If you haven’t seenSpeed Racer, the 2008 big-screen adaptation of the popular, influential anime from filmmakersTheWachowskis(The Matrix), you simply must experience it. It’s a wild, candy-coated fever dream of spectacle, technology, and huge heart. It looks like no other movie you’ve ever seen, I promise you that. And in ourCollider Connectedlive interview conducted by our own Steve Weintraub withDavid Leitch(JohnWick,Deadpool 2) andChad Stahelski(John Wick 1-3), who worked as stunt coordinators, performers, and third-unit directors onSpeed Racer, share some of the wild behind-the-scenes stories of the cult hit.
Leitch and Stahelski had worked with the Wachowskis before, with Stahelski serving as Neo’s double in the firstMatrixand coordinating stunts on the sequels, and Leitch working stunts on both sequels. But this reunion would be a whole different ball game. The film has a curious visual language, in which elements are layered on top of each other, all in focus, creating a hyper-surreal look that mimics the anime it comes from. Four units would be shooting simultaneously, and every scene needed to be covered by all four to achieve every layer. The Wachowskis covered the actors in the first unit, a second unit was used on cars, Stahelski and Leitch covered the third stunt-focused unit, and the visual effects team headed the fourth unit. Put ‘em all together, and that’s one helluva unique-looking picture.
Here’s how Stahelski and Leitch put the logistical challenges with such techniques:
STAHELSKI: Every director had to get together every morning every day and kind of get their shit together and figure out what you’re shooting and work with overlays. I think Dave played eight or nine parts on that in addition to doing all the stunts. You can see Dave in almost every group shot in that thing.
LEITCH: The Wachowskis were trying to do something in the spirit of the animes that they loved that translated cinematically to the screen, and that’s what we really liked about it. And so there’s this 2D/3D popup book element to that that’s really compelling. I don’t think that movie gets enough credit especially for all the love and artistry that went into it on all the departments’ levels. The choreography we did for the ninja fight, or’nonja' fight, was probably some of the most fun we’ve ever had in making a movie.
STAHELSKI: It was film school all over again. Just when you think you know how to do layers and composites, the VFX team brought in a new methodology that we all tried to do. To work that closely again with the Wachowskis going to film school for those six months was pretty… I think most of what David and I know about compositing and doing advanced VFX shots comes from that era.
Even for such pros as these two, working on this film was so eye-opening it felt like “film school all over again,” influencing the two filmmakers for the rest of their careers moving forward.
The two went on to get into the nitty-gritty of the film’s industry-revolutionizing techniques, as it related to the realistic-but-stylistic virtual backgrounds:
LEITCH: The creating of the environments, the worlds that we were in, what they were doing were these camera arrays, which now everybody uses. You go and shoot an array of an environment, like you light our set. They would do that and create a two-dimensional layer so we could basically put the camera everywhere and you had this, what we called a ‘bubble’ of the world. And so they sent that effects unit around the world to get all of these environments and shooting these arrays, and that was really before anyone was using the technology that way. There were so many inventive things that came out of that process.
STAHELSKI: I think they sent a unit to Iceland, to Switzerland, ‘cause I think they were compiling all these different environments to get the bubbles going. Even after we were done with principal photography, there were still units going out and getting bubbles everywhere… I don’t know if we’d ever do it again today if someone wanted to go through that kind of work.
In other words – withoutSpeed Racerthere’s noThe Mandalorian?
For more from our great chat with Leitch and Stahelski, check out their intel onThe Matrix 4andJohn Wick 4. And be sure to look out for the full interview soon.
