If there is one woman in Hollywood who exults in throwing men to the ground and her own magnificent body off rooftops, it’s Angelina Jolie. And if there’s one man who knows how to get the best performance out of that body when she’s pushing it to the limit, it’s Simon Crane (sorry, Brad). Beginning with her high-flying action turn as the bodacious title character in 2001′s Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Crane has choreographed fights and stunts for Angelina on her biggest action films, including Mr. & Mrs. Smith, the Tomb Raider sequel, and her latest action extravaganza, Salt.

Initially, Tom Cruise was slated to play the title role but when Cruise backed out of the thriller, the filmmakers gave the title character a quick sex change and Jolie leapt into the role with her signature abandon. As Evelyn Salt, a former CIA agent who is accused (falsely, she believes) of being a Russian sleeper spy, Jolie goes on the run to clear her name.

In Part 2 of our exclusive interview, Crane provides rare details about Salt’s rigorously realistic action sequences, Jolie’s catch-me-if-you-can fighting style when taking on men, and the unrestrained temper of Salt’s CIA colleague Ted Winter, who is played by Liev Schreiber.

Salt With a Deadly Weapon

30 NINJAS: You’ve worked with Angelina Jolie since some of her earliest action films, such as Tomb Raider. Can you talk about how she’s grown and changed as an actor and how her approach to the work has evolved?

SIMON CRANE: Angelina is a great action actress — she really does want to get involved in all the action scenes, from a character standpoint and also for her personally. But she can be very opinionated, which is great. Sometimes with her we have big discussions about how it should look, how we could do this, but she really gets into it all, which is really great and very helpful for all involved. And she’s a perfectionist; she wants to get it right, so she will really put in her time with the training, with the rehearsal. Like with this last film, Salt, we would often rehearse over the weekends with her at a house, in her own time, just to get things right. And all I can say is, she’s fantastic.

30 NINJAS: Angelina is so small. How do you make it believable that she can hold her own in Salt when she’s fighting bigger men?

SC: In general when Angelina’s fighting a larger man, it’s very difficult. In Salt, we were trying to give her a certain skill set, a certain style of fighting. So she was more bob-and-weave and sort of get the odd hard punch in or odd hit in, and she was also using what’s around in the surroundings.

Liev Schreiber’s Fiery Temper

30 NINJAS: You mentioned Angelina’s strengths, because you know her so well. In terms of Liev Schreiber, who also stars in Salt, were there aspects in particular that when you were working with him that you played towards and created for him?

SC: He’s very good at throwing a punch and very good at reacting, so the more you could get him to do, the better it looked. He’s a fantastic actor, and he’s good at all the action. Liev’s character was more old-fashioned, and he was very skilled, but his temper got away from him a little bit.

30 NINJAS: Oh, interesting. So you used his emotions against him?

SC: To a degree. It’s difficult to talk about that just because the [release of the] film is such a long way off.

30 NINJAS: Salt seems like a film that’s a little bit more realistic in its tone and style than, say, certainly X-Men: The Last Stand or Hancock. Can you talk about the difference in approaching two films such as that, if you were to compare Salt with Hancock? The realistic vs. the fantastic?

SC: From an action standpoint, with a film like Hancock, these characters can fly — they are supermen, superwomen — and you’ve really got to think outside the box, to show the audience something they haven’t seen before. With Hancock, he’s a drunk superhero, so that was actually really fun. Whereas, say, in Salt, you’ve got a more down-and-dirty spy thriller, [and] it’s very important not to step over those boundaries, in that [Angelina's character] is a real human being, although a very trained, very skilled human being. It’s very important not to take it too far, which is very easy do. Very easy and then, once you’ve taken it too far, it will become like one of those old-fashion Bond films, which is something the audience doesn’t want anymore.

30 NINJAS: It’s not really fun to watch someone who’s entirely invincible.

SC: No, it’s gonna get very boring very quickly. It’s maybe how they interact with their surroundings and other humans, normal people, that you can relate to. Or the actors, if they’re in awe of that superhuman character, you will be too. And that’s very important not to forget that.

Sucker Punch and Judy: Angelina vs. Brad

30 NINJAS: I was just watching the fight scene between Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, when they return to the house, and I know that you and [director] Doug [Liman] worked a lot on tone for that and how you could keep the action to a certain tone where it’s not uncomfortable and yet it’s still believable. Can you talk about how you approached the fighting between those two characters?

SC: Yeah, we did lots of rehearsals for that, because it’s a very delicate situation where a man is fighting a woman. So, OK, you’ve got the gunplay at first and that’s a side of it. I think that was relatively straightforward. But also we did have to find those fun elements, as well. But then, we wanted the fight to be brutal, but obviously I was scared stiff of turning Brad into this horrible wife-beater, and so we had to try and keep it equal. So we had to build designs. And then it came in the sequence that they were going to have this one-on-one big punch-up, and I was never, ever, comfortable with it — I thought we were crossing the line there. And I remember taking a beer outside one night ’cause I was meant to shoot it the following day. We’d done all the rest of it, and we were getting to the end of our schedule for this fight sequence, and I was under the pressure of all the time constraints and all that. But I was, to be honest, shitting myself (for lack of a better word), because I really thought we were crossing the line with the next bit of the fight. And I took a beer outside, feeling sorry for myself, and I just came upon the idea of — do you remember those kid Punch and Judy shows?

30 NINJAS: Yeah, absolutely.

SC: Like where you see them beat each other and hit each other. but you don’t actually see it; it’s underneath the actual platform of the theater, or stage. So I thought, well, that’s a great example of kids sort of enjoying seeing fights where you’re not actually seeing anything.

30 NINJAS: Yeah! So you’re talking about when she falls behind the couch and he goes down after her.

SC: Yeah, I came up with that idea of them knocking the couch over and just having this big fight behind that couch, so no one actually saw anything. And the following day I pitched the idea to Doug and the writers and producers, and then Brad and Angie. Thankfully, everyone loved it, and it also saved us time as well.

30 NINJAS: That’s amazing. As an audience member you completely buy that they’re at each other’s throat. And then you also maintain the husband-wife relationship while leaving the violence more to the imagination of the audience.

SC: Exactly, and that’s very important. And I remember as a kid watching those Punch and Judy shows and it completely left it up to your imagination.

More Exclusive Interviews

Read — Stunt Legend Simon Crane on Actioner Surrogates and Double Bruce Willis Action

Read — Exclusive Interview Sherlock Holmes and X-Men
Writer Simon Kinberg (Part 1)

Read Part 2 — Kinberg Reveals Why He Personally Murdered Cyclops in Cold Blood, As Well as More on Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law, an Over-the-Top Sherlock Action Sequence That Was Never Shot, and the Surprising Advice Legendary Action Director John Woo Gave Kinberg About Pacing an Action Film!)

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