INSIDE THE ACTION FACTORY
In a converted church in East Hollywood, director David Leitch and a team of fitness and movement freaks are creating some of the coolest action sequences ever put on film. Here’s how they’re pulling it off
You hear the action at 87North before you see it. Swords shingging and clashing together. Thuds as grapplers slam each other to the padded floor. Fists and feet slapping against focus mitts, heavy bags and the occasional face. But for the frequent bursts of laughter and breaks in the action for commentary and suggestions (‘Wouldn’t it be cool if...?’), you might think you were visiting a training facility for reallife superheroes. And in a sense, you’d be right: 87North, housed in a converted church in East Hollywood, is the world’s premier actiondesign stunt-training facility. Wrestlers struggle for control of a dummy knife. Acrobats hurl themselves like human missiles through the air. A squad of stunt performers work on ‘pre-viz’ – action choreography worked out and filmed prior to shooting. Keanu Reeves and Ryan Gosling drop in to hone their heroics for new projects.
No day is like the next. If Santa’s elves made action movies instead of children’s toys – and lived on protein shakes instead of candy canes – this would be their workshop. ‘When I was coming up, there was no school for stunts,’ says co-founder and action director David Leitch, 54. So he built one. Compact, witty and surprisingly soft-spoken for a guy whose stock-in-trade is roundhouse kicks and car crashes, Leitch is a martial-arts fiend who cut his teeth in Hollywood as a stunt double for Brad Pitt in Fight Club. Later, he made a name for himself as a stunt performer on action movies such as the Matrix franchise and 300. Since co-founding 87North with his wife, producer Kelly McCormick, in 2019, Leitch has brought his bare-knuckle action approach as a director on films such as John Wick, Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2, Bullet Train and The Fall Guy.
The couple’s signature style involves wide shots and long takes of flailing, fighting, falling bodies. Real impact, real stakes and real risk. In that sense, their movies are throwbacks to a pre-digital age when the only way to convincingly show a person falling off a 100ft tower was to film someone falling off a 100ft tower. ‘A lot of studios will say, “Let’s just do that with blue screen,”’ explains Leitch. ‘What we do is so much more visceral.’
Their main competition these days, of course, is digital. ‘We’ve been in a long-term relationship with CGI and AI,’ says McCormick, the company’s steady-hand-on-the-wheel visionary. ‘Now it’s time to go to therapy.’ As AI continues to grow, she says, ‘we’ll need to make a plan to move forwards in a way that’s beneficial to filmmaking – while also supporting a human, artisan workforce.’
Putting that brand on-screen is a painstaking process – and a cerebral one. Though every performer has their speciality – martial arts, falling, driving, parkour – most are conversant in several fighting styles and experts at falls, jumps, flips and wirework. In the studio’s invitationonly fight classes, performers learn to solo and improvise with kicks, flips, punches and throws the way a dancer might with pirouettes and tour jetés – not only as the components of an athletic skill, but also as the building blocks of a creative language. ‘The moves are real,’ says the studio’s grappling instructor, Hugh Fitzgerald, 55, a zen-like jiujitsu expert and former collegiate wrestler. ‘An arm bar is an arm bar; a chokehold is a chokehold. But at the end of the day, it has to translate to the screen and tell the story.’ That requires a level of craft beyond the ability to memorise complex choreography and execute cool-looking moves.
The goal: to discover a sequence or style that could serve as the basis for a character or even a franchise, the way close-quarters combat with handguns – a hybrid they call gun fu – became foundational to John Wick. As conceived by Leitch and his co-director Chad Stahelski, the original Wick was built so that each fight had stakes that were equal parts physical and emotional. ‘There are a lot of stuntpeople that are “spectacle for spectacle’s sake”,’ says Leitch. ‘They’re just thinking, “What’s the cool gag?” And they’re not really thinking about the character’s arc.’ When John finally confronts his archnemesis at the end, Leitch says, ‘you’re so vested in the character that it’s much more memorable’.