Many of you have been Mixed Martial Arts fans since Royce Gracie won the first Ultimate Fighting Championship in 1993, but it’s clear that a lot more people have been joining the party lately and the UFC is gaining a huge, huge following. That got us wondering how the rise in popularity of MMA fighting in the U.S. is changing the way that action movies are made and watched. Chris Weitz, director of New Moon, tackled the issue in his 30 Ninjas blog, and we also asked Chad Stahelski of 87 Eleven (they do the fights and stunts for films like The Matrix trilogy, Ninja Assassin, and Iron Man 2) and action scribe Simon Kinberg (X-Men 3, Sherlock Holmes) to give us their takes.

Chris Weitz: How Cinematic Is a Face Shoved in a Crotch?

“I’m sure you’ve seen this, where every time someone fights they suddenly know how to do sidekicks and know the correct grappling holds and all that kind of stuff. I wanted the fighting [in New Moon] to be quite ugly and unpleasant, so that those moments, when you burst into action, feel more like a fight. The idea was for it to actually feel more like an unpleasant fight between two people that wanted to kill each other, rather than something that’s Matrix-like in its explosion into mixed martial arts. I used to box quite a lot, and I studied kung fu, and to me, when you’re talking about mixed martial arts you’re talking about the UFC and jiu jitsu and ground work. I don’t want to sound down on MMA, but that’s a lot of people shoving their heads into each other’s crotches, and that doesn’t look particularly appealing or cinematic since it’s really one guy managing to twist another guy’s elbow so much that it’s about to snap and he taps out. I was also really keen to avoid beautiful karate or kung-fu type moves.”

Chad Stahelski: Keep the MMA Real, or Add Some Pizzazz?

“I think if you showed even the barest-bones karate back in 1977, you could impress the entire world. I think the MMA has, if anything, overeducated the American populace in martial arts. There aren’t too many people you can find nowadays who have never heard the term martial arts or who don’t know what a rear choke or a roundhouse kick to the leg is. When we were competing back in the 1980’s, if you kicked somebody in the thigh, half the world didn’t know what Muay Thai was. Now, everybody knows what jiu jitsu is — middle America, East Coast, West Coast, everyone knows. It’s not a special thing; it’s just another sport like basketball or football or boxing — it’s just another athletic endeavor. So it affects us as choreographers: You can’t just get by; you actually have to think. Then again, you can have arguments all day long. I read the blogs and the Twitters, and hear, “That’s not really real.” And to some extent I’m like, “Guys, it’s a movie!” Ninety-nine percent of what you see in movies is meant to be aesthetic. Any movie is effective if the guy’s good enough, and any movie’s ineffective if the guy’s not good enough. It’s just that simple.

“We try to take the essence of the martial art or MMA and think, What is it? It’s ground fighting, it’s boxing, it’s kickboxing — but with a lot of ground work and bigger throws. We take the essence of that and come up with moves that are slightly different, slightly better. In movies, we don’t kick the way we would kick if we were fighting in the ring. We kick with more of an aesthetic line, we kick higher, we’re a little bit more flexible. We try to kick with a different kind of snap, so it looks better for camera. If you watch a straight MMA match, while it may be cool, if the guy doesn’t get knocked out the fight can get a little boring and tedious, so we try to put a little pizzazz back into it and crash the guy into the table.

I think MMA is good in that it’s educated the audience, but I also think it’s divided the audience into two groups: Half the people out there want to see something more real, and half the people want to see something more flashy, so we try to get the tone of the film and put the right art to it.”

Simon Kinberg: The Appeal Is That It Feels Like Two Guys Who Got Drunk and Pounded Each Other

“I know that the new fighting styles [of MMA and the UFC] are having an impact on fights and movies. It was something that we explicitly discussed when we were choreographing the fights for Wolverine in X-Men 3, and it’s also something we looked at in Sherlock Holmes. There’s much more use of what the sport is — karate and martial arts, combined with fist-fighting, kicking, brawling, scratching, and dirty fighting. And I think it’s that fighting style, the combining of the different disciplines, that you see in movies now. You can’t only be a kung fu fighter, you can’t only be a bar room brawler, and I think those things on their own feel kind of strangely antiquated, but put that all together and they feel like the moves of a modern fighter. Whether the movie is about people with superpowers or a guy from 120 years ago, you know that fight choreographers and stunt coordinators are looking to the MMA world for material.

“The other thing is that fights don’t have to be pretty anymore. The Matrix fights are pretty, dance-like fights but mixed martial arts fights are dirty, sweaty, and ugly. MMA feels real — it’s part of its appeal that it doesn’t feel choreographed. It doesn’t feel like two guys who’ve trained forever; it just feels like two guys who got drunk and got into a fight.”

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