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SMC Pod #217: Directing the Action Film · Secret Movie Club Podcast

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Hello, Secret Movie Clubbers, and welcome to Secret Movie Club Podcast 217,
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Directing the Action Festival.
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My name is Craig Hamill. I'm so grateful to do these, and I'm grateful for whoever
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is out there listening. Thank you.
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Today, we are going to take a look, not really at like, although this will happen as well.
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This is not really meant to be a survey of the greatest action movies or anything
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like that. Rather, it's a little more filmmaker-centric in directing action
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and really thinking about that.
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For a long time, I'm a filmmaker as well as a movie lover.
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And for a long, long time, I've felt that action filmmakers don't get the do they should get.
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Because I actually think directing action and making it work is some of the
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hardest directing any director can do.
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And it really requires a very patient, diligent, detail-oriented,
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it's-not-right-until-it's-right mindset.
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And it's distinctly different from the kind of direction that a lot of directors get noticed for.
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I don't even know why I think I'm qualified to do this podcast.
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I'm still working on my first feature film.
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I'm not known for being a great action director, obviously. So why am I going
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to talk about directing action?
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I don't know, but I am. And I hope this is worthwhile.
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I want to hear what you think about it. I do know what the next two podcasts are going to be as well.
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So I will just tell you right now as a coming attractions, Secret Movie Club
1:45
Podcast 218 will be play or drama or theater adaptations to film.
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And then Secret Movie Club Podcast 219 will be music video directors and the
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age of the music video director. I'm thinking of directors like David Fincher,
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Spike Jonze, Michelle Gondry, F. Gary Gray, Antoine Fuqua.
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As I speak to you, you'll be listening to this on Saturday.
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May 14th or later, this Saturday,
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if you happen to hear it before this Saturday, May 16th, we are at the Million
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Dollar Theater in downtown Los Angeles, L.A.'s very first movie palace built
2:22
by Sid Grauman in 1917, a 2,000-seat theater.
2:26
We are showing an anime plus speed triple feature at 11 a.m.
2:32
We're doing the Animatrix, which is rarely screened on a big screen.
2:35
And then at 2 p.m., one of those filmmakers made a movie that's often considered
2:40
one of the greatest anime movies of the 21st century, 2009's Redline,
2:45
which is a sci-fi like drag racing movie on different planets.
2:49
We are going to be showing that in Japanese with English subtitles,
2:53
barring some kind of technical glitch. So if your question is,
2:57
is it subbed or dubbed, it's subbed.
2:58
And then at 5 p.m., we wrap up the triple with Speed Racer, the Wachowski Speed Racer 2008.
3:04
Speed Racer starring Emile Hirsch as Speed, Christina Rishi as Trixie.
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John Goodman is Paw Racer. Susan Sarandon is Ma Racer.
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Incredible cast, incredible movie. We've shown this movie before.
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I was a fan from the first time someone said, you got to see Speed Racer.
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And I was one of those people who did not see it in the theaters,
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I think. And I was like, really, Speed Racer?
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And they were like, yes, you need to see Speed Racer. That's this Saturday.
3:32
Go to secretmovieclub.com. You can get tickets. If you haven't yet,
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create an account there.
3:38
Very shortly for our Indiana Jones triple feature, which is going to be Father's
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Day, 35 millimeter Raiders of the Lost Ark, 11 a.m., Temple of Doom,
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2 p.m., Last Crusade, 5 p.m.
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On Paramount Archive 35mm Parencio.
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Bring Your Dad at the Million Dollar Theater. As always, you can reach out to
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us, email us, community at secretmovieclub.com.
4:02
We're all over them socials at secretmovieclub or at secretmovieclub35mm.
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And really the cheat code, the two cheat codes are go to our website,
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get a free account, and wait a few moments on the homepage and a newsletter
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signup should pop up. Or just go to the bottom and click the newsletter.
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We send out a newsletter every Monday. that's the
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most like nutritious because we will have discounts we'll have opportunities
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we'll do shout outs for podcasts for movies for other screenings and there you
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go okay enough gaba gaba gaba gaba let's get to more gaba gaba gaba gaba but
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let's talk about directing the action film.
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So I'm gonna drink some coffee. If you couldn't tell, it's my theory.
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Oh, so good. So good. If you're if you're curious, I know you're not.
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I drink my coffee black, nothing in it, just strong.
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And that is good coffee. Okay.
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So today I want to talk about directing the action film,
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I am obsessed with this topic, for one, because God willing,
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inshallah, I want to make a more or less, it's not really action.
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It's probably more action adventure.
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I have a trilogy idea that maybe one day I'll get to do. I love action movies.
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And part of that came from a father, love you, dad, father who loved action movies.
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And once my folks divorced when I was six and my sister was four,
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my dad did not give an F. and we would go to the video store and if he wanted
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to see Predator, we watched Predator. If he wanted to see Die Hard, we watched Die Hard.
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If he wanted to watch Robocop, we watched Robocop. And then my mom would get
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angry at him on the phone.
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But I am so grateful to my dad. I saw those movies way too young,
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eight, nine, 10, 11 years old, but I loved them.
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And they clearly imprinted themselves on my brain.
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And I'm sure for the Freudians out there, you can make some connection with,
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you know, single dad, son, bonding over these action films. But there you go.
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That's sort of the origin story there. But I've always loved them.
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To this day, I love action movies. And.
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We are going to be showing, as I said just in the intro, this June,
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Sunday, June 21st at the Million Dollar Theater, we're doing three,
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I think, of the greatest action movies ever made.
