Every real punch that was purposely done on set,
I would take a few, so I owe him a lot.
Nice to meet you too. Those are dope.
- Thank you, man. - Classic.
They've got the old vintage vibe to them.
What I've noticed about having watched the film already
is that the slow motion is used in a really meaningful way.
I was just curious, does everyone act in the same way
or are there different steps to make it more dramatic?
Yeah, there's different kinds of steps, man.
I think when you're doing some of the punches in slow motion,
the actors can't hold back so they actually have to take a hit.
The slower the shot is, which Mike and Florian hate me for,
the more they have to take the hit, the contact,
just because you can't really fake it.
So yeah, they took quite a few hits.
There's no visual effects in it at all,
their faces wiggling and all that stuff,
that's all them, that's all their face.
(laughter)
I know, I owe Mike a few punches.
I told him every real punch that was purposely done on set,
I would take a few, so I owe him a lot.
It's interesting you say that,
because the sound effects used are really impactful as well.
It's a really nice emphasis, really sharp and clean sounds.
Is it hard to perfect those and get the right noises,
and what kind of input did you have?
I had major input on that.
I was really concerned about the punches because the dude is so big,
and I didn't want to hear boxing glove punches.
I went to a real fight and I was like, you can't really hear them
and they were really cushioned a bit,
but this one, I wanted to hear it a little bit UFC style.
You hear the flesh of each punch, and so with that,
there were layers behind every punch of different kinds of sound
to make one specific sound.
They had to do about six or seven versions of these
so that each punch sounded different,
and then I had emphasis on the efforts and grunts,
so when you hear the 'rah', the Dragos and all that,
and then at the same time, the swings.
I'm just big on sound in general. You'll see little sound nuggets
throughout the entire film, beyond the fights.
The first time I heard it, I was like, 'Yo!'
I definitely heard it, that's for sure.
Speaking of music and sound, I always look forward to seeing
the entrances of matches and the walk-out music.
What would you walk-out music be?
What would my walk-out song be?
I've been changing it up here and there, ironically,
but I would have to say at the moment,
I'm still going to rock the same one,
a song called Knuck If You Buck by Crime Mob.
I'll have to listen to that.
It's complete, like, underground,
but in the States it was just hardcore
and they've got a song on our soundtrack called We Can Hit.
I've listened to that, it's good.
It's really just amped up, ready to go fight,
and Knuck If You Buck is something we would play in the locker rooms
before I played my basketball games.
Obviously the training montages look so great, but exhausting as well.
Are they the most work within the film
for such a short time they're on the screen?
Yeah, we spent weeks shooting the fight scenes,
but it's small windows, small cuts.
Ultimately you play the fights out in real time,
so you have these guys doing round one and round two
in every Rocky movie, it's full on.
If you watch that, then you go into a montage,
so round one and round two, you try and get a minute and a half,
two minutes of fighting, which eventually hits
about a minute fifteen in film time.
And then beyond that, you go onto montage
and you've got to really carefully pick your points
of what shots you want, because you don't want to drain out the actors.
I like the idea of Adonis's focus on really being inside of his head.
How do you personally find your centre of focus
when you're trying to work on something?
I try to escape, get out of everything, escape from all the hype.
Even with a project like this, I had a focus on Creed.
I would either separate myself from everyone
so I can really just find my zone,
and then come to the set where it's a whole bunch of people.
I meditated, I learned a lot about meditating this go around,
which I'd never done before.
So in my trailer, when I have moments at home before I would drive
or during a drive up to set, just no music, no nothing.
Ask the driver to completely go quiet and just find my zone and my zen,
which shows in the movie, because I felt like we've never seen that,
getting into the boxer's perspective,
and I really wanted to get into Creed's perspective using sound
and then using, of course, visuals and POV shots.
- Thank you very much. - Thank you, appreciate it, man.
- Dope interview, man. - That was sick.