'Mulan' Director and Cast Break Down a Fight Scene

This one never stopped, never asked to take a break,

never said she couldn't do anything.

At the end of that day it was just, it was clear

we'd found her, we had literally found Mulan

after over a year of searching everywhere

around the world.

Hi Vanity Fair, I'm Nicki Caro and I'm

the director of Disney's Mulan.

Hi, I'm Liu Yifei and I play Mulan.

Hi, my name's Yoson An, and I play Honghui.

[ALL] This is Notes On A Scene

Whoa

You're saying this like you've never seen the movie

This scene is the first time we see Mulan,

who is known as Hua Jun in this part of the movie,

fight with Honghui. Both of them are conscripts

in a training camp.

Right before this scene Mulan has to contend with

both being in disguise as a man, but mostly

not being able to show the strength she has.

In order to maintain her disguise,

she has to disguise all of herself.

And so we enter this scene with all the conscripts

gathered for a training session.

In terms of the movie, we are in the middle of China,

the vast country of China, but to shoot this scene

we were in New Zealand, in a beautiful place called

the Ahuriri Valley. It was also the location for

our epic battle scene once and a number of other

smaller scenes in the movie.

The first shot involves a very big crane shot.

It starts off in a high wide and you see all

the conscripts gathered below.

Then the crane descends and moves

along a track really fast, then has to

come to a sudden stop, and the crane

telescopes out into the action and

finds these two sparring.

[Yoson] Me picking a fight with Mulan

[Nicki] Yeah, you enjoying it very much,

all I remember from that shot

Yeah

Was the sound of all the guys

hanging off the crane trying to stop it

in time to telescope out between.

I think we rehearsed this scene for like

three months. You did a really good job with that.

Thank you, you too

Oh thanks

[Nicki] I mean a sequence like this is

a long time in the planning, it gets written first,

and then the stunt coordinator comes in and,

with two stand-ins, works out the action, and then

he brings it to me and I work on it as well,

editing it, and then we hand over to you guys

Yeah

So that you learn the particular moves,

and of course both of you had stunt doubles

Yeah

In this scene, but you do a lot of

your own work as well.

A sequence like this is made of so many

different shots, and its shot by two units

over a period of its either two or three days

Yes yes

I love this, now it's serious this is

a girl that hasn't wanted to put

a spotlight on herself in any way,

but now she is all emotion

Yeah

And she's burst and he, on the other hand,

having a brilliant time, which just

pisses her off.

We're going Yes! Bring it!

Yeah

To be honest, even though my character,

Honghui, was getting his ass beat,

I shouldn't say that, even though he was getting whooped

by Mulan, I feel like he was still

having a good time, until she was like

no I can't show too much.

Yeah, but as far as your character is concerned

here this is just another guy right?

Yeah yeah

A guy that he is forming a friendship with,

and enjoying being around and cared

and who actually has all of these crazy skills

that he hadn't shown anybody

Yeah just out of the blue

You did that right?

Yeah

Yifei, that's actually Yifei's strong

balletic background making it possible

for you to put your leg back but

Oh that wasn't that bad because

that wasn't all the way so

Right

And it's a kick so you don't have to like stay there

Yeah yeah yeah yeah

And this is where Mulan starts to lose control,

but we also see how much control she has over her body,

so emotionally she's losing control,

but physically she's showing everybody what she's got

and you can see

I like their reactions so cute!

And you can see these guys are

Let's draw little mustaches on those!

Oh no no no no oh Cricket

I'm gonna draw a little mustache on Cricket

We start to see by the reactions of the guys,

first of all they're laughing because

you're getting your ass kicked

Yep

But then they are kind of contending with

Hua Jun's power, and that's a little

confusing for some of them, particularly

the ones who aren't very bright.

When we prepare for a sequence like this,

it's not just preparing the choreography, but

preparing the bodies, and the minds,

and the stamina of the people that are

going to be doing the work.

So these two and the other guys who you see in the scene

were in physical training, intense physical training,

for three months.

Yes, or longer actually

Right, do you want to talk about that Yoson?

I think we, on top of stunt training,

which was maybe two to three hours a day

For you two to three hours? Not for me

Oh so you were better than him?

I was longer!

You were longer? Oh.

Sorry to interrupt please continue

We went through some other training, we did

strengthening conditioning on top of that,

which got us into that warrior spirit.

What you see here is really through our training.

Yeah, it means you guys can walk on to set

and be really well prepared, not just physically

and not just with your cog- with the choreography,

but critically emotionally prepared.

