The “Pillow Fights” Fueling "Road House"

Plus: I Told You So (Again!)

Author

Steve
April 02, 2024

Greetings Hollywood tech nerds!

In this week’s post:

Subscribe to get Hollywood Tech Nerds magically delivered to your inbox every Tuesday!

The “Pillow Fights” Fueling Road House

Amazon’s Road House remake is a huge hit, and while I’ll always be partial to the (NSFW) hilariously insane qualities of the Patrick Swayze original, director Doug Liman’s new version has some crazy fight scenes that I found fascinating.

Per SlashFilm, Stunt coordinator Garrett Warren utilized his signature method, known as the “Garrett shot/multiple pass/alphabet shot,” which consists of four separate passes when shooting the fight:

Consisting of several stages, it begins with shooting a fight with actors trading fake punches and reactions purely acted out.

Warren then explained what comes after: “The next thing you do is, you remove one person from the equation, and you put a pad there. You say to that [remaining] person, 'Hit this pad as hard as you can.' And that person lays into it, and hits it with all their might — and it looks awesome.”

The next step involves taking out the person doing the hitting and bringing back the person about to be hit. As Warren explained, this step allows for the body on the receiving end of the blow to actually react physically, as if the blow were real: “I take this pad — it's a very soft, square pad — and you jam it at them. You hit them for real. Anybody — a girl, a guy, a child. It doesn't matter because it's basically a glorified pillow fight. It'll look like a UFC fighter getting hit in the face, and trying to keep their composure. It's wild.”

Then comes the final steps of the process. Liman, Warren, and the crew would film a slow-motion take with the stars performing the fight at reduced speed. "Like when you were a kid," Gyllenhaal added for the sake of comparison. This is then followed by a "clean pass," meaning a shot with no one in it just to get the scenery. At last, all the different layers from these various shots are stitched together.

Amazon Video provides a helpful visual breakdown of this filming method:

Pretty interesting way to convey a brutal fight! John Wick 4 actor Scott Adkins isn’t a big fan:

I defer to Mr. Adkins’s stunt expertise, but I also appreciate the attempt to create a more visceral fight onscreen using both technology and an actor’s physicality. What do you think?

I Told You So (Again)!

Going to pat myself on the back here, which I never do. Oh, who am I kidding! I love being right and telling people I was right, like the time I cautioned my Aunt Joan not to buy a boat and she did anyway and then it sank (because she was committing insurance fraud). “Told you so!” I scoffed at her over the prison phone.

What am I right about this time? Hollywood turning its sickly gaze to video games, which I predicted back around Halloween post-Five Nights at Freddy’s and is now confirmed by the Wall Street Journal.

Studios are increasingly mining video games for characters and stories to bring to life in TV shows and films, particularly as audiences grow tired of story lines based on comic books.

Granted, given the diminishing returns of comic book IP, I’m not exactly Nostradamus with this prediction, but it’s nice to be vindicated!

The big question for me is: is Hollywood ready for the deranged toxicity of some gaming fans? The upcoming seasons of The Last of Us will be an excellent test case: reactions to the game The Last of Us Part II were notoriously unhinged, including one of the game’s actresses receiving death threats to her and her son!

The studios are notoriously reactive and skittish to online criticism, and I can’t imagine video game movie discourse will be any less intense!

Here’s a round-up of cool and interesting links about Hollywood and technology:

Kara Swisher’s cozy relationship with tech can’t be overlooked. (link)

Screen time for kids is fine. Unless it’s not! (link)

How Dune Part Two achieved the signature look of the Harkonnen home world using infrared photography. (link)