Chapter 264: Guns and Combat

Time marched on. In September, Jeff Robinov flew to Sydney to meet with Duke in person. Soon after, Warner Brothers opened formal talks with Duke Studio regarding the Harry Potter Series. In response, Duke simply sent Tina Fey back to Los Angeles to assist and oversee Nancy Josephson in her negotiations with Warner Brothers.

Meanwhile, after four full months of pre-production and more than three months of cast training, The Matrix officially began principal photography at Fox Studios.

There were no reporters, no special ceremonies, and no chaotic press conferences. The cameras started rolling in a remarkably quiet atmosphere.

Because of the issue with Keanu Reeves's hair, Duke shot all the virtual-world scenes first.

While they could have put Keanu Reeves in a green cap and erased his hair in post-production, that would have driven up costs. Staggering the shooting schedule made far more sense.

With their training fresh and both the leads and the stunt doubles in peak physical condition, Duke jumped straight into filming a heavy slate of action sequences.

"I know you still don't have a clear idea of what this movie is actually about."

Once the crew's departments were almost ready, Duke walked onto the dressed soundstage. As on most Hollywood productions, many of the actors had only their own sides rather than the full script, leaving them with no real grasp of the overarching story. None of that mattered, though.

"All you need to do is get through your scenes and perform them the way I ask. Then you can walk right out of this hell."

The physical workload of their hundred-day training camp couldn't compare to what professional fighters endured, but for these actors, it had been nothing short of physical and mental torture.

"Tiger..."

Duke tilted his head toward Tiger Chen. The martial artist walked over to Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne to run through the fight choreography one last time, while Duke stepped out of the dojo set and took his place behind the camera.

Yuen Woo-ping was helming the camera for this scene. Specialized work naturally belonged in the hands of a specialist.

Having built enough rapport over the past few months, Duke simply gave Yuen Woo-ping a nod and walked over to the monitors. Yuen signaled his assistant, and the clapper loader quickly called action.

Finished Hong Kong martial arts films looked flashy and gorgeous. Whether or not they obeyed the laws of human biomechanics, they were undeniably eye-catching. The actual filming process, however, was anything but pretty. Under Tiger Chen's guidance, Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne fought as if moving in slow motion. Worse, just as Duke had anticipated, neither actor had absorbed even the surface of real kung fu; their strikes were soft, limp, and thoroughly unconvincing.

Still, that fit the virtual-world setting perfectly. Flashy posturing was all Duke wanted anyway. It was a sci-fi movie; no audience was gullible enough to believe real kung fu actually let people fly.

Because the moves in Hong Kong-style action scenes were so intricate, the takes were also far shorter than Hollywood's brawler-style fights. Often, after just ten or so seconds—sometimes only a few—Yuen Woo-ping would call cut and have Tiger Chen correct the two leads' form.

Sitting behind the monitors, Duke simply managed the set as a whole, leaving the camera work for the action scenes entirely to Yuen Woo-ping.

This was arguably one of his greatest strengths. Having lived an extra life didn't necessarily make him superior to the true elites of this world, but his psychological maturity was on another level entirely. He knew he had talent and experience in filmmaking, yet he was no master of everything. If Yuen Woo-ping were asked to direct a full movie on his own, the result might not even match one of Duke's original projects, but when it came to shooting a Hong Kong-style fight scene, the choreographer was unquestionably the better man for the job.

Sitting there, Duke was both watching and learning. Stamped to the bone with the mark of Hollywood, he naturally possessed its instinct to absorb and adapt whatever worked.

Studying others' strengths and making them one's own was something every successful director did constantly.

Of course, Duke wouldn't use these Hong Kong filming methods himself in the future, nor would he ever make a pure kung fu movie.

The first day of shooting covered only choreographed ground moves, but by the second day, scenes involving wirework began appearing in force. Although Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne had gone through a fair amount of training, Duke mandated the use of professional stunt doubles unless a shot explicitly required a front or profile close-up.

The film's shooting schedule was only two and a half months long. If a double had an accident, another could step in. If a lead actor got hurt, filming on that portion of the movie would grind to a halt.

Every single day the crew was delayed burned through hard cash.

After two days of observing the shoot, Duke had to admit that Hong Kong productions had a unique edge when filming bouts like the one between Neo and Morpheus. In fact, they were a full tier ahead of Hollywood, where fight choreography remained formulaic and simplistic. It was no fluke that Hong Kong-style action movies enjoyed a wave of popularity across Hollywood and all of North America around the turn of the century. Yet Hollywood treated the crews as outsiders, and they viewed themselves as outsiders too. For all sorts of reasons, that boom proved all too brief.