Yeah yeah yeah

They can drop in from the 21st Century

True

to Ancient China

This is actually a very complicated sequence to shoot,

because it requires two actors, two stunt doubles,

three cameras, pretty much three camera positions,

so we are looking this way of course, to Mulan,

we're looking this way to Honghui, and we're

we've got the camera kind of traveling

very quickly down the track behind these spears

which is this really kind of amazing

graphic and strobe-y image.

And it means it's possible for me to

use your stunt double, Yashei, in one of those shots,

and that is Yashei on camera, but because

we've got the strobing of the spears

in the front of the lens we totally get away with it.

When you're scheduling a scene like this,

as much as I would've liked to do all of it,

in the main unit, my schedule only

allows me to be shooting the actors, not the

stunt people so its almost like, sort of,

embroidery, trying to get all the shots correct

and have two units shooting the same size shot

with different performers in the same lighting conditions

over two days, which is really difficult

as we know in New Zealand,

because the weather changes so much.

Here we go, oh still enjoying yourself Yoson,

[Yoson] Yeah yeah

But not for too much longer.

This is an interesting move because this is where

you see male strength like get the spear in there

and just like kick the spear out of her hands,

and she's having none of it.

The rhythm is so good, the rhythm is telling the mood

And all of that is worked out like months before

we keep refining it and keep refining it,

so when we get on set and we've only got

a certain amount of hours to do our work,

that we're not going 'oh what if we did this

or what if we did this'

this movie was not made like that.

[Yoson] Look at how focused she is

She's yeah and you too my friend

I'm like 'what's she gonna throw at me next?'

[Nicki] Yeah so now it's very very intense between them,

and you can see from the reactions of our other guys here,

good, doing well, possibly,

not quite looking at the right place,

but it's okay

[Yoson] Is he looking at the camera?

He might be but points off, this one very good.

And a lot of those are stunt people,

they're our kung-fu masters, and then additionally

there are a bunch of extras.

In this scene there was about a hundred I think.

This movie is very costume driven.

Costume is incredibly important in this part of the movie

because we're talking about all the guys

coming to training camp and starting to learn

how to wear armor. This is your practice armor right?

This is it's a lot lighter than the actual armor.

There's the shoulder piece here,

and then there's a chest piece,

and then there's also the one that guards the quads,

but also

And then you've got the wrist guards

Oh yeah

This is connected to here this is connect

to here that's how they wrap it

Yeah

The first time we took 40 minutes to put it on,

the last time past it's getting faster but still

taking about an ho- half an hour

It takes a while but it looks really good

Yeah it looks good

And also you can't hear through remember this,

this takes a while too

And that's really, that was genius,

our costume designer, Bina Diageler,

came up with this idea because, of course,

all men in that time had really long hair,

therefore it went up in a top-knot,

to make wigs for the hundreds of people

we needed to make wigs for was,

it just wasn't a possibility,

so these head wraps became a part of the costume,

with a little like a little cup underneath.

It was like a straw cup to emulate the hair bun

I have a real one, yeah

You've got a real top-knot, and you guys had wigs

Yes

Underneath those but everybody else had the head wear.

Even though this movie is an action movie,

and the action's explosive and it's very raw,

and very visceral, it was also as important, to me,

to make a movie that was very beautiful.

Like, photographically, beautiful.

Along with the stunning landscapes,

we have a production design that has

both the incredibly and intensely colorful imperial city

when Mulan gets dressed for the match maker,

it's really gorgeous, but then, when Mulan goes to war

in the middle of the movie, we go into

this very sort of monochromatic environment,

and the predominant color there is red.

You can't see this so well here under the practice armor

but the tunic is red and it makes for really

kind of graphic, stylized images.

I love the red because I think it's

really in line with love, passion, and this strongness.

Everyone came from their respective villages, right,

and I think going into this world,

where everyone's dressed the same way,

dressed in the same red way, that brings a certain energy,

and as you both said it brings a certain passion,

in terms of bringing everyone together for the same mission.

It is all about making everybody look the same,

you know when you go into the army whatever army it is,

and the interesting thing is that in amongst

these thousands of men is this one young woman,

and she manages to disappear within them,

but is seen like this, where she shines a spotlight

on herself, exposes her to potentially being found out,

yet she can't be anything but true to herself

and her emotions you can really see this here.

A: what an amazing still here, amazing performance,

and a lot of this movie is shot on really long lenses,

and so you see Yifei in focus and everybody else,

who are quite close to her, out of focus behind her.

