A Fighter's Heart: One Man's Journey Through the World of Fighting (41 page)

The days turned to weeks. Pat and I would run on the beach in the morning, and then go to the set for the rest of the day. He’d do some consulting, helping with this or that, how to hold a gun (he’d learned this from all the Controlled FORCE work he’d done), but often just watching and drinking coffee.

Oakley was young, just thirty, and his stunt specialties were cars, horses, and motorcycles, not fighting. Pat was the fight coordinator, and of course he had tremendous fight experience, but he had never worked on movies before. To set the producer’s mind at ease, Oakley had asked for some help from one of the best guys in the stunt-fight business, Mike Gunther.

Mike had been in the business for a dozen years and had a résumé that was five pages long. He’d worked on the
Matrix
series and
Underworld, Elektra,
and
Catwoman,
as well as a hundred other films. He was broad-shouldered and athletic, with short black hair and tired eyes; at six foot one and 180 pounds, he was the perfect leading man size. “I was lucky and the right size to double a lot of guys,” he said. He was not just a fighting guy, though; he had done everything. “I was fighting on the national karate circuit when I got into stunts, but I cross-trained to death because I didn’t want to get pigeonholed as a fight guy. I would do anything on the set, rig this or that, be water safety, ride a motorcycle—and it made me more marketable. I wanted to be involved, to be a filmmaker. I got my DGA [Directors Guild of America] card, so I can direct, and my SAG [Screen Actors Guild] card and I’ve sold a script, so I’m a writer in the WGA [Writers Guild of America].” This was a small-time movie for Mike, but he had been traveling for years and been on various sets all over the world and was trying to stay closer to home, to see his fiancée in L.A. and to develop his own projects.

Mike was excited for a chance to work with Pat, and he recognized more than anyone what an opportunity this was for a fighter: You’ve got the best trainer in the world in MMA at your beck and call, just hanging around. We all hit pads on the set, in the darkness, and I held for Pat and put the Thai belt on, so he could throw body shots—his specialty. He threw shots that stunned and staggered me, almost knocking the wind out of me every time, digging in and turning and,
boom,
blasting me on the pad. Shadowy pain rippled across my chest, and I would back off and put my hands on my knees. “Stop being such a pussy,” Pat said, laughing, and I wheezed, “I’m not tough like you guys,” and he hit me again and said, “Shut up, you’re such a liar.” Who knows what Mike thought, but he could hit pads pretty well.

Pat was truly a wonder to watch. He was friendly and honest and open, and after Paul Walker, he became the most popular guy on the set. His face was rough, in contrast to the smooth actors and sallow crew; he looked more battered than I remembered, his nose and brows polished by an accumulation of blows—something like a seal, or a shark, sandblasted, and his ears were nubs. An assistant director confided in me that they all had had reservations about Pat coming in, bringing the fighters, that Pat would be out of control or throw his weight around; but all those fears had evaporated. “He’s awesome,” said the AD. “He’s relaxed, he’s smart, he’s intuitive—he should do this for a living.” Oakley said something similar. He had been concerned that Pat wouldn’t listen to him, wouldn’t respect him because he wasn’t a fighter, but that had never been a problem. “I realized that fighters are performers, too,” Oakley said. “If they are boring, then they won’t get fights.” Very few people in the world knew more about fighting than Pat; he’d been in hundreds of street fights and was a five-time UFC champion, and he’d trained fighters for years. But he was well aware of his limitations in the movie world, and to his credit, he learned more from Gunther and Oakley than they did from him.

Pat and I trained and ran, and we worked hand fighting on the beach, Pat pressing relentlessly forward and his breath sweltering through his battered nose. We were out under a scuddy, remote sky, with a handful of cargo ships low on the distant horizon, anchored and patiently pointing into the wind. We sparred, going light, and of course I tweaked my ribs again, this time courtesy of Pat. He didn’t even hit me that hard, just a clean shot that didn’t bother me until later that night. I was so sick of it that I wanted to shoot myself.

