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“It wasn’t the comedy or the action, but this meditation on fate and this big existential question was at the center of it,” director David Leitch tells Motion Pictures about his new movie Bullet Train. “I felt that was so subversive and irreverent in a big bombastic assassin movie.”
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This profundity seems to have passed over the heads of most
critics. Closer to the mark and to Leitch’s real thinking probably is the
comment of one of the characters in the film, and assassin called Lemon whose
cultural reference is the kids’ book Thomas the Tank Engine.
All entertainment today is “twists, violence, drama, no
message — what are we supposed to learn?” complains Lemon.
Bullet Train is exactly one of those movies, and as
Motion Pictures points out “that’s all it wants to be.”
The $90m off-the-rails actioner stars Brad Pitt as Ladybug,
an assassin hired to do a job while confined on the fastest train in the world. This non-stop ride of ultraviolence puts
Ladybug on a headlong collision course with various lethal adversaries played
in cameo by actors from Channing Tatum and Sandra Bullock, to Michael Shannon
by way of Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Brian Tyree Henry, Zazie Beetz and Bad Bunny.
Even Ryan Reynolds pops up.
Pleasure in seeing all these stars albeit briefly is “the
real point” of Bullet Train, feels Vox.
While Polygon describes the film as “a Looney
Tunes-esque actioner with a buzzy cast playing a batch of goofy assassins
all on the same train to Kyoto, and all after the same briefcase.”
Leitch co-directed (uncredited) the original John
Wick with Chad Stahelski – a film that has earned them the monika
“Godfathers of fight-vis,” in reference to a technique where complex fight
sequences are filmed to visualize the action prior to shooting the real thing.
“Chad and I were definitely on the forefront of something
that now every stunt team on the planet does,” he says (motion picture). Leitch
attributes his approach, in part, to his working with Hong Kong director Ringo
Lam and directing a number of Jean-Claude Van Damme movies like Maximum
Risk (1997).
Before helming Atomic Blonde (2017), Deadpool
2 (2018), and Hobbs & Shaw (2019), Leitch
had a decades-long career as a stunt performer, fight choreographer, and stunt
coordinator. He was Pitt’s stunt double in Fight Club, Spy
Game, Ocean’s Eleven, Troy, and Mr. and Mrs. Smith.
While unconventional, Leitch feels the road from stuntman to
choreographer to second unit director to director was perfect for him,
He views designing action as just part of the bigger
narrative, always seeking to service the story and characters first, as he
explained to DenofGeek: “I decided to start to lean into directing because I’d
had a lot of time practicing these mini-stories within action sequences.”
Shooting on the Sony lot
The production was one of the first out of the gate
post-pandemic but that still meant travel to Japan for principal photography
was not an option. So virtually the whole show was shot on a LED volume at
Culver City.
Production designer David Scheunemann built two full-sized
train cars on the Lot along with a train station set that could be redressed
for each stop to Kyoto, while the LA Convention Center stood in for the Tokyo
Station. A side street in downtown LA
was transformed into bustling Tokyo streets replete with flashing neon signs,
food stalls, and market stands.
A second unit did visit Japan to shoot footage for the LED
plates of landscape viewed through the train windows. They used specialized
array cameras filming routes similar to the Tokyo-Kyoto passage taken by the
movie’s Shinkansen train. However, these views were shot not from a Shinkansen
but from vehicles on Japan’s freeways, traveling within speed limits that are
significantly less than the 250 mph that the bullet train can reach. VFX supervisor Michael Brazelton and team
sped the footage up to the train’s proper velocity. Lux Machina designed
and constructed the high-resolution interactive background of the LED wall for
the film.
“The biggest source of pressure for me was how do we sell
the scope of our movie when we’re shooting in a sound stage on the Sony lot in
two train cars that are supposed to feel like a twelve car train,” says Leitch
in the film’s production notes. “The immersive environment for our actors was
really helpful. Immediately you’re feeling the rhythm and the pace of the
movie, instead of looking at a blue screen and trying to visualize it.”
Scheunemann’s designs allowed for the two full-sized train
cars that his construction team built to be interchangeable, allowing each
train car to be redressed and repurposed to serve as multiple cars.
“The only way to design a good set is to integrate every piece
of lighting that you will need later on,” Scheunemann says. “It’s about
crafting a set that works visually and technically on every level. Every
single light source has been designed, tested, discussed, and built into the
set piece to cover almost every scenario in DP Jonathan Sela’s lighting design
and David’s shot list.”
Indeed, the filmmakers relished the idea of imagining and
choreographing the film’s copious fight scenes in within the tight sets.
“We were in such confined spaces that it lent us to do two
or three moves and then cut, or two to three moves and change the camera angle.
And that heightens the physical comedy in the fights,” the director told Motion
Pictures. “It all had precise timing for the comedic beats.”
For all the ingenuity the virtual production involved,
Leitch nonetheless says he’ll always be more of an organic filmmaker.
“I need to be inspired by a location,” he tells Collider. “I need to be inspired by the touching and feeling and seeing things. I honed my comedic chops with Deadpool,
and worked on sort of a comedy balance and dramatic narrative on Hobbs
and Shaw. And now I've taken away more of a technical idea of this sort of
VFX virtual production, and I'll use it. But at the heart of me is still the
stuntman choreographer who goes to a location, is inspired by that fall potential,
or by those arches, and I want to shoot them. And so, I think I'll always be
that.”
Original IP but not totally original
Leitch insists he wanted to make an original movie yet
Bullet Train is adapted from the Japanese mystery-fiction book of the same name
by Japanese best-selling novelist Kōtarō Isaka.
“What was great about Bullet Train is that the IP was
relatively unknown there outside of Japan and so I could put my creative input
on it,” he tells Forbes. “We're trying to bust out some original IP that can land in the summer or
spectacle space.”
He envisages Bullet Train as the start of a
franchise.
“I see it as a universe. I know that's the buzzword that everybody uses, and they're like, 'We want to build a universe and all the spin-offs,' but organically, on the page already, you had that. Not everybody's left at the end of this film, but that doesn't mean we can't explore different times and places when these fun characters existed.”
Vox says the film’s novelty stems purely from celebrity cameos, adding “it’s pure escapism at its finest, with no message or lesson at its core.”By Hollywood standards, it adds, “in this age of reboots and
sequels and nothing else, Bullet Train counts as an original
screenplay. It’s not; it’s adapted from a book, and more importantly,
everything in it has been seen before.”
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