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The first three Indiana Jones movies, all directed by Steven Spielberg,
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all produced by George Lucas from stories by Lucas.
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And really, to me, just textbooks in summer blockbusters, great movies.
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For those who want to get in the conversation about the fourth and fifth Indiana
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Jones movies, I am not by omission trying to throw shade on those films.
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I just it was just not in the cards to show all five movies in one day.
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So I'm going to lead with, if you have ever tried to do anything in action.
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You know, you're with your buddies or your family and you took the camera phone
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or way back when the camera, the Super 8 camera, and you got your sisters,
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your brothers, whatever, and you made a movie one afternoon.
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If you were making an action film, you almost immediately ran into some things
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you had to problem solve.
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How do you make a stunt look real? How do you get people in the audience to
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jump? How do you make a fight look good?
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How do you get people invested in what's going on?
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How do you get people to go, whoa, or react in the audience?
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All these become things you got to problem solve.
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And if you're making movies for fun, you start to problem solve them very quickly.
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You have to get imaginative very quickly. Again, this is not really meant today
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to be a survey, although I am now, that being said, I am now going to name check
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about 10 or 20 action film directors starting from the beginning.
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But just some things that I would put to anybody out there who loves action,
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directs action, has directed or wants to direct action.
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I think you go back to really D.W. Griffith.
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And even though D.W. Griffith was not an action filmmaker as we would think
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of them now, if you look at a movie like Birth of a Nation or Intolerance or Way Down East,
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which is a movie I love, and has an amazing sequence on ice flows in a river,
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there is action filmmaking. But I mentioned D.W.
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Griffith because he and people like the Lumières and Melies and Edwin S.
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Porter and probably all these people you've heard of.
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And then I really will put in that.
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Category as well, the silent film comedians like Charlie Chaplin and Harold
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Lloyd and Buster Keaton, but Keaton and Chaplin especially, who I did a podcast
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on just a little while ago, so I'm not going to dwell on them.
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But they all had to figure out, how do you sell a gag?
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How do you sell a stunt? How do you sell that this is a war?
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How do you sell a battle sequence? How do you do that in film,
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and they had to figure out grammar.
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Now, D.W. Griffith specifically, and if you go to film school or you love to
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read books about movies, you're going to read about D.W.
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Griffith because Griffith, more than anyone in the 1910s, really came up with
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the film grammar that we are still using today, largely as our shorthand.
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And what I mean by that is the wide shot, the master, the establishing shot,
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the medium shot, which is, you know, often sort of hips up or knees knees up,
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the medium close up, which is sort of chest up, and then the extreme close up, which is sort of face.
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And how do we use those? And the building blocks of coverage, what do they mean?
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Also, D.W. Griffith really came up with, oh, if I'm going to create tension,
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I'm going to do cross cutting.
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So there's going to be editing, you know, the typical silent film thing trope
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now, but it's effective, as cliched as it is, would be so someone's tied to
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the train tracks and And the train is coming.
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You could do that all in one shot, or you could do it with editing where the person's tied.
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You show the train coming, you show the person they're trying to get out, their hands are tied.
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They look, the train is closer. You know, that's very standard.
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They look. And then you can cheat there, which Spielberg is like a master of,
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and we're going to get to that. But the cheating there that I think Griffith
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and other practitioners learned was you would show the train coming close.
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Then you would cut to the person tied to the track. Then you would return to
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a shot where the train was actually a little further back than it was.
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And then it but then it comes closer in the next shot.
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So you're like, ah, Spielberg does this in Raiders of the Lost Ark and in Temple
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of Doom hilariously with stone doors, I noticed. So in Raiders,
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in the very opening sequence in the Inca temple where they get the gold Inca statue,
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Indy is going underneath the door of stone that's closing.
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And really, actually, first he's holding onto a vine in a pit.
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And you see the door close and it's close up of Indy. Then when you see the
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door again, it's really closing.
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Then a close up of Indy is pulling on the vine. The vine moves.
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Indy finally gets out. And when you see the door closing again,
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it's a little higher than it was before.
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It's a total cheat, but it creates this, oh, he's not going to get through it.
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And then when he does get through it, he loses his hat and he reaches under,
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grabs the hat, pulls it under. It's great.
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It's great. But that really has its roots in silent movies.
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And when you look at Charlie Chaplin, who I don't actually look at as an action
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director, but when you look at, you know, a sequence I love is Modern Times
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when he's the night watchman for the department store.
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And I believe he's just trying to impress Paulette Goddard. he
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does this great roller skating routine where he
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is ostensibly on the third floor of the department
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store and he's not looking behind
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him and frank capper just stole the gag for it's a wonderful
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life in the pool sequence too but as charlie chaplin skating and dancing he
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keeps skating right up to what appears to be this chasm where if he goes over
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it he's going to fall three floors down this department store and he just barely
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misses it that was done with uh special effects and something before perspective
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and the Shufdan process.
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And until I saw how it was done, I really did think that he had just measured
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out how close he could get, would just get there, and that that gag was done
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for real. I didn't realize that he was always safe.
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This is the same thing with Harold Lloyd's very famous safety last gag,
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where he's hanging from the clock.
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When you see how they shot that, you think Harold Lloyd's hanging from a clock,
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you know 10 stories 20 stories above the downtown los angeles streets and indeed he is,
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But what they don't show you is the way they set up the camera.
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What you never see is that if he fell, he was only going to fall 10 feet onto
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a ledge, which is great. It's brilliant.