Pat reassured me that it wasn’t just me, and he lifted his shirt to show his own ribs, which were notched and nobbed all up and down the bones. He had me feel the lumps and deformities, where Alvino Peña and other pro boxers had shred him up. “My ribs were destroyed all the time—we all went through it,” he said. “You got to tense up.” What he meant was that you had to be constantly tense, and then flex your body when you knew a punch was landing. I’d heard this before but had never been able to do it.

The set was the most social place I’d ever been. You’d end up talking for hours to everyone, getting their life stories, anecdotes about this film and that film; the fighters had their own brand of gossip. It was a kind of forced, convective bonding. The fighters’ interaction with the movie people was a little awkward at first: There was friendliness, a slight sense of mutual disdain coupled with genuine interest and curiosity, but inside, both sides were secure in their own form of arrogance. There was flirtation, on-set romances kindled, flared, died in front of your eyes. And there was celebrity.

Celebrity is an interesting phenomenon in the United States, directly tied to power. A famous judge is more powerful than a non-famous judge; celebrity is its own currency and is worth something very specific, set dollar amounts for so much notoriety. I think the roots of movie celebrity lie in basic biology, and in our subconscious. The human being is programmed to read other humans’ faces, and to read them intensely and closely—indeed, manipulating those ten thousand facial muscles is what movie acting is all about. I don’t
know
Harrison Ford—I’ve never met him—yet I have
seen
him up close, in a wider range of emotional states than I’ve seen in any of my friends. I’ve seen him laugh and cry, undergo tremendous suffering and joy. The fact that it’s all fictional is secondary. I know him, in a sense, better than I know my friends and family. I’ve spent hours staring at his face and identifying with him—and not just him, but the most heroic and pure version of him that the writers could come up with. This is just an example—I’m not a Harrison Ford fanatic—but it is the kind of thing that happens to some extent with all movie and television people. When fans approach with the “mad joy” in their eyes, the camaraderie of an old friend, that shouldn’t surprise anyone. In a way, they
are
old friends.

It’s the same with fighters. You’ve seen a man fight five or six times, you’ve been with him through his struggles, and you know him now; in a sense, he’s your friend, an intimate. You’ve seen him show his courage, come back from adversity, fight through pain—you’ve seen him game-tested.

In Hollywood, they call that initial reaction being starstruck, which happens when you first meet a bona fide celebrity and you react to all the one-sided time you’ve spent together, before you begin to recognize the real person underneath that famous flesh. It’s interesting to watch celebrities deal with it, because they can sense it, and it sometimes makes them uncomfortable, as it would anyone. It’s why meeting new people is exhausting for them.

There was some of that when I met Paul Walker, a familiar face, even though I didn’t know all his movies and certainly wasn’t his biggest fan. I stood around nervously for a while, trying not to appear impressed, trying to get a sense of the reality of the guy.

He was a good-looking, slender guy with intense blue eyes, some of the bluest eyes I’d ever seen. The first thing I got off Paul was that he just wanted to surf. He was laid-back and very polite and friendly in a Southern California way, and he would hang out and bullshit with the PAs or makeup people as readily as with the other actors or the director. He wasn’t buying into the whole diva routine—he came from a pretty humble background and seemed like he knew he was lucky to be where he was. He was going to work hard and deserve what he got. And then go surfing.

My first reaction was similar to what I felt with Andre Ward; I just didn’t want to bug him. I hung around and got to know him a little better, and helped Pat train him and Oakley one Sunday on the grass in front of the ocean at his hacienda. Oakley joked that he’d learned to fight on a movie set: “Reach way back and grab a bottle from the bar” was how he had been taught to punch, with a huge western windup, old John Wayne stuff. Paul was serious, he took what he did seriously and wanted to be good, he wanted to make good movies.

Paul had a darkness to him, an edge that I was a little surprised to see. When he hit pads with Pat, he was intent, and he was a good athlete and picked it up faster than Oakley did. He understood what “bad intentions” were, and he knew about MMA. He had even started jiu-jitsu with a famous Brazilian, Ricardo “Franjinha” Miller, rolling in the
gi,
part of the surfer/jiu-jitsu interface, before the movie started. He was psyched to have Pat around, and he confided in me that he wanted to train, and maybe fight someday—even though he knew he would probably never have the time to learn enough.

