Ralph Fiennes’ Coriolanus Blog: “There Will Be Blood” — New Photo of Ralph and Gerry, Plus an Interview From Set » 30ninjas

Ralph Fiennes’ Coriolanus Blog: “There Will Be Blood” — New Photo of Ralph and Gerry, Plus an Interview From Set

Share on Facebook posted 05-20-10 by Andreas Wiseman

Ten days ago I was in Serbia for a thrilling, action-packed two days during which Ralph and Gerard/Coriolanus and Aufidius went head to head for the first time:

Day 36:

INT. DAY – CORIOLES – HOTEL LOBBY. Battle for hotel. Facing enemy. Fight between Coriolanus and Aufidius.

Day 37:

INT. DAY – CORIOLES – HOTEL LOBBY. Battle for hotel. Facing enemy. Fight between Coriolanus and Aufidius.

INT. DAY – CORIOLES – HOTEL COURTYARD. Battle finishes in courtyard.

They were two fierce days full of grappling, lunging and tremendous energy, rounded off with one of the most exciting stunts I’ll ever see. While there, I had great conversations with Oscar winning sound mixer Ray Beckett, stunt co-ordinator Rowley Irlam, hair and makeup designer Daniel Parker, dialogue coach Joan Washington, Production Designer Ricky Eyres, and others.

The team was filming at the stunning (in a decaying, communist-chic way) Hotel Jugoslavia in “New Belgrade”:

Once the best ticket in town (boom op St. Clair Davis stayed in one of the one thousand rooms in 1987), the epic 5 star hotel is an imposing structure with a unique vantage overlooking the Danube. After being hit by NATO bombs in 1999 it no longer functions as a hotel, but still boasts some very visually arresting spaces, hence the team’s decision to shoot there. For an idea of the space check out this video.

At 1.38 you can see the staircase scaled by Coriolanus and his troops, and the large lobby area in which most of the shoot took place.

I went straight to set after landing to find Ralph and Gerry going at it hammer and tongs. It was the last hour of rehearsals and the two were practicing knife thrusts, parries and arm locks with stunt co-ordinator Rowley Irlam and stunt doubles James Grogan and Rick English.

I had a chat with Rowley (who worked with Ralph on Harry Potter) about the upcoming fight between Ralph and Gerard:

ANDREAS WISEMAN: Where did you get your ideas for this fight?

ROWLEY IRLAM: You draw on any movies you’ve seen and your own experience of doing movies. I talked with Ralph about the concept of the fight during my first time out here and mulled over what he said. But it’s the doubles that put these things together. Both guys are experienced fighters. They are professional stunt people but they’ve also been competitive fighters in mixed martial arts and Taekwondo. The guys you bring out often put the fight together. You try to come up with things that look good but that are real. The arm-locks in the fight are real. None of the attacks or the parries or holds are false. They all do what they are supposed to.

AW: And how do you put it together?

RI: We block it out with the doubles. The two actors learn the moves. Then once they’ve got them and don’t have to think about what the next move is they put the energy into it. It’s not about speed; it’s about making the moves look real.

AW: And there’s a pretty exciting stunt tomorrow in which your guys throw themselves out of a window and fall 25-30 feet, right?

RI: Yeah, in the top two corners of the windows we’ve got commercial detonators, electrically charged. The guys sprint to the window, when they are 18 inches from the glass it will be detted, making the cubes stay in place but ready to shatter. It will be less than quarter of a second between them reaching that point and them hitting the window so visually it will look like the guys have broken the glass.

I couldn’t wait.

On set the following morning I made my way up the hotel’s dusty red carpet into the lobby where I soon spotted Ralph and his team of Roman (our friends, the SAJ) soldiers, kitted out in full military uniform, wielding Colt M4s. While all the men’s faces were cut and smoke charred, Ralph’s was particularly striking – tributaries of blood crisscrossed all over his face.

The scene they were shooting follows on from the battle scenes we saw pictures of a month or two ago where Coriolanus and his forces lay siege to the Volscian city of Corioles. After a bloodthirsty solo mission Coriolanus has rejoined his men and is hellbent on finding his adversary, Aufidius, who is holed up in the battered hotel.

