Director J.J. Perry has quickly made a name for himself delivering fun action movies. Following up the vampire Netflix movie Day Shift, Perry’s latest film is The Killer’s Game starring Dave Bautista. ComingSoon spoke to Perry about his thoughts on fight choreography and the film, which is out now on digital and releases on 4K, Blu-ray, and DVD on November 19.
“In the new action-comedy The Killer’s Game, when top hitman Joe Flood (Dave Bautista) is diagnosed with a terminal illness, he decides to take matters into his own hands – by taking a hit out on himself,” the official synopsis reads for J.J. Perry’s The Killer’s Game. “But when the very hitmen he hired also target his ex-girlfriend (Sofia Boutella), he must fend off an army of assassin colleagues and win back the love of his life before it’s too late.”
Tyler Treese: Just like your first movie, Day Shift, I love the energy to this. You always have a real snappiness to the edit. There’s always a good vibe. How is it finding that tone both while filming and in the edit? I assume you have that in mind the entire time.
J.J. Perry: Yeah, absolutely. When I was coming up, I was a big fan of movies like Fright Night, Big Trouble in Little China, Evil Dead, and The Lost Boys. So they’re kind of action comedy horrors or action comedies or fun action movies. I think whenever you put those ingredients together, it makes for [an experience] where you can have the upper hand on the audience all the time. I can always hit ’em with something else. So doing something that’s fun and actiony. Look, man, the world’s kind of a dark place right now. I don’t need to add to that. I don’t need to make any dark material. You can find enough of that on your own. I just want people to watch and enjoy and have a laugh.
Dave Bautista is your star here. He has the pro wrestling background. So, he has experience with choreography and doing stunts before acting, and he’s a huge dude. You’re gonna make his fights very different than what you would do for Jamie Foxx, for example. How was it tailoring the action towards his physicality and, and skill set?
Coming from the action world, that’s where I started as a stunt man. Then became a fight coordinator and a stunt coordinator, and then a second unit director, and then a director. But the key to being a good fight choreographer or a fight coordinator and being able to be good with the fights is to understand your starting picture. So a 6’4″ man moves quite different than Jackie Chan at 5’8″. You know what I mean? It’s just a different dynamic. Dave is legitimately one of the most dangerous people I’ve ever. He’s nice as pie. Everybody should have a little Dave Bautista in their life. He’s a gem of a human, and I love him to death, but he is legitimate. He’s a big, strong man who is very skilled in wrestling and very skilled at jiu-jitsu and who’s got lunchbox fists. He’s massive, and he can hit really hard.
So, coming up with a style with him, with my action team that is always with me. Justin Yu, Felix Betancourt, and Troy Robinson, these guys come with me from Day Shift, and they’ve come with me on this whole journey, even as a second unit director for years. [The key] is coming up with something that’s interesting for him. What is good choreography? What is that? It’s creating a problem for your protagonist or for your protagonist and showing how he solves that problem and repeat and repeat and repeat. Make the problems get harder and harder.
Dave, being a real specimen of an specimen of an athlete, it was easy to work with him. He has a lot of tools in the box as far as wrestling, jiu-jitsu, and striking. I mean, he’s a very well-rounded guy, so it’s easy. I’ve also gotten a lot to work with a lot of pro wrestlers in the last 34 years, and he’s one of the best ones physically. So, it was easy.
I love the stylish introductions to all the assassins in this film because it gets the personality across quickly. You don’t have time to be doing 10-minute setups for all these characters. So what was the challenge and the joy of having these quick, minute-long scenes of really getting these personalities across?
Thank you, brother. I got initially asked to stunt coordinate the movie about 10 years ago. Then I got asked to second unit direct it and stunt coordinate it about four years ago. Then they asked me if I wanted to direct it. So I jumped in. It was gonna be set in London, but we had to make a few changes, jumped in there with James Coyne, and that’s where we added all those intros to the characters.
My mantra was it shouldn’t be more than three camera moves, maybe three or four camera moves. They should stay sub one minute but should be informational and full of fun. So, the Goyang Crew was one of my favorite ones in the karaoke. I spent a lot of time in the karaoke when I was stationed in Korea. So for me, it was like, oh, this is gonna be a lot of fun. Then Marko [Zaror] and the party girls, all of the characters, for me, it was like, “Make it different, a little seedy, trippy, and cool, but give everyone their own style.”
