Catching Bullets In Your Teeth: Choreographing a Gun Fight

In the late 19th Century, there were a handful of magicans that went around the Western United States from Bar to Saloon to Tavern showing off his amazing speed and skill the deadly “Bullet Catch Trick.” To do this, he would have a member of the audience come up and fire a six shooter at him. Rather than being killed by the gun, the performer would catch each bullet between his teeth, spitting out a slug as proof of his feat. (Yes, for you Karate Kid fans out there, this is a lot like a coked-up version of the ‘catch-fly-with-chopsticks’ scene!)

Of course, as I’m sure you know, he wasn’t really catching bullets with his teeth. Instead, he would place a stooge in the audience who would be armed with a blank-loaded six shooter. The performer would keep six bullets in his mouth, spitting out one after each shot was supposedly “caught” in his teeth. For one such magician (whose name has been lost to obscurity), this act went along pretty well until, at one saloon, where folks were a little too drunk, one patron stood up in the middle of the demonstration, yelled, “let’s see you catch my bullet!” and fired his own live six shooter at the man. Fortunately for the performer, the combination of forewarning and the drunkenness of the patron allowed him to avoid the bullet’s deadly trajectory. After that, I believe he chose a different career. Which was fortunate, as most bullets were made out of lead in those days, so carrying a passel of them in your cheek was probably a bad idea for your continuing health. (Not all magicians performing this trick were so fortunate. In 1880, Magician Raoul Curren had an audience member stand and fire without warning, ending both his career and his life in one shot.)

This story illustrates two very important things about gunfight choreography:

1. It’s not what your audience is actually seeing, it’s what they THINK they’re seeing
2. Make sure that all necessary precautions are taken so your performers don’t end up dead

To start in reverse order, the second admonition is not a retelling of the Brandon Lee tragedy, because, if you’re the sort of filmmaker who wants to add action elements to your film, you’re probably already very familiar with the tragedy from the Crow. (No matter your budget, remember to have someone elected as armorer to check weapons before and after each and every session to make sure they stay safe throughout the shoot for this, even if you’re not using any blank firing guns)

No, it’s a reminder that, wherever you will be rehearsing and filming your choreography needs to be a secure environment surrounded by people who know what you’re doing. The greatest tragedy you can imagine would be if you shoot a scene in a non-secured location and an unknowing third party believes they’re witnessing an actual crime and decides to get involved with an actual firearm. This could be a police officer, a common citizen, or a criminal. Who it is doesn’t matter nearly as much as the fact that you don’t want any of your actors hurt or killed working on your film. So, take the extra steps to make sure you have people working security and that you have permission to be wherever you’re at! (And, as our recent articles have mentioned, don’t forget to look at not just asking permission from the local police, but actually hitting them up to be in your film and/or to work security. On Day 419, we ended up having everyone from local cops to one of our district attorneys on camera and helping to keep the set secure!)

Now on with the main point of this article: What the audience THINKS it’s seeing.

While this article isn’t about filming the gun fight, you definitely need to think through how you’re going to shoot your gun fight. Try to think through the logic of your shots as they will be presented to your audience and you will more easily be able to tell an interesting tale that your audience will be able to understand. (Perhaps the easiest cinematographic rule of thumb to keep in mind when you’re choreographing is that the bullet trail is going to create the axis of action between two characters, or, when two characters are shooting at one another, you need to keep your camera consistently on one side of those bullet paths if you want to cut back and forth in an understandable way.)

So what do we need to know about gun fiight choreography?
Well, you must first realize that, like the first karate masters, you are creating a dance of destruction.

In 1610, Japan seized Okinawa, declaring, like the Borg, that “Resistance was futile” and taking away most of the rights of the Okinawans, including the right to have weapons or train in martial arts. The martial arts that would become karate were therefore taught to villagers largely in the form of kata—which are dances that hide an elaborate and brutal fight system within them. Like all good dances (and stories), there is a beginning, a middle, and an end.

In a gunfight, the beginning often revolves around someone getting the upper hand on someone else or everything going to crap. In this area, you often (but not always) will have a first casualty in the form of an unknown crewman or thug who will be taken so much by surprise that he will block a bullet with his face or chest. (Neither of which is a very good place to block a bullet, it might be added!)