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And so these are all the but if that camera angle was off by even a few feet,
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if that shift in process, which is painting on glass and what they did was they
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painted a photorealistic force perspective of what looked like a chasm down
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to the first floor of the department store. But it was just a painting.
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And then that painting was put right in front of the camera so that by force
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perspective, the perspective lined up with the live action element they were
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shooting in modern times.
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But, you know, another Buster Keaton really is the proto action director.
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And I've said this before and I'm not going to spend a lot of time.
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But if you look at his The General, which is the best example of it,
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where that whole movie, the majority of the movie is him on a locomotive, on a moving train.
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And behind that train are actual reenactments of Civil War battles.
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And the train's going one direction, it goes back. That is amazing action filmmaking.
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And that was really shot. And so I think that that is the one of the things
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I want to talk about when we get
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to modern times is no matter how good CGI is, no matter how good AI is.
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I'm sure at some point it will be it will sell the illusion totally.
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But we're not there yet in 2026, I don't think. And I just think that the brain
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just knows somehow that didn't really happen.
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You know, great idea. Often a great idea will sell it.
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But when you see the general, you're like, that's Buster Keaton really on a train moving.
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And there's really a battle happening behind him. And that's sort of the David
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Lean, Buster Keaton old school, you know, Ben Hur, B-Unit. We're going to talk about all that stuff.
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Raiders Lost Ark, Stagecoach, John Ford. They just did it.
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And it's great. I love it. So I would just say that when you look at silent
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film, which all of silent film is learning cinema and setting the stage for
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everything that came after.
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But Griffith and Keaton and Chaplin and film and Lloyd and film comedy,
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especially, they were all working out and figuring out how you sell gags that make people gasp.
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And at this point, I would also say that good action filmmaking is about the gag.
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And I think, interestingly, a lot of people are not good at gags anymore.
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They don't even think about it in terms of gags.
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And the way I've always thought of gags, and I've talked about it on other podcasts,
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is it's just this thing that if you're a gag writer or a gag person...
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You came up with some funny idea, some joke, basically. It's a filmic joke in the shot.
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And the more gags that you could get out of a shot or get out of a scene,
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you know, the more laughs you got. And so you wanted to have a bunch of gag writers.
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And in comedy, it means one thing. But I think in action,
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and you can see this specifically in Spielberg, who's such the perfect hybrid
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of gags as action filmmakers would understand it and gags as people like Capra,
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who came out of film comedy, silent film comedy, worked with Harry Langdon.
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Spielberg's gags are both action and comedy gags, and I think that's why they work so well.
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There are so many people in the classic Hollywood phase that you could single
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out just for the purposes of today.
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I'm going to single out two. Those are Michael Curtiz and John Ford.
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Again, I have talked on other podcasts about Curtiz recently with Casablanca.
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I've talked about Ford. He was our director of the year a few years ago.
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With Curtiz and Ford, and I'm not going to dwell a lot, Curtiz,
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just take a look at the Curtiz, Errol Flynn movies.
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You could just watch those as a little miniseries. These are movies like Captain
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Blood, The Seahawk, The Adventures of Robin Hood.
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And what Curtiz does in those movies with a charismatic star like Errol Flynn,
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and you're going to see that with Spielberg and Harrison Ford in the Indiana
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Jones movies, which to me are sort of the modern-day Curtiz, Errol Flynn movies.
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Even all the way to the fact that those Eric Wolfgang Korngold scores for the
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Curtiz-Flynn movies, really, Spielberg, Harrison Ford, John Williams,
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that's what's happening in the Indiana Jones movies.
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I mean, look, and taken to a different level, totally their own thing. Yeah.
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Look at the Crutises and you're going to see the evolution. You're going to learn a lot.
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The thing that for me that I would,
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I would really single out if you watch Crutises action movies is pace.
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Like that guy, he knew how to move a camera. He knew how to keep a thing going.
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He also knew what was important and what wasn't important.
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I've told this story before, but I weirdly think it's so important.
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I'm going to tell it again.
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There's a Crutise story where Crutise was shooting in one direction and there's a piano.
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And then when they they turn the cameras around for the reverses
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the piano was gone and a continuity person was like
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oh michael you know the piano is gone shouldn't we
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you know continuity isn't that going to distract people and curtis was like
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and i can't do a hungarian accent because curtis was hungarian but curtis said
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if they noticed the piano i'm not doing my job no it doesn't matter and if you
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watch curtis movies or spielberg movies even scorsese movies even though i don't
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consider Scorsese an action filmmaker,
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but I do consider Scorsese one of the great editors.
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You'll notice that if they think they can get away with it, continuity is not really an issue.
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There are continuity mistakes in a lot of movies if you watch them,
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but you may not notice them till the 10th, 11th, 12th watching because the movie
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is just cooking and Curtiz movies cook.
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Now, the other things I'll say about Curtiz specifically, he understood light
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and shadow and cinematography and depth and movement and how editing and those
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combined create cinema.
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And so there's a great thing in The Adventures of Robin Hood,
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which I love, where Errol Flynn, I believe, is fencing. He's doing a sword fight with, I believe...
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It's Basil Rathbone. There's just a great shot towards the end of the movie
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where they are fencing and then they disappear for a moment.
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But you see their shadows thrown on the castle wall as they fence and then they
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come back into the frame again. And Spielberg does that all the time.
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The thing that in action filmmaking is you got to mix it up.
