HIT BY THE FIST OF GOD

Shooting "Lasko" in Berlin

I'm writing this in pain. When I say pain, it's not like a "stab-in-the-guts" or a "baseball-bat-on-the-head" pain. It's more like a tight, almost pleasant full-body soreness, which makes you feel like having done a particularly good job.

And a good job I did (in all modesty). 'T was a 17-hour shoot on one of the hottest days of the year. Admittedly, we'd been goldbrickin' in the sun for most of the day, shootin' the crap & trying to chat up the make-up girls (who'd covered us with grime & had given us the kind of sexy teeth you get after fifty years of chain-smoking & guzzling tar-black coffee). But all good things must come to an end, and at about 4 o'clock in the afternoon we finally got called onto the set - an old military base outside Potsdam - to film the actual fight scene.

Basically, it was a 3-men brawl between Lasko , the hero (played by Mathis Landwehr), and 2 Serbian mercenaries (played by Ferdinand Fischer & myself) who had abducted & tortured some poor Balkan babe... don't ask why, I don't know, either. That's what bad guys do, right?

Man, did we get our asses whipped! The choreography aimed for sheer brutality, not so much for elegance. This meant lots of crashing & slamming onto the hard, half-rotten parquet flooring. A number of painful break falls & ratchet pulls in between tight-knit hand-to-hand combat were on the agenda; and according to the scrīpt, knives & guns had to be involved, too... yeah, brother, the whole shebang!

When we wrapped for the day at 2 in the morning, you better believe we were on our last legs. Ferdi had sprained his shoulder while doing what roughly translates as a "Hong Kong cork-screw"... I have no idea what the proper English term for this move is. But it hoits! I was dead tired but pleased as punch, 'cause by some miracle I had no injuries at all (apart from a few minor bruises & a somewhat stiff neck due to the 75-bar ratchet jerks). Two thumbs up for the  ACTION CONCEPT stunt crew & fight coordinator Ramazan Bulut,who were a great help and did a hell of a job.

Me & Ferdi Fischer... mercenaries on leave

It was supposed to be my last shooting day on this project, but this morning I got a phone call from ACTION CONCEPT. Looks like there's more work coming up. Cool.

In the meantime, I'll have to stick to a stunt actor's best friends: Aspirin, ice spray & Voltaren Gel.