Choreographing The Musketeer's Moves

By: Michael Tunison
Date: Friday, September 07, 2001

On opposite sides of the planet, two genre moviemaking veterans had violence on their minds.

In the U.S., director Peter Hyams (2010, OUTLAND) was wondering what the heck he could do to freshen up Alexandre Dumas' much-adapted swashbuckler yarn THE THREE MUSKETEERS. Hyams liked a new MUSKETEERS script written by his SUDDEN DEATH collaborator Gene Quintano, but the helmer wasn't sure how he could present the story's action sequences in a way that would reinvigorate the material for modern audiences.

Halfway around the world in Hong Kong, stunt expert Xin Xin Xiong was looking for a way to bring a very specific vision of cinematic fighting to the screen. Serving as a stunt double on films such as the Jet Li-starring ONCE UPON A TIME IN CHINA series and action choreographer on Tsui Hark's TIME AND TIDE and the Jean-Claude Van Damme/Dennis Rodman vehicle DOUBLE TEAM, the mainland China native had had time to formulate lots of ideas about what he hoped would be a new and exciting approach to on-screen combat.

Xin Xin's dream action style would avoid Hong Kong-style exaggerated theatrics in favor of a more down-and-dirty approach, while retaining the blinding speed that is the hallmark of Asian chop-sockies. And unlike the special effects-driven style that dominates Hollywood action flicks, there would be no cheating in post-production. Camera placement and a lack of cuts would show that actual human beings had accomplished all the moves with real-life physical skill.

"You see the guy fight one bad guy, two bad guys, up to five guys -- without stopping, in long shot," Xin Xin explains. "Every shot has to be over 15 seconds, and it had to be very fast. Nobody had done that before, not even in Hong Kong."

Xin Xin felt he'd gotten close with

the turbo-charged shoot-'em-up action in TIME AND TIDE, but he didn't have the opportunity to bring his violent vision fully to life until he was approached by Hyams to be the stunt choreographer on the film eventually titled THE MUSKETEER. Watching a segment of the 2000 Millennium celebration featuring acrobats dancing vertically on the walls of the Sydney Opera House in Australia had inspired Hyams with the idea of injecting some Hong Kong-style physical energy into his new take on the old Musketeers story, and a few overseas phone calls later the director was talking to Xin Xin about how the action styles of the East and West might be blended to bring moviegoers a fresh take on swashbuckling Musketeer action.

"I said, OK, this is the time for me to do something brand-new with American movies, and also with Hong Kong movies," Xin Xin tells Cinescape in a phone interview from Hong Kong. "I want to show the audience what Xin Xin can do. I have [developed] that kind of style, but even in Hong Kong I don't have opportunity to do it."

Working on the storyboards for THE MUSKETEER, Xin Xin and Hyams developed a visual approach for the film's fight sequences unlike anything seen in previous THREE MUSKETEERS movies or anywhere else, in Xin Xin's opinion. In the end, Hyams accepted "85 percent" of the stunt master's ideas, objecting only when a particular bit seemed too over-the-top -- "too Hong Kong" -- for the 17^th century European setting, Xin Xin says. Any fears the director might have had initially about his Musketeers and men-at-arms slipping into wu shu moves were quickly eased in talking to Xin Xin, who had consciously departed from that style of screen action with TIME AND TIDE.

The ballet-like, cartoonish fighting so popular in Asian action cinema has its place in certain kinds of films, but for a more reality-based action piece the style is "kind of weird," Xin Xin says. "I don't say it's no good. For a movie, it's OK, but nobody would show the real fighting, realistic. In real life, when you kill somebody, you cannot do this. In real life, you cannot jump that high and stay in the air for two or three seconds [without] going back to the ground. You are not Superman."

As for the fancy formal styles both Asian martial artists and swashbuckling European fencers so often display in their respective movie genres, Xin Xin doesn't put much stock in them. In his experience, battling for one's life is a much more nitty-gritty, desperate affair, and combatants rarely take the time to observe the niceties of training forms.