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If you don't mix it up in all sorts of ways, then it gets boring.
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It gets repetitive and it loses its effect. so if
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you watch Curtiz you just see him do that stuff all the time
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John Ford is a little
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more I don't actually consider Ford a great action
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filmmaker like Curtiz but I do think that Ford is a great action filmmaker and
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he what I mean by that is Ford just you know he knew where the camera had to
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be he knew that a stunt needed to be a stunt he was just like a good old like
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old-fashioned director of action.
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And there are other directors like that, William Wellman, Raoul Walsh,
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that they just knew, yeah, the hammer's got to be here.
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Alan Dwan, you know, get the shot. They weren't trying to over-impress or get
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artsy or, and I think that's an important thing.
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And I'm not trying to denigrate artsiness because, look, you will hear podcasts
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about Bergman and Fassbender and Tarkovsky and Fellini and Bresson and all those
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folks. But Kieslowski, Kieslowski.
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But what I mean by artsy in action filmmaking is if you're not clear,
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if you didn't capture the stunt, if you didn't get it, like, what was the point?
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So I found that there was this kind of filmmaking that came into vogue years
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and years later in the like, I want to say the 90s and the aughts where it was like handheld.
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And look, and I love handheld. I'm not trying to denigrate handheld either.
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But if you're using handheld as a substitute for kineticism or kinetic action,
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and you can sometimes be like, wait, where's the gun? What's going on? Who's hitting who?
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If you look, actually, just kind of jumping around here, look at Jackie Chan movies.
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And Jackie Chan is really the heir apparent of Keaton and Chaplin,
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for sure, in Kung Fu and martial arts.
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Jackie chan's directing is amazing but it's again
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he makes sure he gets the stunt there's a lot of wide shots there
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are a lot of masters you know he's not there are also two multiple
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cameras you know let's make sure we got that
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and if we didn't get it from this angle i hope we got it from that angle and
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you'll notice that a lot of great action filmmakers when they're doing something super
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important a super key stunt they're gonna have you
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know five to ten cameras going and you hope that one
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of those cameras gets the hero gets the hero shot but
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ford specifically I would I would just point out a stagecoach
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I know it's easy I know it's basic but if you watch stagecoach
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which is my favorite Ford film I love that film the the
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whole action sequence it's really
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the first of two I love them both but the stagecoach chase across the desert
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flats as the indigenous Americans are like chasing them uh Ford breaks a lot
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of rules in that action sequence but But he also makes sure he speeds up the camera.
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That's another thing that I think you see in the James Bond movies, a little trick.
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I mean, I'm just going to go all over the place here, technically,
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but it's a little different now in the age of digital.
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But back in film, you know, you would shoot at 24 frames per second.
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Which would essentially be 24 frames every second would be one second of film.
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But if you shot at 21, you can't really get away with it more than that.
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You could, but then it's really noticeable.
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But if you shoot at 21 or 22 frames per second, it's a little sped up, actually.
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It's faster than it really happens. But if you do that, you sell a punch,
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you sell a hit. It looks hard, like it looks gnarly.
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And James Bond movies, I noticed in the 60s, 70s, into the 80s would do that.
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And even though you can tell, I feel sometimes like they undercranked, they sort of pushed it.
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I feel sometimes like they're at 20 or 21 frames per second where it starts to be noticeable.
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But if it's edited right, it looks brutal. And that was a way where you could
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go a little slower in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
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I mean, Spielberg uses all these tricks in Raiders of the Lost Ark during the
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desert chase truck sequence. They undercrank when Indy goes under the truck,
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which is a direct reference to a stunt in Stagecoach where Yakima Knute jumps from horse to horse.
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And again, that could go a little slower.
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And if you film it a little faster, you speed it up. It looks like it's happening
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at real speed and it sells the stunt. And Ford did that.
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Moving forward to Spielberg. I mean, we've already covered it.
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I think Spielberg is this person who he talks about Curtiz and Ford all the time.
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So no surprise then that you would find that he absorbed all their filmmaking tricks.
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But when you look at the indie movies, especially, you'll see that they're always full of gags.
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And Spielberg, you know, I think Lucas was a good foil to Spielberg and that
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Lucas is he's a very pragmatic guy. You get the feeling in some ways.
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And he's not a saccharine guy, George Lucas. There's not a lot of...
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It's emotive, excessive warmth to George Lucas.
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And I think weirdly that helped in the indie movies because I think Spielberg
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will on occasion go too far.
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It'll be too cute. It'll be too.
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OK, I get it, Steve. Not a lot. And I love Spielberg. I love Spielberg.
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So people know that. So this is not a dig at Spielberg.
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But I think when people rein that in with Spielberg or pull it back just a little
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bit, you sort of get the best of both worlds. So what I mean by that is we're
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going to talk about this in just
24:37
a moment, but action breaks when it's ridiculous, ridiculous, I think.
24:43
And Spielberg will always go up to that line. But somehow you're so into a Spielberg
24:49
movie, you don't quite register it.
24:51
The Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the great Venice boat chase,
24:57
like that whole great part at the beginning of the movie where they're in Venice
25:00
and they go into the catacombs to find the night shield.
25:04
And then they have to get out of it. Then the rats and then the protectors of
25:08
the grail light the catacomb because it's oil.
25:10
And then they get out and they chase on boats. Great action sequence.
25:14
There are things that are a little ridiculous. Like the catacombs seem to have.
25:22
10,000 rats, which like undoubtedly catacombs are going to have a lot of rats.
