Comic Con 2012 Adventures – Darren Shahlavi “Twister” of Ip Man 2 Talks Stunts

On day two of our Comic-Con 2012 visit, Darren Shahlavi stopped by the booth and remembered me from contact him on Facebook. I gave him a copy of  Death Grip, and he spent an hour giving me the low-down on what it’s like being a “ gwailo” ( foreigner) in Hong Kong films. From his big debut as “Smith” in Tai Chi Chuento his recent role as “Twister” in Ip Man 2, Darren’s been a force to be reckoned with on screen.

I mostly asked him about Ip Man 2 since it was his latest big gig. Darren had originally seen Donnie Yen in 1991 at a seminar in the UK. You can see Darren as a teenager in the clip, and from that moment he knew he would eventually work with Donnie one day. After almost two decades it happened in, and he said they flew him around promoting the film using the story of a young boy wanting to work with Donnie finally realizing his dream, with Donnie proudly telling everyone Darren was his student.

When it came to working with Donnie, Darren used the familiar term “incredible” in describing him and detailed moments like this:

“They’d have me run the choreography with a double, and Donnie would just sit there watching me. Then when it came time to shoot, he’d just get up and replace the double without any rehearsing.”

Darren would go home daily with bruises from the fight, since so much of Donnie’s choreography involved strikes to the limbs and chest and all that. “Plus I had been working out to get ripped for the fight anyway.” The fight with Donnie took ten days, which should give anyone who shoots action scenes Hong Kong-style some relief. So yes, Hong Kong takes a long time too. But they’re by no means slow. Sammo would dictate the shot style, lens, choreography, almost without any thought.

“I’ve never seen someone more in command of a film set than Sammo.”

Darren’s fight against Sammo came after shooting Donnie’s. Early in the scene apparently Sammo messed up his knee doing a side kick, but he kept rolling with it. Later when Darren was supposed to nail Sammo in the face with his gloves, Darren balled up his fist near the wrist area of the glove, which left a bunch of padding so he could do some real contact. After multiple attempts to get the shot, Sammo said, “Really hit me hard, we just need one good one.” Darren wound up, and Sammo lunged off the ropes, but his knee gave out, sending him forward an extra foot or so and straight into Darren’s fist and splitting Sammo’s lip wide open.

“The thing was I had another gig coming up and had to catch a plane the next morning at 7am, and Sammo knew if we didn’t finish I’d miss this gig. So he laughed it off and finished the fight strong and just went to the hospital afterward.”

Consistent with stories from other stunt folks like Cynthia Rothrock, Shahlavi detailed the “no-scrīpt” method of shooting in Hong Kong.

“They don’t have scrīpts for these things, so when they wrote down some roughly translated English for me to say, I said, ‘Guys, I can’t say this.’ So I started rewriting it there on the set, and they were ready to roll camera and here I am still writing the scrīpt on a piece of paper.”

Meeting Darren was no less than awesome. Here’s to a guy who made it into big Hong Kong films from just being a kid with a dream.