A Quote by David Leitch
I look at the action scenes as placeholders when I arrive on a script, knowing that I'm going to expand on them when I understand the constraints of the movie, the locations of where we're shooting, the abilities of the actors, and where we want to go with the characters.
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You never have any idea where your movie's going to go when you're shooting - you're in this little bubble. Everything you care about is getting the next step right: getting the script right, finding the right actors, shooting it.
Movement should be a counter, whether in action scenes or dialogue or whatever. It counters where your eye is going. This style thing, for me it's all fitted to the action, to the script, to the characters.
Coming from an action background, I always approach the action sequences in any script as kind of placeholders.
I can easily say "no" to a project if the script isn't great, but when the script is good, then I start asking the other questions. Who's going to direct it? Who's the creator? Who are the actors? When are we shooting? Where is it shooting? All that kind of stuff.
In the old days when I first was coming up, you would turn up on set in the morning with your coffee, script, and hangover and you would figure out what you were going to do with the day and how you were going to play the scenes. You would rehearse and then invite the crew in to watch the actors go through the scenes. The actors would go away to makeup and costume and the director and the DP would work out how they were going to cover what the actors had just done.
You never have any idea where your movie's going to go when you're shooting - you're in this little bubble. Everything you care about is getting the next step right: getting the script right, finding the right actors, shooting it. Then you spend half a year in a dark room editing your film, and you don't talk to anybody.
What interests Sam Mendes are characters and relationships, and he was a genius at giving you the freedom to create the type of character you want, and also to explore and have fun with your fellow actors. For him, characters and relationships are really the heartbeat of the film, and then the action is the backdrop. By developing the characters, he makes you care that much more about the action and going on a journey with the characters.
I think making a great action movie is one of the hardest cinematic endeavors. By definition, smart characters avoid action. Smart people don't go down dark alleys, but if you're making an action movie and you want to have an action sequence, somehow you have to get that character into that dangerous situation.
When I'm writing a script, I don't worry about plot as much as I do about people. I get to know the main characters - what they need, what they want, what they should do. That's what gets the story going. You can't just have action, you've got to find out what the characters want. And then they must grow, they must go somewhere.
If there's a cutaway, you need to get it then because it's only going to last [a few moments]. You have to edit the movie as you're shooting it in your head and communicate with your crew about how it's going to work. While making a movie, you have the luxury of storyboards and a script and a bigger crew and actors. I mean, it's so much easier.
If you're doing movies on a set... many times, I've shot the end of a movie in the first week of shooting. Because of locations or budgets or actors' availability.
I'm such an action movie junkie that as an action fan, because action scenes are so heightened, we could never really picture ourselves in that scene. So when you're watching an action movie, you experience an action movie more outside of the aquarium: you know you're out of the aquarium looking in at all the swimming fish that are in there.
When you try to be true to the script, changes occur. A script is there to show us a certain direction. But when you actually have the actors in and you start shooting the movie, you have the actor say a line and it doesn't sound right so you change it and make it different. It's the script that gives birth to these changes and the more you try to stay true to the script, the more that happens.
I don't want to do an action movie, because I've acted in them, and they're so boring to do, because they're so technical. The headache of that is daunting. But, if it were an action movie with really interesting characters, how great would that be?
I prefer to take actors and put them in real settings and real locations and real situations rather than create artificial locations that serve the characters. It's just much easier when you are walking down the street with your actors to do that in a real street that's still open with people on it, rather than to close it off and bring in extras.
It's our job as actors to make it look like it's not manufactured. If you have two actors who understand their characters - and therefore what they are trying to portray - then all they need to do is be the characters and there's a chemistry there.
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