hey everyone welcome to green light so today we're going to be talking about
snake eyes and uh the creator of snake eyes and storm shadow too
as well as going into the stunts of the film so let's get into it right now
i've been a lifelong fan of japanese cinema it's my favorite national cinema so to be here
and shoot a film in all these locations and all across japan is a great honor and it's a
great joy so just being here and being able to do this is a dream come true for me i've been really
lucky i had traveled to japan a tremendous amount my wife used to used to live in tokyo
and so but arriving with an entire crew and now a family uh we get to explore it together and and
some of the locations that we we filmed out were just amazing and and you know the the japanese
government really worked closely with us uh to allow us to film in thousand-year-old temples
and himachi castle being one of the one of the greatest locations um so it gave gave us license
to be really authentic and because japan played such an integral role within the clan it was so
important to get that right snake is and and storm shadow or the you know uh the brother fantasy
and the loyalty fantasy and and all that rolled into one you know they uh
i didn't really have a handle on snake eyes until they introduced storm shadow
when they brought in storm shadow uh i realized oh this is the only asian character in the
entire gi joe universe and he's a bad guy and i said i didn't particularly like that
so i was trying to figure out what i could possibly do about that so i decided okay i'll
i won't tell hasbro but i'll just change him into a good guy over the course of the year in within
the storyline and uh in order to do that i had to establish this relationship between the two
characters and um so in the very first time that they meet in issue number 21 which is silent issue
i got to the middle of the story and they're fighting and both of their sleeves get torn
and i thought wow what can i what can i do with that and i thought i'll give them the same tattoo
uh and i thought well well it should be something that i can remember right so i chose uh hexagram
63 of the e-chain which is the the ancient chinese book of changes which was used uh
for fortune telling in china for like 2500 had no reason idea why they both had it or what it
signified or anything i just put this symbol on on their arms and then four issues later
i had to figure out why and i that's when i re i i decided okay they it's it's the sigil of a
ninja clan is the one you know and that they somehow had both come up to this ninja plan
and then i thought well how how do i set that up and then i came up the back story about them
being in the war together and uh comrades and snake eyes has this horrible tragedy and um
storm shadow takes him into the into the clan i think for for larry when we spoke to him about
um this kind of new take on snake eyes i think he was super excited um you know he he wrote those
comic books a long time ago at a different time um in the world and so for him to be able to truly
um express his creativity with us um i think he he really looked forward to it
i think larry being on board uh definitely gave us kind of the stamp of approval you know
there are long time uh gi joe fans out there and they have a very sort of rigid look at
how each character has sort of developed in things um so to have larry on board uh to be able to
sort of blossom a character's past and and tell of their history uh i think was really important
because you know having the original creator on board you can't deny the fact that perhaps this
is the way that he wanted it in the first place i'm very excited to uh show american audiences
international audiences an aspect of cinema that i don't think is in the mainstream for the most
part uh you know there's a lot of chumbara there's a lot of car action there's a lot of
uh elements that we've drawn out of japanese culture and out of japanese cinema there's
you know we have some yakuza in the film and there's some ningyo ideas in there so we're
playing around with a lot of things that are very specifically japanese and we're trying to get them
right and and i think that will make this film very very special when i read the script
i was very gratified to see that a lot of the
the core stuff about the characters and who they are and how they interact and the integral core
fantasy of that relationship was intact and uh from what i've seen i think you know robert is
really sticking to that that's very good the type of training that we actually went through uh
was predominantly focused on the choreography because through the the fighting and the martial
arts your body changes and your muscles in which you need so you know your fast twitch reaction uh
sitting down in that kind of uh low horse stance for the entire day your your legs soon adapt to it
um but also we did sort of private training so we would have four to five hours of choreography
um every day and then i would go and do like an hour and a half with a private trainer just
to keep my my cardio and my uh my sort of energy levels up um and then we would do like two hours
of script training with um uh with robert so that was our day for pretty much a month and a half to
two months i think through the training uh we all realized a lot about ourselves we knew um
or through sort of kenji and the stunt team's guidance that uh we could do every single thing
that was thrown at us um and so in the beginning where it would take like a whole day to learn a
choreography it would take you know about 30 minutes by the end of the the production to
sort of like relearn and absolutely sort of execute um a sequence flawlessly so
we became a very well-oiled machine and i think not only is it physical but it's it's a mental
task to be able to it's like a dance you've got to remember your muscle sort of motion um
and so yeah by the end of it we really became kind of very much in tune the car
carrier is probably one of the my favorite and biggest sort of um stunt sequences and it took
probably a good week to film all the different little parts from the the motorbike
sort of chase sequences to the the actual choreography on top and below the car carrier
so the fascinating thing was we couldn't have what you would usually have is sort of harnesses with
kind of points of of um sort of safety uh usually you would have kind of
strings or ropes attached to the to the top but with the movement of the swords we couldn't
have anything below anything to the side because it was limit our our sort of motion and so the
what we had to do was was just have crash mats so we would have to fall down off these cars and
onto the carrier and then onto the floor for anything to sort of catch us so it
was a calculated risk because we went through so much training we knew the choreography we
you know we we added sort of grip where where possible um but there's there's a couple of sort
of moments where you know you lose your footing and you're just like wow um but i think it adds
to the the jeopardy of of the scene you know we're we're meant to be hurtling down uh the highway uh
you know 70 miles an hour um and whilst fighting these yakuza sliding in and out of cars and
jumping and and sort of having a sword that was great information coming out of all the
stunts and everything from the film larry hama has a lot of information that he gave away too
just on storytelling so this is very very very informational video today so i'm glad that you
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