Directed by James McTeigue and produced by the Wachowskis, Ninja Assassin is the story
of Raizo, an orphan who's recruited into a shadowy clan of ninjas who carry out political
assassinations.
Ninja Assassin didn't do much at the box office when it debuted in 2009, but since then it's
become a cult favorite.
Why?
Here's a look at the untold truth of Ninja Assassin.
It started as a joke
During the filming of Speed Racer, the Wachowskis brought in stunt coordinator Chad Stahelski,
who had worked with them on the Matrix trilogy.
While working on a fight scene that involved Korean pop star Rain, Stahelski had an epiphany,
telling Spire magazine,
"We always kind of had a running joke with the Wachowski[s] about making a kickass ninja
movie.
We told them we found our ninja, and brought Rain in to do a fight sequence […] and everyone
was like 'Holy s***!
This guy is good!'"
Within a few months, that running joke was in production under the title Ninja Assassin.
Rain did his own stunts
Many action flicks rely on stuntmen to do the heavy lifting for big set pieces.
But Ninja Assassin went the other way, as Rain did almost all his own stuntwork, with
very little wire work or special effects.
How?
Well, Rain started by training eight hours a day, five days a week, for eight straight
months in order to pull off both fight sequences and stunts like flipping off of moving cars.
Now that's dedication.
Inventive hardware
Ninja Assassin features one of the coolest weapons ever seen in a martial arts film:
that blade-and-chain thing Raizo uses to hack through mountains of ninjas.
Although you can now buy it on Amazon, it actually didn't exist before Ninja Assassin
— the production team invented it just for Rain.
Sure, chain weapons aren't entirely a new concept, but figuring out the physics of their
modified kyoketsu-shoge required a lot of trial and error before they hit on exactly
the right formula.
And having an all-new type of weapon meant a creative challenge for the fight choreographers,
who worked with Rain to invent a totally unique fighting style.
Chad Stahelski said, "As we went through the training, Rain kept getting better, so we
had to keep re-choreographing.
What we had designed originally, he outgrew by the time we were ready to shoot.
The more Rain's abilities developed, the more our choreography had to evolve."
53 hour script
No movie works without a good story, which is why most scripts are in development for
months.
Then there's the script for Ninja Assassin, which Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski
wrote in just 53 hours flat.
That speed was required because, with just six weeks left until filming was set to begin,
the Wachowskis decided to scrap the script they already had.
According to Straczynski, after the Wachowskis called him, he "went home and put on a pot
of coffee, and…wrote essentially a whole new script in 53 hours.
When a friend calls you and says they're in trouble, you do what you have to do."
Sho Kosugi is a ninja legend
Ninja Assassin's brutal antagonist Ozunu may not be a familiar face to you, but hardcore
fans of ninja films know that he's played by none other than the legendary Sho Kosugi,
who helped kick-start the ninja craze in the '80s with films like Enter the Ninja, Revenge
of the Ninja, and Ninja III: The Domination.
Director James McTeigue decided early that he wanted to cast Kosugi as the villain in
Ninja Assassin as a tribute to those old ninja films, and Kosugi was happy to come out of
retirement to play the part.
The decision certainly worked, as Ozunu is one of the most terrifying movie villains
in recent years.
The orphans were random German kids
Some of the most intense scenes in the movie are the flashbacks involving young Raizo training
with the other orphans under Master Ozunu.
So how did McTeigue populate that mystical dojo?
He just…found some random kids.
Well, sort of.
The movie was filmed in Berlin, so McTeigue went around to all the local martial arts
schools and found a handful of kids who seemed like they knew what they were doing, then
trained them.
In his own Hollywood way, McTeigue grabbed up a bunch of children the same way Ozunu
did in the film.
Guess life really does imitate art.
The blood was styled like anime
Ninja Assassin has a lot of blood, but there's a certain art to making all that gore look
good.
In fact, McTeigue studied classic anime hits Ninja Scroll and Samurai Champloo to perfect
the stylized look of the blood.
After all, as McTeigue puts it, "what's a ninja movie without blood, right?"
Amen to that.
A real heartbreaker
In the opening scene of Ninja Assassin, an old tattoo artist explains that he's seen
the ninja assassins once before, and the only reason he's still alive is because his heart
is on the wrong side of his chest — when the ninjas stabbed him in the heart, they
missed.
It may seem like a goofy gimmick, but that heart-on-the-wrong-side thing is totally real.
It's called situs inversus, and it happens when a person's internal organs are flipped
around to the opposite side of the body.
It's pretty rare, so yeah, the chances of two people who are targeted by the same ninja
clan having the same medical condition is a stretch...but it's not impossible.
Even some celebrities, like singer Enrique Iglesias, have situs inversus.
So say what you want about Iglesias, but the guy's pretty much immune to ninjas.
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