Perhaps "one quick thrill before dropping dead" would be the most fitting way to describe the future plight of kung fu films in North America.

Future Hollywood action scenes would carry plenty of echoes of kung fu without actually being kung fu at all. From Batman's blunt, brutal brawling to Captain America's sharp, rapid-fire strikes, it was all Hollywood's own innovation—skimming the surface of kung fu stunt work and fusing it with other combat styles.

Hong Kong cinema's pipe dream of breaking into Hollywood would soon be shattered for good.

Never mind the likes of Jack Chen, Jet Li, and Yuen Woo-ping today—even Bruce Lee, at the absolute height of his glory, never turned kung fu movies into part of the North American mainstream.

It was an intensely insular media market. Even a passing study made it obvious that North American theater chains were completely insulated from more than ninety-nine percent of films from the rest of the world. For Hong Kong cinema, breaking into the North American market was nothing more than a fantasy.

The decline of Hong Kong cinema was unavoidable, and no single person or conglomerate could save it. Setting aside factors outside the industry, ever since Jurassic Park landed in that city, Hong Kong movies had been sliding toward their demise. Once this year's giant ship went crashing across the globe, Hong Kong cinema would have only one road left to take—heading north!

The laughable part was that the provincial fools in that city couldn't read the situation at all: the north didn't need them, yet they desperately needed the north.

Never mind the film industry—without the north's backing, the other industries in that city would soon collapse as well.

Their film industry, in particular, was packed with people blind to how the wind was blowing. Oblivious to the fact that the outside world was advancing every single day, they clung to the pitiful little tricks in their hands, marching in place without any drive to move forward.

During the training and filming of The Matrix, for instance, Duke had more than once overheard the crew speaking in Mandarin—saying they needed to keep their trump-card techniques locked away in reserve...

Did keeping those secrets under wraps actually do any good? None whatsoever!

People in Hollywood didn't need to figure out the deep, intricate subtleties of kung fu. All they needed was the outermost surface—or to put it more bluntly, how to make a fight look lighter, faster, and prettier on camera!

None of that required understanding what kung fu truly was.

Right now, Hong Kong action choreography teams held a crushing advantage over their Hollywood counterparts in that department. If they were willing to adapt proactively—tailoring their work to what North American audiences actually wanted, absorbing the strengths of other combat styles, and designing choreography better suited to the global market before viewers grew tired of kung fu—there was no reason they couldn't carve out a massive slice of Hollywood's action choreography market!

Every kind of discrimination existed in Hollywood, yet there was one thing powerful enough to hold it all down: profit! As long as it brought in cash, Hollywood could treat a Black man as God!

To Duke, the logic couldn't have been simpler. Yuen Woo-ping, however, clearly had no desire to change, and Duke had no intention of reminding him. Their relationship was strictly a business arrangement, and nothing beyond that would ever come of it.

Had this team come from the north, he might have dropped a hint. Since they came from that city, though, forget it.

Hollywood was the business world in miniature: those who could adapt stayed, and those who couldn't were naturally weeded out.

Whenever it came time for the dramatic scenes, Duke took back control of the shoot.

"Laurence!" Sitting behind the camera, he called out to the Black actor who had just finished a test take. "Your expression isn't right! You're Neo's guide, and you firmly believe he's the savior. So when you lead him to understand the real world and the virtual world, you need to come across..."

After a moment's thought, Duke found the right phrasing. "More like a charlatan!"

Philosophical depth and deeper meaning were things for audiences and critics to care about. As far as Duke was concerned, The Oracle in the film was one big charlatan, and Morpheus was a junior charlatan...

"I got it!"

Laurence Fishburne closed his eyes for a moment to think, then said, "I think I've found the groove!"

In complete contrast to Chicago, Duke didn't demand much in the way of acting chops on this shoot. First and foremost, everything had to stay cool—from the actors to the costumes to the set design, it all had to be cool to the bone. Second, it needed to fit the film's premise by showing a touch of mysticism at the right moments without actually turning into an out-and-out charlatan movie. This was a standard commercial film, after all; touching lightly on philosophical depth was more than enough.

"You think I can beat you because I'm faster and stronger than you? Because my muscles are more developed?"

On camera, even without the trench coat and sunglasses, Laurence Fishburne's charlatan air was still cool to the bone.

"Neo, do you need to breathe in here?"

"Cut!"

With Duke's call, the dramatic take was cleared, wrapping up the scenes in the dojo.

Even though kung fu was on display here, the dojo itself looked much more like Japanese architecture. Duke had originally considered an authentic Chinese building, but after a reminder from Robin Grande and the set designer, he dropped the idea.