SHE’S BRAWL THAT!
How ‘Blonde’ heroine Charlize Theron took down six assailants in one kick-ass scene
‘THEY fight.”
That was pretty much the sum total exposition provided by the “Atomic Blonde” script for a nearly eight-minute orgy of violence that unfolds as if it were a single take.
Here’s hoping the screenwriter wasn’t paid by the word.
The scene, in the new Cold War-era spy flick that early viewers have been talking about, finds Charlize Theron slugging it out with six burly henchmen in a building’s stairwell. She uses her fists, feet and a gun to carve a grueling path through the building.
The bruising sequence is just the latest punch-up for the willowy Theron (after 2015’s “Mad Max: Fury Road”) and adds to her quickly growing rep as one of the biggest badasses on the big screen.
“[Director] David Leitch came to me and said, ‘I’ve always wanted to do a “oner” — a long take of an action [scene],’ ” says Sam Hargrave, the film’s stunt coordinator
and second unit director. “I said, ‘David, that is a terrible idea.’” Hargrave thought extended takes were too trendy (2014’s “Birdman” appeared to be shot in one take), and, logistically, choreographing a scene seemingly without cuts can be a nightmare. He changed his mind when he realized how the technique could immerse the audience in the battle and help viewers appreciate how violent, chaotic and exhausting fights are.
In the film, set in 1989, Theron plays a British spy who’s sent to East Berlin to retrieve a stolen list of double agents. She teams with a loose-cannon operative (James McAvoy) and soon runs afoul of several enemies, including Russian heavies.
The stairwell scene involves Theron rushing into an apartment block in order to reach a sniper who’s got a man she’s protecting in his sights. It was shot in an abandoned building in Budapest, Hungary, over the course of four days.
“Stairs are a fun environment,” Hargrave says. “We did one in ‘Captain America: Civil War’ [on which he was fight and stunt coordinator], but we wanted this one to be more raw, where you felt every blow and every move.”
The filmmakers first choreographed the action, then videotaped the scene to see how it would play. The seven-minute-plus battle was originally two minutes longer, but Theron’s tussle with the final henchman was shortened to give the audience a break.
Theron, who will soon turn 42, trained in martial arts for 2 ¹/₂ months, often at the same gym as Keanu Reeves, who was preparing for “John Wick: Chapter 2.” The two movie stars would occasionally spar.
The actress has said she was initially nervous about fighting convincingly on-screen.
“It was so hard, are you kidding me?” she told an audience at the South by Southwest Film Festival in March. “When I started, I . . . said, ‘This is never going to work. I look like Big Bird.’ ”
She ultimately ended up doing much of her own fighting, and her background as a dancer helped her handle complex choreography without stopping or having the camera cut. That ability gave Leitch the confidence to attempt the stairwell scene. The director has claimed Theron is in the “top 1 percentile” of actors who do their own stunts.
But actually shooting the stairwell fight in one take wasn’t possible because the director wanted to demonstrate the damage being done as the fisticuffs unfolded. Theron’s face was touched up along the way to look more beat up, baddies were given gunshot wounds and spilled blood was added to the stairs, for example.
The cuts were hidden in camera movements and with tech wizardry. Hargrave won’t say how many make up the scene.
“It’ll be a fun game for people to find all the stitches.”