'RAHANA' Written and Directed by Suchet Budon
The story of a Delhi University Professor who comes to the UK for a 4 day holiday that turns into a Hellish nightmare of suspense, intrigue and drama. RAHANA is a labor of love for me. I wanted to create a cross between a Hollywood suspense horror with a Bollywood plot involving lovable characters. To make things believable I left the characters to use their natural languages in their scenes, to make it more believable. There two main languages Hindi and English and some Spanish. There are lots of long takes, scary scenes, romantic moments, lots of humour and many action and chase scenes. The audience are to jump out of their seats in excitement on seeing this the first time and again on repeat viewings!!! HTTP://rahana-movie.com
The above is a fight scene I have directed and did the cinematography for. The fight moves were choreographed by martial artists David Blake and Phil Mawdsley and the scene features Jimmy Elizaga (as the heroic Padre Armilio Santiago), searching for one of his lost students and coming across three vilains played by Phil Mawdsley, Nathan Levis and Charlotte Askew.
I've been somewhat disappointed with some modern movie fight scenes as they seem to be fast cut and lose that intensity that made fights in the 80s films so brilliant - You can literally compare any Jackie Chan movie fight from the 80s and 90s to any fight scene seen in a movie in the last 10 years and Jackie Chan will always come out on top, it's because he uses long intense takes and wide angle shots which encompass everything and is harder to fool the audience members that way. He rehearses fights heavily and reshoots many times if he has to, to get it right.
To make a fight scene more interesting, there are rules that should be followed, there should be a McGuffin or story device that drives the fight story (here it is a powerful God gun that Padre carries), I believe fights should be attempted in a one take sequence, it is only good to put a cut in if there is a very valid reason for it, because with each cut you are lowering the users belief in the realism of the fight, because subconsciously they will know you have filmed something again or have taken a break or are either hiding an error or speeding something up, which is not good, not good at all.
So strong heavy rehearsals are always important for a fight scene and my fight crew really went that extra mile with the choreography of this fight.
The fight was filmed in single-takes many times and gave me the luxury of putting cuts in only where I wanted them to be in terms of story and drama.