25:27
I've been in New York subways too. I don't think I've ever seen 10,000 rats.
25:31
If I saw that, I would run.
25:34
But this is something Kurosawa too, another amazing director of action knows.
25:39
You have to amplify an effect in action. You kind of actually have to go to
25:44
a bit of an extreme to sell something.
25:47
If there had been 50 rats and this
25:50
is in raiders too with the snakes in the the tomb if
25:53
there are like a hundred snakes it actually looks like
25:56
they're not a lot of snakes and you end up just noticing the scarcity of snakes
25:59
or like oh i guess the wrangler can get more than 80
26:02
rats when you see and there were rubber rats
26:04
too by the way like which is also the way you get around and there were rubber snakes
26:07
but when you see what appears to be
26:10
10 000 rats you're like oh my goodness they're
26:14
really in there with rats to the great tank battle
26:17
right before they get to the temple with the grail and
26:21
indy goes over the cliff with the
26:24
nazi there's this gag where they're
26:27
looking over it's really more an emotional gag than an action gag but they're
26:30
looking over they think indy has died we know he hasn't died and then suddenly
26:34
he climbs up a vine from the cliff and harrison ford sells it great comically
26:38
and he's like all his clothes are all ripped and torn apart and he looks over
26:43
the cliff What are you guys looking at?
26:45
It's a ridiculous gag when you think about it.
26:48
Indie would know. But Spielberg plays it for total comedy and it works.
26:53
And then Sean Connery turns around, hugs, embraces his son. You kind of tear up.
26:56
But a good action filmmaker knows how far you can sort of go over to the frontier,
27:04
the border, but then pull it back.
27:06
And I think you see that Spielberg all the time.
27:12
There are some modern day filmmakers who are
27:15
amazing john mctiernan directed i mean it's really maybe one of the greatest
27:20
action film runs of all time he did predator die hard and the hunt for red october
27:26
i think back to back to back i love all three of those films predator and Die Hard specifically.
27:33
And McTiernan to me, I remember my dad saw Die Hard in the movie theater and
27:39
when it came out on VHS, he made us watch it, which I loved.
27:42
And I loved it too. But when my dad saw Die Hard in the theater,
27:46
he came home raving about this film and he could not believe the pace of Die Hard.
27:52
And I still to this day think Die Hard has one of the greatest paces,
27:58
unbelievable believable paces of any action film I've ever seen.
28:01
And weirdly, what I think is that a lot of filmmakers, you may have heard this
28:06
if you're a movie lover, after Die Hard came out, everything was pitched.
28:10
If it was an action movie, oh, it's Die Hard on a boat, Die Hard on a train.
28:14
And then the joke always was someone eventually pitched it ultimately as Die
28:17
Hard in an office building. Someone was like, oh, that's Die Hard. But.
28:21
The nonstop action, I actually think it's not nonstop action.
28:28
It's almost a smoke and mirrors trick, which is there are some movies that appear nonstop.
28:34
These are movies like Hitchcock's 39 Steps or North by Northwest,
28:39
Spielberg's Indiana Jones movies or Jaws and other movies and Die Hard.
28:44
But when you watch them, there are almost always incredible central characters
28:51
going through some kind of existential or emotional crisis.
28:55
And there are interstitial scenes, not many, that slow it down,
29:02
introduce humor, introduce emotion.
29:04
And then when you get to the back, to the back, to the back,
29:07
back, to back, to back, it's often you've laid the groundwork across the first
29:12
half of the film for what then appears to be nonstop.
29:15
James Cameron, I think famously does this in Aliens, which is my favorite Cameron
29:19
film and one of my favorite action adventure movies of all time.
29:23
Where you actually notice that the nonstop nature of Aliens,
29:28
which you seem to remember when you think about the movie, it's actually not nonstop.
29:33
The first half of the film is relatively slow, not in a bad way at all,
29:38
but it's laying the space. It's laying the story.
29:42
It's laying the foundation. It's laying Ripley's character.
29:45
It's laying the mother and daughter subtext. It's building,
29:48
it's doing all that foundational work so that when, by the time that they get
29:52
to the planet and the aliens are attacking them, the military unit and Ripley,
29:58
from that moment on, it is nonstop.
30:00
But that's like an hour into the film when that happens. And I think you'll
30:04
notice in many movies that even in Die Hard,
30:08
there is this build and cross-cutting and it doesn't really and even even the
30:14
back half of the film, it's cross-cutting between Hans Gruber, you know,
30:18
delicious Alan Rickman as the bad guy and conversation scenes and,
30:23
you know, the cops and cross-cutting.
30:25
And there's way more going on than what your memory of nonstop is to me,
30:30
I really think is actually your brain felicitously remembering great filmmaking.
30:34
And it translates it as nonstop.
30:37
But I think what that translation is, is nonstop cinema versus nonstop pace.
30:42
Because if you do anything too long or without any contrast or interruption, you cease to hear it.
30:48
You cease to see it. Michael Bay, look, say what you will about Michael Bay,
30:53
but there are some things about Michael Bay that I do admire,
30:57
specifically his color sense.
31:00
His kinesthetic camera motion sense, I admire.
31:03
Also, I have to say I admire his unapologetically ridiculous.
31:08
You know, we talked about how action filmmaking breaks with the ridiculous.
31:12
There's that weird thing where it can get so ridiculous, it becomes amazing again.
31:16
And Michael Bay seems to go through the no man's land of ridiculous to ultra
31:22
ridiculous to, oh, this is dope again.