"When you are fighting somebody, it's the same in Eastern and Western it's really fast," he says. "If you really want to kill somebody, it happens in a few seconds."

One Hong Kong genre convention both Hyams and Xin Xin definitely wanted to avoid is the use of cables to allow characters to perform all sorts of impossible airborne maneuvers. Cable technique may be the basis of memorable fantasy action in films such as CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON, but Xin Xin's approach is to rely on it as little as possible occasionally using cables for "just a little bit of help" to speed up a particular stunt, and of course to help keep stuntmen from breaking their necks on the job.

"I don't accept the cable and cable stunts," Xin Xin says. "For me, the cable is only for safety, not helping you to do the stunt."

That meant lots of hard training for his stuntmen as they prepared for scenes such as THE MUSKETEER's first big action set piece, in which young would-be Musketeer D'Artagnan (Justin Chambers) takes on four opponents in a tavern. One particularly daunting bit in which the characters fight atop enormous rolling wine barrels had the stunt team pleading with Xin Xin for assistance from the familiar cables.

"First week we were doing rehearsal, my stuntmen said, 'Can we have cable?'" the choreographer recalls. "I said, 'No. Every day you guys have to practice one hour, just walking on the barrel.' 'But without cable, how can we do it?' I said, 'Practice.'"

Another

element of Xin Xin's style -- his preference for wide, uncut shots that leave little room for editing-room trickery -- was put to the test in the film's longer action sequences. An especially difficult segment to shoot in long takes was his personal favorite, in which D'Artagnan attempts to save his chambermaid love interest (Mena Suvari) and the Queen of France (Catherine Deneuve) from bad guys carrying them away in a fast-moving coach. The usual Hollywood method for dealing with the sequence would be to divide it into a series of short individual cuts, especially some tricky business that occurs when the coach passes under some tree branches.

"I discussed with Peter [that] I prefer to do it in long shot, wide shot," Xin Xin says. "I want to see the whole coach, I want to see the horses, I want to see the branch in one picture. Everything happening in one shot.'" Hyams asked, "Can you do that? You don't need to CG anything, bluescreen?"

"No," Xin Xin replied, "If I need to CG, I might not do this movie. Because I am stuntman."

The same can't be said for Chambers, who faced the double challenge of taking on both his first big leading role and his first screen stunts in the picture. Trained by Xin Xin and a French fencing expert for six weeks in everything from swordsmanship to horseback riding and cable work, the young leading man quickly developed a respect for the men who do this sort of thing for a living.

"There's very, very little special effects involved in this film," Chambers says. "I mean, those guys are really flipping doing the splits with those barrels and all that stuff. One of the most inspirational things I saw on the set was just watching Xin Xin and his group of people - the way that they work, and the focus. They busted their butts."

Fortunately, Chambers displayed some natural affinity for stunts as well, replicating all but the most difficult maneuvers his double carried out if admittedly a tad slower than the pros.

"It's choreographed, so it's like learning

a dance and I ain't a dancer," he says. "And certain times a scene might not work when we start shooting, so they take out a few steps, and that throws you off a bit because you learned it from A to Z. But you put your trust in Peter Hyams and Xin Xin. They knew what they wanted, and I think they achieved it."

Considering the bigger budgets and relaxed shooting schedules U.S. productions typically allow compared to those from Hong Kong, one might suppose that Xin Xin landing his first Hollywood choreographing gig might have affected how he does his job. But such factors had relatively little impact on either what he wanted to do or how he went about doing it, he says.

"A lot of Hong Kong stuntmen, choreographers, they think, 'Oh, American movie big-budget movie. You can have whatever you want money, time.' But not this movie. I have a lot of money, I have a lot of equipment, but I don't use it." For Xin Xin, being a stuntman is about "proving your physical skill" on film, not setting up a shot for the special effects wizards to come in and finish.

"I didn't come here to use a computer," he says.