THE FURIOUS Interview: Star Joe Taslim

After a career as a judo champion, Joe Taslim turned to movies, with roles in The Raid: Redemption (2011), Fast & Furious 6, Star Trek Beyond, and Mortal Kombat.

In The Furious, he plays Navin, a journalist searching for his missing wife. In the process he uncovers a child trafficking ring, leading to some of the most sustained and exciting action sequences on screen this year.

Taslim talked to ScreenAnarchy via Zoom.

ScreenAnarchy: Let's start with your training for the movie.

Joe Taslim: I think I got to Bangkok two, three weeks prior and straightaway jumped into the choreography. But before that, I prepped myself a couple months. So I trained three months before Bangkok, but mostly about physicality, endurance, and stamina.

In action scenes, we don't really try to kill people; we don't want to punch someone and break noses. It's all about how long we can perform. Being able to work the whole day without taking a break. You're talking about endurance, talking about stamina. It's all about trying to raise my VO2 max. I run at elevation on a treadmill, practicing to be strong so I can shoot twelve hours nonstop.

That makes the jump to choreography a lot easier. If you can train nonstop from morning 'til evening, you can learn so much in one day. If you train for an hour and you have to stop and catch your breath, need five or ten minutes, that stops the moment, the flow.

If you have the stamina, you can really practice the choreography. You understand your role, your motivation, understand what the choreography is trying to tell, what the story of this or that fight is. Once you understand everything and realize you are working with the best people, everything else should flow beautifully.

You talk about stamina, but your character's smoking throughout the whole movie.

That's acting. I had a conversation with [director] Kenji [Tanigaki] where I said even though I'm strong enough to do these scenes, I want my character in the fights to show he is not fit. He's a chain smoker. He's under a lot of stress because he's lost his wife.

Kenji and I talked about how the other characters can fight and get up like nothing happened. But Navin, everything affects him. If he's injured, it affects how he walks. If he's in a long fight, we need to see him catching his breath, getting up slowly, struggling.

The action here isn't like old-school Hong Kong, it's messy, raw, people make mistakes. I love the moment when you're fighting Wang Wei [Xie Miao] and your feet are sliding on the linoleum floor.

I don't like clean fighting. Even if you watch The Raid: Redemption, there's a fight there where my character tries to stand up, but his feet aren't gripping. It's too slippery.

That kind of fight situation is chaotic, which I really like. That's how I believe action should be. Of course, there are action movies that are clean and composed and beautiful. But we're trying to deliver raw, grounded action, and viewers need to feel the reality of it.

So in that moment I have to struggle to get up. Those things, even though it's a second or a half-second, give the audience reality.

Sometime viewers forget. They are expecting to see beautiful, fancy moves. But we're talking about human beings. Every single fight in real life, there's nothing composed about it. Nobody's waiting for their turn to make a move. It's always chaotic.

What happens when you miss a turn or a prop breaks. You just keep going?

It depends. Sometimes the action director wants it clean, and will say, "Cut. Okay, we didn't plan that one."

I'm lucky because Kenji and [Kensuke] Sonomura are maestros. They're putting reality into the fights because they realize that's what people relate to.

I remember a moment at the end where I'm fighting Yayan Ruhian. The floor's super slippery because it's covered in blood. The fight is very messy, we're pushing tables, throwing things around. Yayan needs to slice me a couple of times. It was slippery, I'm falling, and I got hit because I wasn't in a stable position. It was a slice that wasn't designed.

Sonomura didn't say cut, he said, "Just continue everything until we finish. And makeup, put a little blood on him because he got cut for real."

When you're in the flow, if it's a long take, when something unexpected happens, it's magic. You don't want to delete it.

It's hard enough when you're fighting one guy, but at the end there are five people fighting each other.

That's probably the hardest action scene I've done in my life. When you fight one-on-one, it's all about chemistry. You and the opponent, your co-actor, need to understand each other. You need to be dancing in the same song. It's almost like you're a couple, although it feels so weird to say that.

When you're doing five-way fight, it means it's not just one that you need to understand. You need to understand four of them at the same time, because you're fighting everybody.

Kenji and Sonomura are so ambitious that they're not going to cut if they don't need to cut. They'd say things like, "We're going to go as long as it takes. We're going to push it because we want to deliver something that hasn't been done before."

I remember times that four of us did it right and one made mistake, and we have to go again. Or three of our guys were good, but two slipped and were no longer in position to continue the long take. If I made the mistake, I felt so bad. It meant another take for everyone.

In that desperation, we found unity. I don't remember which day, but we had a hard time shooting one of the long takes. Then we realized that in order for us to be able to deliver this, we have to fill each other's gaps. We have to work as one. Because once you are only focusing on yourself, trying to make yourself look good, it's impossible to achieve this ambitious scene.

We looked at each other and said, "Okay, what is your problem? What is my problem? What is our problem?" After that everything went so smoothly.

People underestimate action. They have no idea. Action is one of the high arts in performance. That is, if the actor's really doing it.

Did you ever accidentally hit the cameraman?

In that five-guy fight we were more concerned that we didn't hurt each other. Which we did once in a while, but the chemistry was so good that we didn't stop.

One time during the stair fight at the Snake Pit, I hit the camera so hard I knocked it to the ground. In my role I'm injured and going crazy and making wild moves, and I went a bit too chaotic and hit the camera. At least I didn't break it.

The Furious is now playing hroughout the known universe, only in movie theaters. Check local listenings for locations and showtimes.