31:24
And I always point to Bad Boys 2, which is the one Michael Bay movie I love.
31:29
Other ones i there are parts of them i admire i
31:32
admire parts of the rock i admire parts of pain
31:35
and gain but bad boys too i just love and that is a ridiculous film that's ridiculous
31:40
but what i love about it it's like there's some kind of gunfight or something
31:45
in a morgue and for some reason the bodies in the body bags are just hot naked ladies um.
31:53
Which ridiculous but when you
31:56
get and then there's a thing he does with the camera and another part of bad
31:59
boys too where i don't know how they did it i think the camera there was probably
32:04
some cgi it was maybe shot on a i don't know like against a green screen and
32:09
they had the camera on some kind of gimbal but they're doing like some kind
32:13
of shootout and the camera's doing a 360,
32:15
but it's going super crazy fast and then slowing down and that's sort of where
32:19
the music video comes in, but it's so ridiculous that you eventually,
32:24
and it goes around like five times or something, you're like,
32:27
yeah, Michael Bay. Yeah.
32:28
Yeah. So I got to shout him out for that.
32:31
Martin Campbell, I want to shout out to the Journeyman action director.
32:35
I think that James Bond specifically, you know, a lot of us don't spend too
32:40
much time talking about directors like Terrence Young and Guy Hamilton and John
32:44
Glenn and Martin Campbell, who helmed multiple James Bond movies.
32:49
But these folks, they knew how to direct an action film.
32:54
And I actually feel their journeyman roots allowed them to just get to work,
32:59
just get to work doing the James Bond movie.
33:01
And they made great ones. I mean, from Russia with Love, Goldfinger,
33:06
even the ridiculous ones, Thunderball, You Only Live Twice.
33:09
Glenn was in the Roger Moore era, and that's not trying to throw shade on Glenn.
33:14
But Campbell, actually, Campbell only did two. He did Goldeneye and Casino Royale.
33:19
I am not a huge Goldeneye fan, I have to say, which is heresy among some people. But.
33:24
And I thought it was good. I think, you know, GoldenEye is probably arguably
33:27
the best of the Pierce Brosnans, and it's enjoyable for sure.
33:30
But I thought Casino Royale was a revelation.
33:33
It is in my top three James Bond movies. For a movie that late in the series,
33:39
the first Daniel Craig James Bond, to be that good, and again,
33:42
amazing action, Martin Campbell delivers, but it is a movie from its source
33:47
material where it's really, it's an origin story, but it's also a love story.
33:53
And that's why I love Honor Majesty's Secret Service as well.
33:57
And I think that makes the action work great. But Martin Campbell, he gets it done.
34:01
And actually, this leads me into a technical thing I want to talk about, which is the B unit.
34:05
The thing that Spielberg really learned on Raiders that I think any action filmmaker
34:11
just has to make their piece with, I really believe, is, you know,
34:14
up until Raiders and Spielberg had done Duel and Sugar Land Express,
34:19
Jaws, Close Encounters in 1941.
34:21
Spielberg was even shooting B-Unit. He was shooting his own B-Unit.
34:25
That dogfight in 1941 above Hollywood Boulevard.
34:28
Spielberg was shooting the B-Unit on the model. And George Lucas,
34:32
I think, told Spielberg, you can't do that.
34:35
You can't. If you're going to prove to everybody that you can bring a movie
34:38
on budget and under schedule, you've got to trust your B-Unit.
34:42
And what a B-Unit is, is it is another unit that's shooting things while you're
34:47
directing the A-Unit. And so the desert chase and Raiders is a perfect example of this.
34:52
The B unit was helmed by the best.
34:55
British stunt people and action filmmakers and
34:59
they got all of the shots that spielberg
35:02
needed from spielberg storyboards that didn't involve
35:05
uh close-ups of the main actors and then spielberg came in and he shot all of
35:10
the coverage and all the shots in the desert chase sequence where it's clearly
35:14
harrison ford it's you know it's clearly our main actors and and those punch-ins
35:19
but a lot Out of the desert chase is a B unit and it weaves beautifully.
35:24
Now, the thing I'll say, and I hope I hope I made it clear in what I said a
35:27
moment ago, Spielberg storyboarded every single shot of Raiders.
35:31
And I think that's another thing. If you're an action filmmaker,
35:33
the storyboarding, if you need to come in on budget,
35:37
you know, under schedule and you're going to have to delegate the storyboards
35:42
can serve as your ability to make sure that your vision is protected without being.
35:50
Too neurotic about it, I think, I would argue. And I would argue that's why
35:54
the Indiana Jones movies are so Spielbergian and yet so efficiently directed or the B-Unit.
36:00
Other examples of amazing B-Unit action filmmaking are the chariot sequence
36:04
and Ben-Hur, really as one of the greatest stunts of all time,
36:07
but it was not meant to be a stunt.
36:09
It's the one of the chariots came undone. If you've ever seen the movie,
36:13
you know what I'm talking about.
36:14
And the stunt person on the chariot flew like 10 feet in the air,
36:18
broke a rib, landed, continued, and went to the hospital.
36:23
And the debate was, well, do we show that? And they were like,
36:26
well, we have to honor him by showing what he suffered for.
36:31
And when you see that, now you can't plan that, you can't do that,
36:34
obviously, but that was a B-unit thing.
36:37
And that B-unit chariot sequence is incredible.
36:42
You know, George Miller, Akira Kurosawa. I'll just say there,
36:46
you know, George Miller, who directed the Mad Max movies, specifically Road Warrior and Fury Road.