From here, you will often have the rest of your people scatter and take cover. As they get into shelter, we enter into the middle of the gun fight. This is the period where your warring factions are firing at one another with limited risk, as they will rise from cover only long enough to fire a few short bursts, either as an actual attack attempt or to distract their opponents so someone else can get the jump on them. This is the part where you either have a lot of shots ring off into the distance (ala most westerns) or, if you’ve put your gunfight in a home, tea house, or warehouse, lots of stuff blowing up (ala John Woo and Michael Bay). Invariably the middle portion of a gun fight is about weeding down the number of competitors as much as possible (because, as we mentioned earlier, not breaking the 180 degree rule can be a nightmare if too many people are left alive). If you started with a singular protagonist, then this is his/her time to show the audience what a hardcore guy/girl he/she is.

(Okay, we’re going to stop being politically correct. I’m just going to use the masculine pronoun from here on out, with the full understanding that a gunfighting protagonist can certainly be a woman, and, in most cases, probably SHOULD be a woman. After all, guys like chicks with guns and feminists who would never watch a male gunslinger will often be supportive of a strong female action hero, so long as she’s not two-dimensional and doesn’t seem cast due to her bust size.)

If you started with a group of protagonists, then you’ll either be killing off the other characters or wounding them so they’re taken out of the battle. (Of course, another thing you can do, is to have multiple action sequences going off in different areas, so you can cut between them. This can give you more leeway to not kill or incapacitate too many of your protagonists. The Stallone film, The Expendables, did this quite effectively in the final battle.)

The antagonists will be slowly killed off, starting with the stupidest ones first and then working your way up to the smartest ones.

This brings us to the ending. The ending is almost always between only two people (although it’s perfectly acceptable to have them fight to a stale mate and have a third person tip the scales, as we did in Day 419 and as we’ve seen in bigger budgets movies like the aforementioned film, The Expendables). If the fight is an early battle in an overarching film, then the ending usually involves both parties getting away with their lives (such as the early gunfight between Sean Archer and Castor Troy in Face/Off, even though that battle does involve Troy going into a coma, he got out of it alive which paves the way for a later battle). If it’s the final fight in the film, then, unless you’re really telling an unusual story, the antagonist has to die.

Ideally, the antagonist will die due to either a moral flaw on his part or, conversely, due to a well-crafted mental realization on the part of the protagonist. For an example of the former, one need only to look at another John Woo film, Hard Target. Because the villain assumes that homeless people are sub-intelligent, his arrogance gives the homeless protagonist the needed opening to kill him. For an example of the latter, we can look at the trippy action/fantasy, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, where the main character realizes he must overcome his own need to be self-sufficient and much reach out to his ex-girlfriend to defeat the main villain. (For a non-action example of the protagonist realizing something that turns a “battle” around, Rounders—the movie that did for Texas Hold’Em what Swingers did for swing music—features a great finale between Matt Damon’s character and John Malkovitch’s character, where Damon’s character finally realizes what Malkovitch’s “tell” is.)

You can also combine the two of these. In Day 419, our lead protagonist, Jenna, is the woman whom the battle occurs over and she isn’t immediately seen as an action lead in this fight. As her assailant, Rockland, sees her as no threat, he ignores her to focus on her protectors, Flanagan and Fitch. We introduced Rockland’s moral failing earlier in the scene: his arrogance, especially in relation to women. On the flip side, Jenna has survived a brutal future that she was never “supposed” to survive and she struggles with a death wish. Despite this, in the midst of the fight, she begins to come to grips with some of her own demons, including self-forgiveness over her actions in betraying her mentor, which opens up some of the memories she had repressed. Her clarified memory in the stress of the fight allows her to gain the courage to get involved and to finally treat her protectors with the trust they deserve. Once she does that, she is able to turn the tide of the battle, providing Fitch the opening he needs when she enters the fight from an unexpected location. So, in the end, Rockland’s death is due both to his hubris, but also due to a clarified understanding of reality happening to the main protagonist.

Because gunfight choreography is essentially about putting people in an environment that is interesting both to the gunfight and to your story, the individual choreography of every gun fight is going to change pretty heavily depending on your needs. As such, the best way I know to showcase the thought process is to give you a case study. In this case, I’ll go through the steps we arrived at for the choreography of Day 419.

However, before I go into that, I want to put in a little list for you to keep in mind as we move forward, as these are rules of thumb to consider. (As with all things, once you know the rules, if it suits your story needs, you can break them.)

MFM’s Five Commandments of Action Gunfight Choreography

1. Always have more antagonists than protagonists.
   
   
2. Always make sure that most of the best and/or most powerful guns are in the hands of the antagonists.
   
   
3. Always look for environments which will contribute to taking interesting damage AND provide interesting deaths for your characters. (There’s a reason why Mortal Kombat has always offered “Stage” fatalities!)
   
