simu's actually looking at here

is not a scary razor,

but a floppy, weird dangly thing that looks like a noodle.

[intense music]

[passengers screaming]

[suspenseful music]

[engine revving]

[glass shattering]

And this is a great example of the VFX team

working very closely with our physical production team.

This is real and everything else is fake.

We shot all of the action that's taking place inside the bus

on our stage and as the camera moves in towards the bus,

at the moment that Razor Fist breaks that window,

that's when we're actually

back into the reality of what we're shooting,

but everything else here is a combination

of real plates and VFX

that Chris and his team worked tirelessly on

the entire post-process to get it to this point.

[men grunting] [suspenseful music]

One of the greatest joys of this process

was working with Bill Pope,

who many might know was the director of photography

for some incredible movies,

like the entire Matrix trilogy.

He is such a smart, smart man,

and really so good at finding creative ways to shoot action,

and light action.

In this sequence, he and our incredible gaffer, Reg,

put together a lighting grid

that was constantly moving

so everything outside of the bus,

this is all green screen so, you know,

we're on a stage and everything out here is blue.

We had lighting on this track

that was zooming around the bus

to emulate the way that the shadows

would be flying through this bus as it was going down

through the city streets of San Francisco.

[horn beeping]

[cars smashing]

[people scream]

[suspenseful music]

[men grunting]

[tires screeching]

This stunt was initially choreographed

by one of our great stunt performers named Jessie.

He came up with this little run

and this was kind of the first time that we saw

what Simu was capable of,

and it's not easy what he's doing

'cause he's not only doing this acrobatics,

but he has to stay in coordination

with making sure that he is close enough

to Razor Fist's swings to make it look realistic

and also coordinating with all of these extras

to make sure he's not elbowing anybody in the face.

This was one of the moments I talked about

in my initial pitch to Marvel,

that was one possible example

of upping the stakes of a sequence.

If the brakes go out and the bus driver goes down,

what if Shang-Chi has to get up

and start driving the bus and fending off his assailants

while he's trying to drive the bus?

And it's really crazy to me to watch it

and see that it actually is up on screen.

[men grunting] [weapons clanging]

Go, you freak!

This is, you know, another example

of a great use of props

that our stunt coordinators were utilizing

everything that we had available to us.

In one of the previous shots that we were looking at,

you get kind of a set up of

that there's this fire extinguisher up on the wall.

And if anybody noticed that, of course,

someone's going to end up grabbing it

and hitting Razor Fist on the head with it.

This was not real, but it did have enough solidity to it

to give a realistic reaction from Florian.

[extinguisher thunks] [Florian grunts]

Go, you freak!

[tires screeching]

[bus crashing]

Anytime that we're outside of the bus,

our second unit was shooting in San Francisco,

getting all these exterior shots.

They had a bus full of extras

that mimic the extras that we had in Sydney.

And all of these shots

had to be coordinated with all of the stunts

that we shot in Sydney.

Just before this, when we are inside this bus,

everything outside the bus, all of these buildings,

everything had to be shot on plates

right after this moment

so that we could project them onto the green screens

on the inside of our vehicles

so, when we are inside doing all those stunts,

we want to make sure that the background

matches everything here.

We also, I really wanted to just demolish

a bunch of these scooters,

which has been a fantasy of mine for a very long time.

I'm not a fan of these scooters.

[brakes screeching]

[weapons clanking]

[intense music] [circuits crackling]

This is just an important story point.

We wanted to make sure that all of our innocent bystanders

are getting pushed to the back half of the bus

in this one shot.

This becomes the set up for the final act of our sequence,

where Shang-Chi sees an opportunity

to get all of the people who are in trouble

from the back half of the bus

to the front half of the bus and get rid of all the bad guys

by getting rid of the back half of the bus.

[tense electronic music] [passengers screaming]

[Shang-Chi grunting]

[glass shattering]

This is a cool gag that our stunt team created

was we shot this on a stage,

but there was a treadmill that they put down here,

so these tires were fake tires,

but there was a treadmill here

that was flying really fast and every time his feet hit

it was able to create the effect

that his feet were skidding along the ground

and he was trying to regain his balance.

I think it worked pretty well.

[men grunting] [tires screeching]

[people screaming]

This was actually a pretty important character beat for us

to see that Katy, here, and Shang-Chi here,

are instinctually working together,

that there is a cause and effect happening

from Katy's driving and what Shang-Chi needs.

She turns the bus very quickly in the next shot.

The gravitational pull of that turn

allows for Shang-Chi to doo, doo, doo,

flip up onto the top of the bus

and, simultaneously, has Razor Fist and his goons

thrown back to the other side of the bus.

We really wanted some moment in this movie

to see that, without really even trying,

these two are a team.

[tense electronic music]

[Shang-Chi grunts] [Katy gasps]

[fist pounding] Open the door, please!

We wanted to create a moment

where it felt like it was going to be

a big giant Marvel superhero moment

and ends with just a silly slam into a door.

This was not an easy stunt and Simu practiced quite a bit

to make sure that he could do this.

And it was pretty important for us

because it's all done in a one-er,

and the camera swinging around this way

and ends in a close-up here of Simu

which is why we really hoped that Simu could pull this off.

And he runs from back here, runs along, jumps off

grabs onto this, I'm going to draw him grabbing on.

There he is. And here's his feet.

Is that a foot? Here's another foot.

He grabs onto this, he swings around.

It's his big hero moment,

and then splat into the door.

And if you watch Simu's facial performance,

it's extremely convincing

that he believes he's going to blast through that door.

This performance, to me, is money!

It really feels like he has his eye on the prize

and that he is just going to shatter this door,

and make a grand entrance.

And that's not what happens.

Any movie that I've ever worked on

starts with an idea that I have in my head

and in this case, it was just the seed of an idea

of a fight that takes place on a runaway bus

that has no brakes

that is careening down the hills of San Francisco.

What I love about the final product of this scene,

is seeing how many creative brains

have put their stamp on this scene.

And it's one of the most collaborative efforts

of our movie.

To be able to work with all of these teams

and try to keep this thing cohesive was a challenge,

but extremely satisfying to watch in the end.