Road House Remake Director Doug Liman Defends the Controversial CGI Fight Scenes

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CGI fight scenes could become a new trend as Road House director Doug Liman defends the technique from the myriad of criticisms that have since been leveled against it. The movie stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Dalton, a former UFC-fighter turned bouncer, who is hired to protect a Road House in the Florida Keys from increasingly violent customers. The remake of the beloved original (starring Patrick Swayze) co-stars real UFC fighter Conor McGregor as the movie’s main villain, Knox, and, as a result, features relentless action and fight scenes. However, Liman used a relatively new and experimental technique to capture the fight scenes. While some fans hated the end result, the director says there is no going back.

In an interview with Empire Magazine, Liman explained his decision to incorporate CGI in the fight sequences of “Road House.” Unlike other action films that use a single shot and clever camera angles to create the illusion of punches landing, Liman filmed each fight scene four times. This allowed him to switch between actors executing moves against one another as well as striking a padded dummy. These individual shots were then combined to give the impression that Seagal and McGregor were actually fighting each other. The director justified this method, stating he found it monotonous to watch obviously fake fight scenes and aimed to innovate the way fight scenes are portrayed in “Road House.”

“I can’t spend two hours shooting fake bar-fights. I’m just gonna get bored. It’s not the loftiest aspiration to be like, ‘I’m gonna reinvent how fights are shot just to keep myself from getting bored,’ but when you’re making a movie like Road House, it’s going to have a lot of bar-fighting. How am I going to make that interesting for me, as a filmmaker?

A significant factor that finds shooting fight scenes somewhat uninteresting for me is the limitations in camera placement and editing due to the fact that people aren’t physically striking each other. This led me to ponder, ‘I wish I could position the camera like a filmmaker would if they were truly exchanging blows.’

Doug Liman Wants to Shoot More Action Movies Using CGI

One of the biggest criticisms leveled at Liman’s Road House remake was about how fake the fight scenes occassionally looked. As smart as the technique sounded on paper, and as well as it’s been implemented in the past, in reality it gave each punch in the movie an odd, distorted effect, pulling audiences away from the action. While most audiences disliked the style, Doug Liman has fallen in love with it, and believes it is far superior to the techniques currently used by other action filmmakers. He said:

“Now I’ve done it this way, I could never go back. I look at other movies, and it looks so fake to me.”

Despite receiving a mix of positive and negative critiques, “Road House” managed to garner enough interest for Amazon to approve a follow-up. It’s been confirmed that Jake Gyllenhaal will reprise his role in “Road House 2”. As for Doug Liman, he hasn’t yet announced whether he will direct the sequel; however, if he does, fans can anticipate similar CGI-enhanced fight scenes to be a part of the second installment.

Road House
is currently streaming on Prime Video.

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2024-09-03 16:05