   
4. Never have children as fatalities in a gunfight. While the death of a child can kick off a gun fight, children dying in the midst of a gunfight can make a gun fight feel like a war or horror film and really take people out of an action film mindset. (Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with a child being endangered by a gun fight, as we’ve seen in many films, most stylistically, of course, in Face/Off. However, as we’ve mentioned before, shooting with children and/or animals in any film adds a lot problems to making your days. So, unless there’s a REALLY, really good reason for kids to be involved, it’s probably better just to pass on them altogether!)
   
   
5. Always take your actors to an actual gun range and practice with real firearms before shooting, regardless of how much experience they say they have. It will change how they handle their guns in the scene! (Asking people about their past experience with guns is like asking people about their sexual prowess. Expect that, on one hand,t there is a good chance that they’ll be lying to save face and, on the other hand, that they probably picked up some bad habits that you don’t want to be in the final product. Only seeing them in action will tell you what you’ll need to work on.)

With that out of the way, we’ll break down the choreography of Day 419.

The Backstory:
Our lead character (Jenna Whitmore) has a special talent that makes her a unique commodity in the post-apocalyptic World of Depleted. Because of her talent, her employer (Fitch) takes her and her bodyguard (Andre) with him to a meeting with an old client (Rockland). Shortly before they arrive, Jenna reveals that she’s going to be leaving Fitch’s service, a revelation she realizes she has to make, even though she’s fairly confident that Fitch will kill her because of it. During the later meeting, Rockland figures out what Jenna’s talent is and decides to steal her from Fitch himself. At first it looks as though Fitch will let himself be paid off, since Jenna was going to leave anyway. However, we see that this is a ruse on Fitch’s part and that, although Jenna doesn’t trust her boss due to her own psychological damage, he really does care for her and will risk his own life for her.

The Setup:
Our protagonists [Fitch, Jenna, and Andre] enter the warehouse to find that our 3 antagonists [Rockland (center), a bearded bodyguard (stage left), and a clean shaven bodyguard (stage right)] are already in place. A long table is in between the protagonists and antagonists. The warehouse is full of boxes of half rummaged junk and is supported by square, concrete pillars.

Due to an undisclosed condition Jenna has, even though she is armed, she is essentially a non-combatant, which puts the number of fighters automatically at 3-to-2 in favor of the antagonists. To further stack the deck, Rockland has an extra goon hiding in the shadows at the rear of the warehouse with a pump shotgun (the most powerful weapon in play, since everyone else is armed with pistols). So now, we’ve got 2-to-1 odds in favor of the bad guys and they’ve got superior fire power. Now, we move on to the actual choreography. (Notice the picture below that shows the start of our scene.)

The Choreography:
In addition to my other metaphors, it can be useful to think of the beginning of a gunfight in a similar manner to moves in a paper role playing game, where first one group of combatants can attack with their opponents reacting, and then switching the sides, their opponents attack and the original combatants react. While you can switch this up, it adds a certain symmetry to a gunfight that reinforces the dance of destruction notion I brought up before if it’s thought of in this manner. (For us, because the protagonist is very cerebral, we make some of these concepts very literal, so, in the midst of the fight, the world slows down and she hears a music box waltz from her childhood. Our sound effects were specifically designed to play through this music as though they were underwater, to add to the dreaminess and dance of the fight itself. This is one of the reasons to be thinking about how you plan to edit and present your fight in your final film, even when you’re choreographing it!)

Fitch begins the fight by pushing Jenna to the ground and whirling (ala Chow Yun Fat in Hard Boiled) to fire his .45 caliber 1911A1 pistol at Rockland. He misses and the round impacts a support pillar near Rocklands head, causing Rockland to try to run toward stage right. Meanwhile Andre pulls out both of his 9mm Beretta M9 pistols and fires wide. (It was important to us that such an unaimable shot was there only for distraction and not with any chance of him hitting anyone. Keep in mind that audience suspension of disbelief only goes so far so “bank” that disbelief for a cool and crucial situation, rather than blowing it on a silly cliché!) His left bullet smashes into a table leg near in front of Rockland’s current heading and causing Rockland to run in the opposite direction (stage left), while Andre’s right bullet hits a crumbling wall near where the clean shaven bodyguard is stationed, spewing out dust that flows along the ground to blow past Jenna as she ducks under the table. Because of his reflexes and the element of surprise, Andre gets one more “attack” during his initial part of the fight. He pulls both of his guns together and fires them through the chest of the clean shaven guard as he drops beneath the cover of the table. One guard is now dead.

Rockland fires backward as he runs for cover (stage left), passing by the bearded bodyguard who is now moving from stage left towards from our protagonists. The bearded bodyguard moves forward in a military fashion, firing toward Andre’s current cover systematically.

