Interview with Chad Stahelski of 87Eleven - the Fight Team of Ninja Assassin, The Matrix and More! [Part 1]

Showflicks fans!  We have the great honour and pleasure to bring to you Part 1 of our recent interview with Chad Stahelski of 87Eleven, the awesome fight team and choreographers from The Matrix, Ninja Assassin, Rambo and more!  Here is our interview with Chad by Showflicks’ Lorne Gross.

LG:     So, it’s a real kick to speak with you.  I’m a big fan!  I read that you originally were a martial artist training with the famous Dan Inosanto in LA – in that right?

CS:     Yes, I trained with Dan Inosanto for the better part of 12 years and as an instructor for seven of those years under him.

LG:    Wow, that is quite involved, is that how you originally got into stunts?

CS:    It was through that (experience) which definitely helped lead the way, that’s for sure.

LG:    Did you know you were going to be in stunts when you started off doing martial arts or did it just evolve that way?

CS:     No, I just did martial arts in a small town in Palmer, Massachusetts so it was a very small town and I don’t know, I just didn’t seem to quit. It fit in with well with basketball and things and I got into Judo, then I got into Karate then I ended up going to college at the University of Southern Cal and stumbled across a guy who was already an instructor at the Inosanto Academy Academy and he kind of dragged me over there.

Then I got exposed to film and stunts because of the University of Southern California, which is a big film school and then through Jeff Imada, who was one of Dan Inosanto’s instructors and he was also a good stunt coordinator at the time.

LG:    Ninja Assassin (which you choreographed and for which your company did the fight scenes) was very interesting because it was quite a unique style you created for the film.  It seemed to be partly acrobatics and partly martial arts and I was curious if it was a fighting style that you created specially for the film?

CS:      I guess in order to answer your question, you have to kind of understand what a choreographer does, how we do things and what limitations and capabilities we’re allowed.  First of all, as a choreographer you’re not bound by any particular style.  You’re bound by a flavour, you’re bound by the script, the story and the character. So, once you read the script…not everything works.  I mean, for example, you can’t do fantasy-type choreography in a Borne movie.  But then, again, you can’t do Borne choreography in a children’s family or a family film or a PG-13 film.  So you take that into consideration.

Then you have take into consideration the logistics of who is the actor, is he physically capable, what level of participation is he going to have, where does the movie take place, are you going to have good stunt men, bad stunt men, are you going to be in (for example) the Maldives Islands where there are no stunt men.  You need to take into consideration if you have to bring your team and also how much time do you have to shoot the fight, because ultimately the better fights are the ones that take longer to shoot because you get more coverage and you have better camera lenses. 

You have to think about all these things before you start choreographing the fight.  Like what are you going to do?  If you have this very intricate Kung-fu fight and then you don’t have great cameramen or you’re not going to be the one editing it or you have different kind of editors who are not used to action, you’re going to come up with a very muddled fight.  If you knew you’re going into limitations like that, you try to choreograph simply so it can be shot simply, so it could then be edited simply. 

With Ninja (Ninja Assassin) we knew we had the capabilities to have at least a certain degree of control because once it passes through cameras and is captured on film, unfortunately the fight coordinators and the stunt coordinators have very little to say about the outcome.  It goes to the editors and the directors and the producers and the studio heads, so we try to control what we can.  Up to the point of capturing it on film and then like I said creatively it goes to the next group of people so it’s not always interpreted that way.

Whereas in Hong Kong the same people stay with it until it’s finished which is why it looks a more integral fight I guess you could say.  So now (on Ninja Assassin) we’ve got a little bit of control, we have some good cameramen, we have some good stuntmen, we’ve got our team with us, we’ve got an actor that can actually do quite a bit of the action himself, being Rain.  We have good producers behind us so that’s always good and we had a fair amount of time to prep so now we want to make it a different kind of story where the character is supposed to be a little bit better than an average human being so we put a little bit of acrobatics in it because our team is incredibly gifted in the acrobatic sense. 

With the choreography we just wanted to try something different, Rain is a dancer, he has an incredible memory to capture and remember the moves that we teach him so we try to do longer takes and yeah, we kind of mix it up.  It has a big basis in Japanese Karate, it has a lot to do with some of the Philipino martial arts, but it’s mostly that we went through a lot of different arts and moves or a lot of different moves from a lot of different arts and saw what Rain did best.  That’s what we developed the style off of.

 [End of Part 1]

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