I was called to set and felt extremely self-conscious as I entered the rarefied air of the actors and director and DP—the real movie.
As it turned out, Paul was doing 99 percent of the fight, because(a) he could do it, and (b) the trailer was tight and close and you could tell who was actually in almost every shot. In addition, because of time constraints, they’d cut a huge chunk of the fight scene, from sixty moves down to about twenty or thirty. As Mike had said, “When a movie starts to fall behind schedule, action is always the first thing to go, because it’s not all plot essential.” Action takes a long time to shoot because of all the setting up and taking down for each shot, and multiple angles. You need days and days to get a fight scene right, and there is always going to be compromise. One of the things Mike wanted to do was address this by designing the action beforehand, instead of loosely sketching it and then figuring it out as you went, which is how a lot gets done these days. By designing and having an exact shot list and careful plan, you can save time and money and get everything you need. Plus a lot of the time, the directors don’t even know what’s possible in stunts.
The kicks were still in the fight, and the little muay Thai footwork for a lead-leg kick that I was supposed to do hadn’t been cut, so I went in and did it, kicking at Stefanos and trying to make it look good. I ended up not having to sell a punch at all. They even did a close-up shot of my feet, there was a little skip kick, but I doubted that would make it into the film. It was somewhat stressful, with the camera crew looming all around, but Stefanos was a pro, and I blocked everything out and just focused on the kick.
That was it, just a few minutes of work, then Paul was back in there. As I walked off the set, the AD shook my hand and whispered, “Congratulations, you just got your SAG card.” And made $719, the day rate. I asked Robbie if it looked okay, because he was a guy you could count on for the truth—Robbie didn’t care about your feelings. He nodded, and I sat and watched the monitors as Paul and Stefanos battled through the trailer, growling and roaring. I had a new appreciation for the way Paul took the hits, and Stefanos did a great job of acting; he really seemed enraged and frightening. He also had had a rough day, I’d leg-kicked him a little too hard (even though he’d asked me to) and he’d had to walk it off, and then he got smashed by Oakley several times into some cupboards made of balsa wood that didn’t break as they were supposed to, and then he got burned on the stove. He laughed and said he felt like he’d been in a fight, but he was glowing with happiness and from exertion by the time the shoot ended, late at night. Because we went so long, I got overtime pay, too, which put me up to around $1,500, basically for sitting around drinking coffee all day and doing fifteen minutes of kicks. It’s why everyone wants to be in the business.
We wrapped the trailer scene and went back out into another part of the desert to shoot Split-Rock, the huge fight scene between Paul and all the boys. I had been standing in for Paul for most of the rehearsals for this, too. Mike talked about the differences in the planning stages of action; he had just done Elektra, and the female lead, Jennifer Garner, had rehearsed the fight scenes for three months before the movie started, eight hours a day—one scene had a hundred moves and five attackers with bo staffs. On Bobby Z, there just wasn’t the time. Pat and Mike had originally hashed out a big fight scene that went up and down the rock, with a ten-foot fall for Paul and Pat, and the director wisely wiped that out with a few words, because he had two days to shoot the entire sequence.
The Split-Rock set was a huge man-made rock triangle, placed out in the middle of a plain, in what felt like high desert but was only a couple of miles from the sea. Mexico was heading into winter like the rest of the hemisphere, but it had been a dry fall and a fire had started, and from the set the entire southern horizon was covered in roiling smoke, blowing out to the ocean. It was low scrub ground with very spotty fuels, and so I reassured anyone who was worried, as the smoke billowed up in black gouts across the sun, that we were in no danger—the entire plain was a safety zone, and the fire was miles downwind. But it was close enough to be spectacular, and as the sun sank, to turn the day a dreaming red.
It was Pat and his boys’ chance to shine, and they did. Robbie, who had been sleeping all day, suddenly came alive. “He’s a game-day player,” said Pat. He looked great moving and coming around the rock with murder in his eyes. Paul dispatched him with ease.
Rory was next, and he came hard with his knife, but Paul was up to the challenge and disarmed him, beat him to picking up the knife, and slashed his throat. That was the first day.
The morning of the second day, I dressed as Paul again, and doubled him for the close-up of Rory getting his throat slashed. I watched what he had done on the monitors and then tried to match it, while keeping my face angled away from the camera. It was hard to remember everything in order, and to also use the gag knife, which had a blood bulb in it—I was supposed to squeeze it as it went across Rory’s throat. (The effects guy laughed and said this technology was straight out of 1930.) It took a few tries, but finally we got the shot. There is a fair amount of stress in doing action live for the camera, because you want to nail it, get it right on one take, and sometimes you just go on and on getting it wrong. Rory did a terrific job selling the knife slash, his eyes darting from his head.
Then it was Pat’s turn, and they battled back and forth until Paul caught Pat in a leaping triangle and elbowed his face about a dozen times. The director had the makeup guys put a thin trickle of blood down Pat’s nose, and I thought, Man, his face would be busted to pieces—it would look like an exploded tomato. Paul’s elbow should have been red with blood, too. That scene was the most impressive for Paul’s commitment: He and Pat tumbled all over the place, they went up and down and up and down in the dirt, banging and smashing. “Movie stars don’t do that,” the AD said. Paul had wanted to make it good, and he wanted to hang with Pat, and Pat felt the same way. They pushed each other and got down and dirty, and by the end of the second day they were both exhausted and beat up.
The fires continued to fill up the southern part of the world, and the smoke drifted far out to sea in a hazy, dirty layer. The sunsets as we drove back to Rosarito were incandescent.
The film had bought both Robbie and Rory return airfare, so in the end, I wasn’t going to have to take either one of them with me. I thought I had concealed my desire to be alone well, but Rory laughed and said, “This is good. I know Sam was going to leave me at a truck stop in Texas.”
We watched the UFC that night. Pat had three guys fighting and they all won, and Paul sat next to me for a while. I liked Paul, although we weren’t close; I think he is an honest guy, the real deal. Whenever he got a film, a circle of friends from his youth who worked in movies (stunts, effects, producing) would drop what they were doing and go with him; they kept him grounded—they would tell him when he was doing something stupid. He knew that some of the movies he’d made were cheesy, and he wanted to make good films, cool films. He was capable of it.
Paul had read the article I’d written about Thailand and said he might want to go and train there. He asked me, “Do you think you’ll ever get this out of your system? You won’t, will you?…It will always be there.” He had the bug, a little bit: He wanted to train more, he wanted to fight.
I thought about his question. Maybe it was out of my system, I realized. I still wanted to train, to get better, to roll and spar—but I didn’t need to fight, I didn’t want to hurt anybody. Did I?
There is a question, an endless debate, over whether fighting makes you more aggressive and prone to violence, or less. In my case, it was definitely more. For the first time, I kind of, secretly, wanted to hurt someone. Before, I had been forcing myself to do it because I could, because I enjoyed the training, because I wanted never to be afraid.
I had looked deep into my heart for any sign of fear; what I found instead was boredom. I like getting hit in the head—I’m not afraid of it. It gets me psyched. I hate getting hit in the body, but that’s because I get hurt and then can’t do things for five weeks or whatever. Climbing into the ring or cage didn’t seem like such a big deal. Staying in shape was boring; training all the time was boring. I was never going to be a great fighter, so maybe it was time to move on to other fears. I could walk away from it, I thought. I can walk away from anything or anybody, I’ve proved that, not that it’s something to be proud of.
Suddenly, it was all over—at least the Mexico part was. Pat’s role was finished, and the fight scenes were all done. The crew was packing up and getting ready to return to L.A., take a week for Thanksgiving an