As he’s so intent on killing Andre, whom he sees as the greater threat, the guard fails to notice how close he’s come to Fitch’s hiding spot, allowing Fitch to rise up and fire at him. Fitch’s shot, again, is wide, and impacts another pillar near the man’s head. (While it wasn’t an intentional commentary on part when we were doing the choreography, it is a fact that the amount of recoil powerful handguns have often leads to missed shots, which is why the .45 1911A1 was replaced by the 9mm M9 as the U.S. Army’s official sidearm.) The bearded bodyguard whirls on Fitch and fires as Fitch ducks back behind the table, his round just missing Fitch and impacting the rear retaining wall. In the bodyguard’s distraction, he can’t refocus before Andre rises up and fires twin shots through his chest and neck, leaving a spray of blood across a pillar as he falls to the ground. Two guards are now dead.

At this point, the shotgun body guard (called "Bitch" on the layout graphic due to the fact that this is the slang term for pump shotguns) from the rear of the building makes himself known, firing at our protagonists as Andre ducks beneath the table once more. The 12 gauge blast knocks free some of the ceiling materials above Nash. The guard then ejects his shell and hides behind a pillar. We elected NOT to have our protagonists waste bullets firing blindly at the shotgun guard at this point. (It’s a post apocalyptic world, after all. Bullets are precious!)

As Rockland hunkers down in a hiding spot on stage left, the shotgun guard moves forward and fires again, his shot lower this time and blowing some of the junk on the table into bits, with debris raining down on Jenna’s shoulders. The guard ejects his round and again, hides behind another pillar. As he steps out from behind the pillar, Andre rises to shoot him as he did the bearded guard, but he mistimes his rise so that the guard is able to fire his shotgun first, winging Andre in the left shoulder. As the guard rechambers a new round quickly, Andre rolls with the impact on his shoulder and fires his right hand gun. The round scores on the bodyguard, who falls backward while firing the shotgun one last time. The shotgun blast blows a hole in the ceiling and dust and debris flood the scene dramatically.

Amidst the debris, Rockland decides to make his escape, so, firing two more shots blindly, he runs for the door.

This essentially ends the gun fight choreography for this film, because, although two more shots are fired in the film, they are accentuations of a knife fight, rather than the continuation of a gunfight.

(However, as they relate to the earlier killing portions I foreshadowed previously, I’ll give you the cliff notes version. The conclusion of the scene involves Fitch body checking the fleeing Rockland into a wall of boxes before Rockland can make it to the door. In the resulting fight, Fitch loses his gun which opens up the knife/fist fight between the two characters. This goes on for several minutes while Jenna is torn with fighting with her own demons. The fight is starting to go badly for Fitch when Jenna finally overcomes her own fear and fires her gun into the foray. The shot provides the crucial distraction Fitch requires to stab Rockland in the gut with his bowie knife, ending the overall fight scene. You can see the ending locations of all the characters in the included image below.)

Now that you’ve heard how we set up the choreography for Day 419, it seems only logical for you to see how it came together in the final edit. As such, I’ve included the last part of Day 419 in video format for you to watch below. (If you’d like to see the entirety of this film, you can go to the World of Depleted YouTube page and watch it in its four part serial layout for free, or you can also rent it as a single film with no ads or interruptions for $0.99 here.)

We hope this article has provided insight on how you too might wish to “catch bullets in your teeth” by exploring gunfight choreography ! I would challenge you to go through and watch some of your favorite gunfight films with new eyes, looking for the beats and the turns that are part of the ballet of destruction. (In addition to the ones I’ve mentioned, consider the ones in Equilibrium, as well.)

If you'd like to see more of what we're doing with the World of Depleted Creative Community, find out how you can get involved, or get ahold of the uncut gunfight footage from Day 419 to re-edit yourself, join us in the World of Depleted Contributor Inner Cloister.

As I conclude, I’d like to give special thanks to Jay Kerr (Day 419’s choreographer), Gabe Kinderknecht (the armorer), and all the talented people on Day 419 who enabled us to do what we did! I really can’t express my gratitude enough!

The director of two feature length films and half a dozen short films, Jeremy Hanke founded Microfilmmaker Magazine to help all no-budget filmmakers make better films. His first book on low-budget special effects techniques, GreenScreen Made Easy, (which he co-wrote with Michele Yamazaki) was released by MWP to very favorable reviews. He's curently working on the sci-fi film franchise, World of Depleted through Depleted: Day 419 and the feature film, Depleted.

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