I love that both of your films so far have included Scott Adkins in a beard and a very different accent each time.
I would put him in everything, brother. I love Scott. I go way back to Undisputed 2. We did a bunch of movies together back in the millennium. We’ve done a bunch of films, and he’s a dear friend, and I’m super proud of him. He’s a gangster.
What were the biggest lessons you learned from Day Shift that you were able to incorporate in The Killer’s Game?
Budgeting my time a little better. Because I come from second unit where you’re locking up a city and you’re doing a giant car chase with 13 cameras. But you know what I learned? I was blessed to have Foxx and Franco on Day Shift and they’re great comedians and I haven’t really worked with bad actors yet. I don’t know what that’s like, and God willing, I won’t. But what I’m saying is when you have the right people there, it’s just about momentum. So I don’t cut the camera very often. Now I just keep it rolling and reset and go back to one to create a momentum. Okay, try that again, but like this. Okay, back to one. Here we go. Settle instead of cut, reset everything when something fell apart.
So it was about momentum. This movie, we shot it in 42 days. It wasn’t a long shoot. We didn’t have a lot of time. We shot it during the SAG strike, but we had a waiver. But it created a lot of challenges shooting in Budapest. We didn’t have a ton of time to prep it. But in saying that, coming from second unit, I feel like I’ve learned the lesson of being a responsible action filmmaker and I’m learning my lesson about being a responsible first unit director.
I love how you use Pom Klementieff throughout this film. She is just so hilarious in this. You have her saying just the wildest stuff. Was that all from the script or was she improvising?
So a lot of it was on the page, but a lot of it comes from the [attitude of] keep it rolling, let’s try this. Pom and I go back to the Old Boy remake, the Spike Lee movie. That’s where I met her. When she first came here, we trained, she came to 87eleven. We’ve been friends ever since. We take her to the gun range and teach her martial arts. Pom can ride a wheelie on a motorcycle. She can trick ride on horses. She jumps outta planes. Pom is an action star waiting to happen also, and she’s a dear friend.
I was grateful that she came out and did this. Because I know she was neck deep on Mission: Impossible, but I agree. I felt she brought a whole new thing. Sofia, my lead, is a French actress and Pom is being a French actress, there’s something super exotic and cool about that. To me, that was a lot of fun. Her kind of having her way with Daniel Bernhardt was a lot of fun as well, even on set and on camera. So yeah, a lot [was] improvised and we had a lot of fun on set.
You worked with Dave again on Afterburn. Was that just a no-brainer after The Killer’s Game?
Yeah, man. We had a great time on The Killers Game, and they had mentioned that there was another film, another script. I’d actually read Afterburn 12 years ago to coordinate it about six years ago when Gerard Butler was gonna do it with a Korean director [Jung Byung-gil], who did The Villainess. I met the Korean director in K-Town, and somehow, it landed in my lap, and I was grateful. I kind of knew what to do.
I’m just wrapping that one up right now. Dropped my director’s cut. So I’m super excited about that. Dave, I’m telling you, if you don’t have someone like Dave Bautista in your life, you need one. He’s such a generous and intelligent [person]. I can’t say enough good things about him. He’s amazing.
This year is the 10th anniversary of John Wick. I know you were in the stunts for that. What was your big takeaway from that and seeing Chad and David working on that with their stunt background as well?
We kind of all started in the same freshman class in ’90. I got out here from the Army, and I met Chad pretty soon and Dave too. I’m super proud of those guys. I think that the stunt community doesn’t get the nod for the amount of creativity [they bring]. All the action movies you see when you’re looking at the trailers that’s all done by stunt coordinators, stunt men and women, and second-unit directors. That’s what gets people to go see the movies. Well, it’s not the only thing, of course, but we have a big hand in that.
Watching my two bros, my two classmates, come up has made me super proud. I wouldn’t have been able to direct my first movie if it wasn’t for Chad Stahelski. So I’m super grateful for him and them, and I’m super excited to see what they do next. I think that the glass ceiling is about to break because there are a lot of young men and women out there who come from our background and can do this job very efficiently. The way that visual effects directors were huge in the early millennium is the way that I think action directors are gonna start coming out now. I think it’s well deserved. I’m super grateful to be here. I didn’t expect any of it. I’m grateful for my spot, but I’m super excited to see what comes next.
Thanks to J.J. Perry for discussing The Killer’s Game. It is now available on digital.
