Fight Scene with Uchi Chan

A few weeks ago, I had my first pure fight action job of the year. It was for a quirky Japanese TV show called "Life" and the main character was a Japanese physical comedian (who's actually quite a martial artist) nicknamed "Uchi Chan" because he also looks quite a lot like Jackie Chan. Here is one of his old fight scenes if you wanna check it out:


In this fight scene, it seemed like we were parodying either Jackie's Armor of God, or at least Indiana Jones, as he was trying to save an innocent girl and a professor looking guy from the bad guys- namely us. The fight choreography was fairly simple, but the set we had to do it in was the tightest I've ever had to work in. Literally, there was only enough room for 4 or 5 steps in any direction. To further complicate things, it was full of props that littered the floor, were hanging from the ceiling, and many were actually integrated into the fight scene (as they should be).

Every good guy's worst nightmare, lol. 

The stunt coordinator/choreographer for the day was Takeda Michihiro. I knew of him from my time working on Godzilla:Final Wars, and the Geki Rangers movie, but I had never worked under him before. Most of the action work I do in Japan is under the same few people or with the same few groups, so it was nice to work under someone who choreographs in such a different way and with such a different style.

Aside from the super tight space that we had to work with (and the fact that it consequently dictated that we take each and every step carefully), probably one of the hardest things about the shoot was that mid-way through the fight, Uchi had to throw full potato sacks at me, which I had to deflect before coming at him again. All that would be well and fine, except that the dust and particles coming off of them as I hit them was blinding, and I still had to (carefully) come at him so that he could get out of the way of my kick and still step the right way to position myself so that we could both naturally move in the right way to continue the sequence without bumping into anything or knocking over any props. That fact aside though, the choreo itself was fairly simple. Beyond that, my only other complaint was that I die (of course) halfway through the shoot, so that the next guy could come in, so I had to spend the later half of the shoot simply lying dead on the cold ground (and at one point, the other guy he was fighting accidentally kicked me in the head while I was laying there).Overall though, it was a pretty fun day to shoot. Everyone got along quite well on set, and while the stunt coordinator was strict, he was also squarely in his stunt players corners, and let us know it. (Some, if they are trying to kiss the director's ass, won't really care too much about you- doesn't happen a lot, but it does happen). Uchi was also great. At this point, he is in his fifties, and isn't doing nearly the physical kind of stuff that he was doing before... (Much like Jackie Chan)...but I do hope to get a chance to work with him again.