THE Bus Brawl
THE TRANSIT FIGHT IN NOBODY
WE’VE SEEN BUS fights before in films. But it’s hard to think of any quite as inventive, quite as brutal and quite as painful as the one in director Ilya Naishuller’s hugely enjoyable Nobody. It establishes its action credentials early by having Hutch ‘Nobody’ Mansell, Bob Odenkirk’s former CIA assassin-turned-family man, beat the crap out of some drunk Russian punks who have made their way onto the bus taking him home. It’s a wonderfully choreographed scene which tickles the funny bone and reduces all the others to a fine powder. Here, Naishuller details how he brought the pain.
THE PLAN
The fight would be the first action scene shot for Nobody, and so ambitious that three days (or, more accurately, nights) were set aside to film it. “We knew the film would live or die by the scene,” says Naishuller, who split it into three distinct sections. “The first, there’s nothing deadly happening. The second, they bring out the knives. The third, Hutch comes back in [having been thrown through a window]. It’s a constant escalation.”
THE HERO
Hutch was Bob Odenkirk’s chance to prove himself as an action hero after years of making his name — and fortune — with his mouth. Odenkirk had trained for a couple of years for the role, but it’s perhaps apt that his first sequence was also one in which Hutch, rusty after years of inactivity, gets his ass handed to him before muscle memory kicks in. “That’s the most fun part,” laughs Naishuller. “Having your lead get the shit kicked out of him is so much more fun than seeing somebody cut through 30 guys with a fire extinguisher. And it was super-important to have him be super-rusty. It’s much more memorable because he has an arc in a fourminute scene.”
THE LOCATION
The sequence was shot on a real bus that had been parked on a Winnipeg street. “Very cold, lonely streets,” recalls Naishuller. The bus had been slightly tricked-out. “We switched some seats around to make it suit the areas where we wanted the action to happen. We didn’t do anything crazy, like cut the bus [into sections]. One thought we had was to maybe do an Oldboy situation,” he says, referring to that film’s iconic one-shot hallway fight, “where you follow Bob and it’s gonna look great, but it’s not in the style of the movie.” Just as well — Shang-chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings did just that.
THE GOONS
Daniel Bernhardt, who plays the thug who gets a knife in the arm, was Odenkirk’s trainer for the movie, while Teddy, whose vicious beating sets the film’s plot in motion, is played by actor Aleksandr Pal. The scene ends with Hutch saving Teddy’s life, performing an impromptu tracheotomy with a knife and a straw. “He understands that he overdid it with Teddy,” says Naishuller. “I remember telling Bob, ‘This is pretty much a guy who cheated on his wife, and here’s the post-fight clarity.’ He’s got this look where he’s disappointed in himself. ‘Well fucking done.’”