And we, this is a lens called a Pittsburgh lens,

our favorite lens

it really kind of radically softens the outside,

bringing all of your focus into the inside of the frame.

And most of the way we frame stuff was to frame

Mulan, Yifei, like right at the center,

so we would always use this lens on you,

and it, only in very very extraordinary circumstances

did we ever shoot anybody else with that lens

because it was all yours.

You know standing on the side, in front of the camera,

most of the time I couldn't actually see where

the camera was, because it was so far away,

because the lens was so far you know.

It's a good point Yoson, because being on the

longer lenses means the actors can perform

and feel very free

I remember that saying when I need to ride a horse

we would have a group of people ride a horse together

forward on that road on one road and

I'm like there's no camera!

Are we on a film set?

It's a 2800ml lens its about as big as you

CJ's there you know rolling

and then I see him eventually and he's like

'cause its a low low how do you say

low shot?

Low angle

Low angle yeah and its ahh there it is

We had two lenses built, one of which,

the other special one, a 58ml lens gouse lens,

which had a what you call a chromatic apparition

in it, which will distort the shot so there's

almost like little rainbows little flarey rainbows

in it and what we were trying to do was

express Mulan's chi her power,

and this lens did it for us.

So you see how much the, how much distortion is here,

how much softness here.

But the focus is really

I think this is the only shot right,

in this sequence, that was on a wire,

so that she could leap high and then

we pan back to your startled face.

And here you see Mulan as Hua Jun realize what she's done,

she's put a spotlight on herself.

With this movie we tried very hard to

keep off wires - a lot of martial arts movies

employ a lot of wire work but for us,

particularly for Mulan who's not a superhero,

we wanted to ground the action somewhat

in the laws of physics, and so for me it was like

the beauty of seeing a strong female body in action.

When you are on a harness, sometimes,

it feels like oh they're helping you right,

because they're controlling you,

but I feel like our method is I have to just do

the exact move, don't think about the wire,

and just to be you, so there is actually a part

of your body actually so that way I feel like

I can come to the balance better,

and knowing where and when to land,

and knowing which direction I'm going.

So the lines are up there right,

that's the one where it's wrapped right?

So one wire, and then they wrap it so that you spin?

So basically use this leg and do a little pull off,

and then its that kind of move.

Yeah and all the wire does is just get some elevation,

but the force, the explosive force of body,

is coming right through the hips.

And you also have ballet so, it meant, for me,

even though we had an amazing stunt double

for Yifei, often we would ask for Yifei,

rather than the stunt double because in her body

she has tremendous grace that goes with the strength,

and incredible extension. 'Cause what she would do

sometimes when we went off the choreography,

was more instinctive and more beautiful.

When we practiced real martial arts

you're trying to hit that person,

to take that other person down,

but here I learnt that you have to make sure

you don't hit the other person, at all.

Where I turned around, this part,

I struggled with this move so much,

I think I did it we shot it like five times,

I don't know something like that,

I finally got it on the sixth take,

and everybody clapped 'cause it was like

a big achievement for me just to get that move.

We had to make sure we worked together

on this particular scene because

the edge of my spear was on Yifei's wrist

and I didn't want to, you know

Oh right you don't want to, yeah

I didn't want, exactly yeah because

you know these are real weapons we're playing with so

Yeah, they did have rubber tips though,

just so everybody's

Yeah yeah yeah of course

I guess one of the big surprises, certainly for me,

was how easily I came to action sequences.

I really love them I love everything about them,

from the writing of them to the designing of them,

and the constant kind of refinement of them in

the planning stage. You know, there's a way

to shoot them where you just, which is how

action sequences which is just with a lot of coverage,

just coverage coverage coverage,

so you've always got that moment,

and then there's the way we approach them.

But what Mandy and I were doing with the camera

was really explosive.

In other sequences we are kind of turning the camera

180, 360 degrees in the middle of the shot,

we're tipping the frame up on it's side,

we're doing all kinds of joyous and expressive things

with the camera that just literally came out of

the sheer joy of being able to do it,

and being able to play with these big toys.

I had worked for Disney before, I made a movie

called McFarland USA, and they knew that I was

a stalking fan of Mulan,

so they let me in the door,

and it turned out that my vision for the live action

version of Mulan, which is a huge,

very real epic action adventure movie,

was exactly what they were hoping

a director would come through the door and provide.

Thanks very much Vanity Fair!

We hope you enjoy Mulan!

This has been Notes On A Scene