36:50
Again, watch how George Miller directs action.
36:53
You're going to see he understands the importance of the master shot.
36:58
He understands the importance of simplicity.
37:00
Fury Road is basically the general. Buster Keaton's the general.
37:04
They go one direction, nothing's there, they come back.
37:07
And yet within that simplicity he's able
37:10
to do so many stunts so much action you know
37:13
billy wilder used to say you can do something you can
37:16
tell a simple story in a complex manner or you can tell a
37:19
complex story in a simple manner but you cannot do a
37:21
complex story in a complex manner or a simple story in a simple manner
37:24
and i think the same holds true for filmmaking if
37:27
you keep it super simple and super clear and everybody
37:30
knows the space the spatial relationships and everybody knows
37:33
what the point of the sequence is why they're fighting you
37:36
see this in jackie channel the time too why are they fighting what's
37:39
the space keep it simple you can do so many variations
37:43
of stunts and in fury road with george miller
37:46
it's a car chase i mean the whole movie is a car chase but within
37:49
that when they get to the point where they have those cirque du
37:52
soleil dudes on the like 20 foot vaulting poles leaning
37:56
in to grab people you're like whoa and again
38:00
it is a variation on a simple moving
38:03
in one direction not simple to make but simple
38:06
to understand filming and then akira kurosawa i mentioned this movie all the
38:12
time but seven samurai and look kurosawa directed a number of amazing action
38:17
films seven samurai hidden fortress yojimbo even sanjuro and in a different
38:23
way uh ron but and kagamusha but.
38:27
I believe that people have been chasing the rain, the final battle sequence
38:31
in the rain from Seven Samurai ever since it came out in 1954.
38:35
And the key there was they really shot a battle in the rain with something like 10 to 20 cameras.
38:42
And they just did the battle over and over and over and over again.
38:47
And so you have this feeling. But now Kurosawa was a brilliant editor.
38:51
And we come back to that multiple cameras thing, which is you can do that kind
38:56
of thing if you have a bunch of different cameras.
38:59
So you also have to accept that sometimes in action filmmaking,
39:03
don't make the perfect the enemy of the good, by which I mean,
39:06
you know, so many directors are type A control freaks. And of course,
39:11
the irony is they end up having no control either on the movie or in their personal life.
39:14
And I think the greatest directors can at least self-diagnose that.
39:19
Delegate, move more to being like, and you hear people talk about this all the
39:24
time, being more like a general of a military.
39:26
Trust your departments, trust your colonels, trust the captains,
39:31
trust the lieutenants, trust the chain of command, and make sure that you've
39:34
set everything up for the battle. and then you have to let the battle play out
39:38
and let everybody do what they can do.
39:40
And you often get further, faster, and you get more. And when you see that rain
39:44
sequence in Seven Samurai, I, you know, Kurosawa and Mifuni,
39:48
Toshiro Mifuni, the lead actor, both said, had they even been a few years older,
39:52
there was no way they could have made that happen.
39:54
Kurosawa, I believe when he shot Seven Samurai was in his mid to late forties.
40:00
Mifuni was in his early thirties, I believe.
40:04
And that final sequence just pushed
40:07
them both to the limit kurosawa choreographed it the whole set was built he
40:11
had like 10 or 15 cameras maybe more in different parts of the village and they
40:17
shot it multiple times okay we've covered many many things i think the the last
40:23
thing here i will say and then we'll go into closing,
40:26
is eye movement. This is something that George Miller talks about all the time.
40:30
When you're doing a fast-moving action sequence, wherever the next shot starts,
40:34
it's got to be where the eye is at the end of the shot previous to it.
40:37
Not always. You don't have to do that. But if the eye is having to go everywhere
40:41
to find where it's supposed to focus in the new shot, where the new center of
40:44
action is, you're hurting yourself.
40:47
Whereas if you're fighting and they move from screen left to screen right,
40:52
and then the guy grabs the gun and that's lower screen right.
40:57
Then in the next shot, maybe it's an insert of the battle for the gun,
41:01
lower screen right, so the eye is right there.
41:03
Or you just keep everything in the center of the screen, which is what Miller
41:06
did in Fury Road, and the eye is just always in the center of the screen.
41:09
Turn the sound down, you'll see it happen.
41:15
Wrapping this up, in closing, I knew this, I knew this was foolhardy.
41:20
No way I was going to make this a short podcast. I quixotically thought,
41:23
But yeah, I'll do this in 30 minutes. Nope.
41:28
All right. Wrapping this up, I think the Tom Cruise's Mission Impossible movies,
41:33
specifically 1, 4, 5, and 6, and 7.
41:40
Specifically 1, 4, 5, 6, and 7, which is a hell of a batting average.
41:44
You know, you watch those movies, they're expertly directed, they're real stunts.
41:50
There's the sequence. I think Mission Impossible really understood the sequence.
41:54
And they also understood the importance of how real stunts affects the whole movie.
42:02
When you see real stunts and you can market that and say, you know,
42:06
Tom Cruise really did these stunts. I mean, it's crazy that he did.
42:09
But then people, there's a, I can't believe he really did that.
42:13
There's, you know, you've earned your, your, you've earned the ability to charge
42:18
your audience 14 bucks for that ticket.
42:20
And I think an audience is glad to pay 14 bucks to see something that blows
42:26
their mind. And the Mission Impossible movies, I think did it great on all levels.