After we trained, Paul and Oakley took Pat and me surfing on the break right beneath Paul’s place. We shrugged into borrowed wet suits and listened dutifully, the roles of teacher and student reversed. Pat had fins and a boogie board, but his body was so dense he sank it, and he swam like a lead weight. His buoyancy was about the same as concrete. I got the biggest longboard they had, and I lay sideways on it to protect my jacked-up ribs and paddled in the freezing cold, battling to catch a few waves. My favorite part of surfing is sitting out on the board, just watching the swells roll in, looking for the right wave. I shadowed Paul and Oakley, spending eight times the energy to get to the spots they easily paddled to, while Pat worked even harder, chopping away with the flippers, working against wind, waves, and his own nature. We sat there bobbing on the swells, in the cold wind and warm sun, and Pat and I watched Oakley and Paul catch a big wave. Their surfing styles were similar, with their arms cocked behind them. It looks so easy when someone else is doing it. Pat muttered, “This is pretty cool, dude—we’re surfing with Paul Walker.”

The most important thing a movie actor does is look good on camera; and it’s a weird phenomenon, how certain people just look better than others on film. On camera, Paul’s face picked up a definition and roughness, an edge that it didn’t have in plain sight. One of the stuntmen told me that Sharon Stone was crazy like that—you would look right at her and think,
She’s pretty,
and then look at the monitor and think,
Who the hell is this girl? She’s amazing.

We wrapped the prison scene, and Tim and Ben returned to Iowa. Pat was working on two major fight scenes with Mike and Oakley and had sequenced them out in steps.

The first was between a bad guy, played by Stefanos Miltsakakis, and Paul, in a trailer down by the beach. It was going to be brutal, smashing the trailer to pieces, breaking windows, and generally tearing shit up. The second fight was to be filmed later, at a set the construction guys were building out in the desert, colloquially called Split-Rock in the script. That one would be Paul versus Pat, Rory Markham, and Robbie Lawler. They joined us on set, Robbie utterly laconic, while Rory was more excited; he shamefacedly admitted he’d taken acting classes in Chicago.

Stefanos was a fascinating character, a massive, craggy man who had played bad guys in several Van Damme movies but was also a real fighter; he was 5–0 in MMA. John Herzfeld had seen him fight in Los Angeles and hired him to be in his movie. He was Greek and had been on the Greek Olympic wrestling team in 1984. He’d trained with Rickson Gracie and had won
vale tudo
fights in Brazil. He was educated, European; he told me I had to read Emile Zola’s
Nana
, and I promised him I’d get right on it. He also looked great, an unbelievably rough, handsome, leonine face, massive hands, the steely blue eyes of a German U-boat commander. He was great for movies. He was forty-five and looking for a shot at the UFC. He had a deep respect for Pat, as well as lot of his own ideas about how the fights should go—some were good, and some weren’t. He wanted to maybe kick the gun out of Paul’s hand, but Mike shook his head: “That’s a little
Charlie’s Angels
for me.” There was a move that eventually got cut of Paul banging a pot on Stefanos’s head; Mike felt it was slapstick and said, “I didn’t know we were making a comedy,” and Stefanos replied immediately, “We’re not making Shakespeare.”

Fighters watch movie fights and are experts of a kind; they know what they like, and they know what a real fight is like. When Pat started working with Paul and Oakley, he wasn’t teaching them movie fighting, he was teaching them real fighting—the basics: footwork, balance, keep your hands up. Pat knew you had to teach feet first. “The arms are the chisel and the body’s the hammer,” he’d say, and you have to move your feet to swing that hammer. What Pat and I had to learn was movie fighting.

“The difference between movie fighting and real fighting—the big difference—is that in a movie fight, the guy
getting
hit is more important. It’s a dance, you have to have a good partner or the fight won’t work. The person getting hit—he’s got to sell it. Or it looks fake,” Mike told us.

Oleg Taktarov had a funny story about that: He was doing a Russian film, and one of the extras told him that he really admired him and was thrilled to be working with him; in a scene where Oleg was getting beaten by five or six guys, that same extra kicked him in the face, hard, trying to make the scene look real. Oleg laughed and said, “That was the only kick that looked fake, because it surprised me so I didn’t react properly.”