We got to speak with Zoe Bell when her latest movie Raze premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. It is set to be released in theaters and VOD on January 10, but it’s not like we need a new reason to talk to Zoe Bell. A stunt double from the “Xena: Warrior Princess” days in her home of New Zealand, Bell hooked up with Quentin Tarantino to double The Bride in Kill Bill. Tarantino made her the star of Death Proof, as herself, and she continued to work in action movies, doing stunts and fight choreography. So it’s fitting that Raze is a big fight movie. Some 50 abducted women are forced to fight to the death, and our money’s on Zoe Bell.
CraveOnline: Do you get offered a lot of fight movies?
Zoe Bell: Yes. [Laughs] Those are the majority of what come on to my plate. I’m okay with it.
Is that a good thing?
Yeah, I mean I think the difference between what makes it good or bad is the decision of which movies I say yes to. For all the hundreds of scripts that are out there, there’s not that many that are amazing. It’s an interesting decision with action movies because I feel like you can keep things really simple and make a great action movie, but it seems to be not that hard to make really bad ones as well. It’s just a matter of trying to keep myself in good ones.
Raze being a much more realistic take on fighting, are you often asked to do fights that make no sense?
I wouldn’t say that don’t make any sense. I would say movies all have their own world or reality they’re built in. One of the things that we were really striving for with this movie was, for me something that I hadn’t done much of, which is the realism of the fight. I think, and it’s not that I’ve done a lot of research on this, it’s just my personal opinion that often with female action in particular, psychologically it’s easier to do it and shoot it and watch it if it’s not super realistic.
I think the minute you start doing really realistic, you get the kind of reaction that this movie gets which is people are fundamentally more shocked by it. I don’t mean that we were just out to shock people but we were definitely aware, I personally was aware of wanting to perform a type of female fight style that I’ve done quite a lot. As a stunt girl I’ve done most varieties of female fight action.
The style of shooting fights handheld has become standard. Do you ever lament that that makes it harder for us to see the choreography you’ve worked so hard to design and execute?
Yeah, of course. As with any change, you get used to certain things and then things change and there’s always advantages and disadvantages. I’m always a fan, I love to see the action, especially if there’s talented folks doing it so that if you were nice and wide, you’d be able to see something impressive anyway. I also understand that energy-wise, getting in close and being handheld does lend itself. You add energy to a fight by doing that.
In our case, with Raze, we had a really, really tight schedule. We shot something like 17 fights in three and a half weeks which is insane. When we could stay as wide as we could, we did. Particularly with the elevator fight because that was me and the woman I was fighting, Amy Johnston, is also a stunt performer and an actress so you could just stay wide with us because we knew the choreography. If one of us didn’t get it right, the other one would. So you could shoot that without fear of wasting too much time because when you’re doing it wide, if you want to stay in that shot, everything in that shot has to be right otherwise you have to cut around it, in which case it’s easier when you’re tight and handheld.
There’s advantages and disadvantages to both and you work with what you’ve got. Stylistically, depending on how the director sees the movie and the feel for it, it was sort of the Bourne movies that brought that around. I can remember watching the Bourne movie and being blown away by the energy of the fights and still feeling like I could feel myself pushing myself away from the screen trying to get out to get perspective on the fight. But it was effective, for as frustrated as I was with not seeing what was maybe going on, I kind of felt like I was in the fight. I’m loathe to despise one way or the other. I think most techniques are effective if you use them to their full advantage if you will.
Sure, but just in the business, has everything changed in terms of choreography because of this new cinematography?
Listen, everything changes all the time and I think choreography has changed in western movies a little bit more. Hong Kong movies have been all about the choreography for a long time, but since the beginning of the Matrix movement, the choreography and the style of fights has become far more frontal than it used to be. It was things smashing crashing and what explodes. Now it’s a little bit more like the stylistic side of the fight. It’s a little bit of both, really, in the sense that when the style and individual beats of the fight are important to the storytelling, you have to see them.
It’s an interesting question because there’s lots of fights that you watch back now from back in the day where they do stay really wide, and now because people are used to seeing it, they sometimes do them quite flat and they didn’t at the time. I feel like you just work with what’s in front of you, what people want and there’s always going to be people that want it wider, and there’s going to be people that feel like there wasn’t enough energy if you go too wide. I’ve been quite fortunate because I’ve gotten to play around in all the different arenas in a whole bunch of different techniques, so I don’t feel like I’ve missed out yet.
Is it important to remember taking the punch is as important in selling the fight scene?
Oh, without a doubt. The amount of times that my job is made much easier when someone can take a punch or my job is often, when I was doubling, to make someone else look really powerful. It’s all in how I fell taking the hit as well. In Death Proof, at the very end when we’re all wailing on Kurt, that man knows how to take a punch so that it looks like he’s just been rag dolled. If he was less effective, that whole sequence would have taken much longer and would have been much harder to get the feeling that you get out of it, which is just that we’re pulverizing him.
It’s really similar, in Raze, there’s a fight between Sabrina and Phoebe. Her character’s not meant to be martial arts trained of any description, but Rebecca Marshall’s ability to sell a hit makes that fight exactly what it needs to be. I’ve had enough experience at throwing punches and kicks, that helped too, but her ability to take the hit made the shooting of that fight so much easier. You watch it and it’s really, really effective. Taking a hit sounds really easy, but actually it either comes naturally or it requires a lot of time to get people to relax.