The first shot tracked Ralph and his troops as they moved cautiously — guns at eye level — up the lobby’s winding staircase. At times Ralph would ask the head of the SAJ unit whether his angles were right or the spacing between the soldiers was authentic. As the crew told me, one of the many great things about working with the SAJ is that they don’t need to be told how to carry out any of the manoeuvres – it is all natural to them. And Ralph’s training with them obviously paid off as he was able to mirror their impressive economy of movement.

At the top of the staircase the troops fanned out and the camera followed Ralph as he edged round a pillar into what initially seemed like an empty clearing. As he moves from behind the pillar, in search of his nemesis, enemy soldiers emerge from the darkness and smoke. First one, then two, three, four, until there was are a crew of guerrilla fighters, ready to tear into the ‘Roman’ General.

The Volscians glower at the scourge of their tribe but know that Coriolanus is worthy only of Aufidius’ sword/gun. Ralph imperiously walks into the clearing, anticipating a confrontation with his greatest foe. And at this moment of stasis, Aufidius emerges from the smoke and pillars, proud and hungry – ‘the lion Coriolanus is proud to hunt’. The two lock eyes. There is a tense beat. Martius, with throaty disgust, sounds the opening volley:

“I’ll fight with none but thee, for I do hate thee.”

Aufidius responds with equal disdain:

“We hate alike.”

This image was taken by Larry Horricks.

Theirs is an exclusive pact. And as with many of the most famous military tacticians in history, the defeat of the enemy is of almost secondary importance to the manner in which they achieve it. For these two old school warriors nothing can better proving themselves in front of their men in one to one combat.

In the manner of a ritual the two unpeel their military garb (cf. the sexual undertones implicit in Shakespeare’s original) and guns until they are free of all appendages bar their knives, which they initially place on the floor. A couple of takes experiment with snapping up the knives using different film speeds. It is something the team do across the two days in order to give the audience the chance to clearly perceive the moves or to whisk them into the action.

They stalk each other, lunging, parrying, before locking horns. It is vicious. They are like bulls, or sea lions butting heads, angling their large frames for advantage, heads interlocked until they are like a two-headed monster. In between takes the two psych themselves up with gutteral cries resembling those of furious Kodiak bears. Anger, hatred, aggression, passion, adrenaline and fear escaping in some kind of war rattle summoned from the depths.

The team worked and reworked the fight, shooting from various angles, developing the intensity and working on the physical locks and movements. By the end of the day the two figures cut stark silhouettes against the fading light and ghostly smoke. They moved with a kind of brutish elegance, strangely bringing to mind the swans of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake pirouetting through the smoke above the lake.

A key factor in creating the tense atmosphere was the smoke. One of the SFX guys had made an improvised smoke ‘gun’ which he ‘fired’ all over set throughout the two days. The ghostly atmosphere and apocalyptic setting reminded me of a space used at the end of Full Metal Jacket:

The day’s shoot was over but in the evening I fulfilled a long held ambition when Ralph’s driver, Cedomir, and some of his friends, took me to a Red Star Belgrade football match. Serbian football fans are notoriously vociferous. As a big football (soccer) fan I am always keen to go to games abroad so I was particularly lucky that my stay coincided with the Serbian Cup Final. The team didn’t disappoint (Red star won 3-0) and neither did the fans

Cedomir told me that Serbian fans often vent their political frustration by singing and chanting about corrupt politicians. Of course, this kind of popular political engagement reminded me of the scenes of protest outside the parliament, and the constant struggle between Coriolanus and the masses. While the thought of fans in the US or UK voicing their political discontent at stadiums seems alien, in Serbia the intense involvement of the fans seemed to bespeak a deeper tribalism and an admirable sense of political agency among the people. No wonder the Coriolanus team considered shooting scenes in one of the local football stadiums.

Red star fans in full voice:

Choreographed support (the Red Star fans pride themselves on uniquely combining the noise levels of the Greeks, the ‘props’ of the Italians and the choreography of the Turks):

And I had to include this clip of Red Star basketball fans as I’d never imagined noise like it at a basketball game:

Check back in soon when I’ll be breaking down my second day on set, the incredible stunt (“there will be blood”, Rowley told me), and the thoughts of Hair and Makeup Designer Daniel Barker, and Production Designer Ricky Eyres.