42:31
Just, just great story, great acting, great cinematography, great editing,
42:36
great action, filmmaking, great stunts.
42:38
Now the ridiculousness I've always there was this movie made in 2008 I think
42:44
yeah called Wanted but directed by Timur Bekmanbatov Timur Bekmanbatov Russian
42:52
Russian filmmakers made actually a number big budget movies.
42:56
It starred Angelina Jolie and James McAvoy and kind of a ridiculous movie.
43:01
I saw it in the theater and but it had this concept where you could bend a bullet
43:06
where if you shot a gun and did something with your wrist or whatever,
43:11
you can make the bullet kind of arc.
43:13
So it could go around obstacles and then hit your opponent in the head.
43:18
And they accomplished that with this slow-mo and CGI.
43:21
This was all in the wake of The Matrix. And I think that in the 2000s,
43:27
in the 21st century, this thing happened where CGI and technology allowed filmmakers
43:34
to do things no one had seen before.
43:35
And they were very cool. Like Matrix is a great example of this.
43:38
The slow, like suddenly camera ramping. So you're going at normal speed and
43:42
then you ramp the camera to like whatever it was, 108, maybe even up to 150
43:48
or 200 frames per second.
43:50
That's slow motion. and in doing
43:52
that you know keanu reeves is fighting someone shoots at him and then.
43:57
Motion he leans back and he dodges the bullets and
44:00
the bullets are of course cgi so they can come right up to the camera the camera
44:04
can turn on its x-axis which is a kind of pan so that it can you know that bullets
44:08
can come right up into the foreground and then it does the pan and then they
44:12
go away all of that is great kinesthetic movement in in action filmmaking and
44:17
you know a great addition to the toolbox.
44:20
But I feel like a lot of filmmakers abused it once that Pandora's box was open
44:24
of the mix of CGI and camera ramping and blah, blah, blah.
44:29
And so you saw a lot of things where, you know...
44:34
It was fine, but, you know, two cars would crash and they would suddenly in
44:39
slow motion come at a character and a character would jump and turn and their
44:43
superhero go right between the cars and midair.
44:46
And you're like, yeah, OK. All right.
44:49
OK. But you knew it was CGI. You knew it was a lot of smoke and mirrors.
44:54
And at a certain point, you were like, yeah, yeah, I've seen that.
44:58
And so I think now in 2026.
45:02
It's going to be very hard. I understand. I feel like I understand.
45:06
It's very hard to convince studios to pony up the money, take the risk to do
45:14
battles and extras and stunts.
45:16
And they're going to be like, no, and you're going to have to fight.
45:19
But I think that you're losing something.
45:22
And I think this is why some of the magic of movies is not present right now.
45:27
And I think it's why movies like Mission Impossible and other films,
45:32
when they insist on the stunt, they insist on the real sequence.
45:37
They insist on the real extras. They insist on the choreography.
45:40
They insist on the old school action filmmaking.
45:44
Audiences are grateful. They're again, you know, it's like why you used to go to the circus.
45:50
Those are real people up on the trapeze and they've worked it,
45:54
you know, for years and years and years.
45:56
They're not super worried about the stunts they're doing, but that's not easy
46:00
to do. But you know, you're getting your money's worth because those people
46:02
are really up there on the trampoline.
46:04
There's no CGI about that. And now I think the great thing about the circus
46:08
is, you know, yes, they would do stunts where there was no net, but usually not.
46:12
Usually there's a net. And every now and then they would they would miss the
46:15
grasp and they'd fall and they'd fall into the net.
46:18
But, you know, I would just be an arguer for trapeze stunts with the net,
46:24
but the camera is tilted up so you can't see the net.
46:27
All right. Let's move on. Thank you, Secret Movie Clubbers, for listening to this podcast.
46:34
That wraps up Secret Movie Club Podcast 217, directing the action movie.
46:39
I would love to hear your thoughts on it and things I missed or things you're
46:43
like, no, you should have talked about this, or this is a cornerstone of action filmmaking.
46:46
But I do think about this a lot. I hope that some things were covered that.
46:51
Whatever i i hope it was in some way interesting
46:55
i'm i'm grateful as always that you listened secret
46:58
movie club podcast 218 will be theater to film adaptations we will talk about
47:05
some of the great ones alia kazan streetcar named desire sydney lamette's 12
47:09
angry men and long day's journey into night the shakespeare adaptations the
47:14
great ones and then 219 will be the music video directors,
47:17
people like Michelle Gondry, David Fincher, Spike Jones,
47:21
Antoine Fuqua, F. Gary Gray. We're going to get into all of it.
47:25
All right. This Saturday, May 16th, 11 a.m. Animatrix, 2 p.m.
47:30
Redline Anime Masterpiece, 5 p.m. Speed Racer, Wachowski's cult classic,
47:35
Million Dollar Theater, downtown Los Angeles.
47:37
Go to secretmovieclub.com, go to events, get tickets.
47:40
You can still also go to Eventbrite, get tickets. We'd love to see you there. June,
47:44
Father's Day, Sunday, the 21st The Indiana Jones Trilogy On 35mm,
47:49
baby Million Dollar Theater, we would love to see you You can find out,
47:52
go to secretmovieclub.com Look at our events Have fun with the website,
47:56
get a free account Follow us on the newsletter Much more coming up I am working,
48:02
I need to work harder I need to do better, period,
48:06
I keep making mistakes And falling on my face Time for that is over.
48:11
I wish you all the best all the best to you all the best to your loved ones,
48:17
fight the good fight run the race.