Fast & Furious: Hobbs & Shaw director on his Hong Kong action influences
- David Leitch watched Jackie Chan and Jet Li films religiously as a young producer, studying Hong Kong choreography masters like Yuen Woo-ping and Corey Yuen
- He worked with the late Hong Kong filmmaker Ringo Lam on three films and regarded him as a mentor
Viewers have seen Jason Statham play soldier-turned-crook Deckard Shaw in three previous Fast & Furious movies. But director David Leitch wanted to take a different approach to the character for Fast & Furious: Hobbs & Shaw, the first spin-off feature from the enormously successful action film franchise.
“When you have an actor like Jason in the fight scene in his sister’s apartment, you can see a guy who actually has a mastery of martial arts,” Leitch, 49, tells the Post in a recent interview. “It’s so much more compelling to not break the character, not break the illusion that he’s doing it. It’s sort of a curse in Western cinema to use the camera to hide the actor’s inability.”
In the fight Statham dispatches a stream of opponents with an arsenal of punches and kicks, employing everything from knives and guns to shower taps and toasters. The scene took three to four weeks to choreograph, with additional time to rehearse.
“We shot that scene in a traditional Hong Kong style, I’d say,” Leitch says. “Every three moves has a very specific angle, and then we cut. It creates a dramatic effect, but it takes a bit longer to shoot.”
In a career that stretches back over 20 years, Leitch has been on a mission to redefine how action is portrayed on screen. In 1997, he and his friend Chad Stahelski – director of the John Wick movies – formed 87Eleven, an action design production company built around their love of Asian movies.