Spoiler alert: This story contains details about the final fight scene in The Man from Toronto. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, click over to do that first and then come back.
Free weights are flying in The Man from Toronto’s climactic fight scene, which finds Kevin Hart and Woody Harrelson’s characters taking on a veritable United Nations of hitmen in a gym-based battle royale. Anyone who’s watched the action comedy knows that it’s a whirlwind of axes, barbells and whirring chainsaws, all punctuated with some good old-fashioned explosions.
But how did The Man from Toronto put this punch ’em up together? And did Harrelson really take a tumble off that roof? Tudum talked to the film’s director, Patrick Hughes, and stunt choreographer, Philip Silvera, about how the knockout scene went from page to screen.
How did you envision the big final fight sequence once you got the script? Patrick Hughes: With action films, when you take on a project, you sort of isolate those action elements. You look at your set pieces, and you make sure there’s a varied approach to the action so you’re not repeating yourself. My question is always, “What makes this one dynamic or unique?” You might have a car chase, and then maybe you’ll follow that up with the fight sequence. There’s an overall planning that takes place.
With the gym fight sequence, the intention was to do it as one shot, or at least to make it look like it was one shot. It felt like there was an opportunity, because they were fighting multiple targets, for it to feel like an overwhelming threat, so we took it from there. We felt like it would be a unique experience to take the audience back to the beginning of the film and to have the characters try and escape through the gym, so we ended up having the chaotic fight there.
The whole thing with gunfights is that it all gets boring very quickly. Phil and I always talked about how we just have to lose the weapons as soon as we can. I think the audience always loves that sort of MacGyvering process that happens, where the fighters are using tools available to them and thinking, “How can I use this either as a weapon or as a shield?”
Once we knew we were doing the gym, the fight was handed over to Phil. We had collected imagery of all the different types of equipment you’d find in a gym, and then we had a lot of fun sort of doing a layout of saying, “Well, this is the area where the bags would be. This is the area where the ring is, so they could move over here, and we could put the weights this way.” He helped us move through different spaces looking at the different equipment available.
Philip Silvera: Patrick has such a great way of blending humor and action that always hits with this big bang at the end. That was the fun of trying to create the sequence with him: weaving in those proper moments with humor, which he does so collectively well in all of his movies. You have to use the characters and the environment, and then find the most unique ways to fight within the world of the gym.
Like Patrick said, we laid out the game plan, saying, “These are the weights, these are the bags, we have a room upstairs...” We just try and figure out a way to lean into what I will call a live action Looney Tunes with very dark humor and a hard-hitting punch. I think the scene really encapsulates all of that. It’s a banger.
How much stunt work did Kevin and Woody actually do on their own? Hughes: I mean, there are professionally trained stunt people for a reason. You don’t want Kevin Hart being thrown out a window.
Phil can attest to this, but being a stuntman is a craft. It’s knowledge that’s handed down over hundreds of years now. That being said, when we were planning the scene, we did think, “Where specifically can we use Woody and Kevin, and how can we seamlessly integrate their stunt doubles?” Then it was just about creating the shots. We’d shoot the sequence just on an iPhone and literally cut together an iPhone version with all the stunt doubles standing in for all the parts and roles. Then it was just about finding really dynamic ways where you can make that look like that one shot. I can’t remember off the top of my head now how many shots it actually was that ultimately got stuck together. Phil, how many was it?
Silvera: I think 36 or something like that.
Hughes: We shot that sequence over two days, and we knew, “OK, Woody passes here, so we can be on Woody swinging and actually doing the fights,” because he’d been prepping with Phil and his team, along with Kevin. For those specific moments, that’s actually them. But we knew that when, for example, Kevin gets thrown this way, he’s doubled when he hits. People don’t see where it’s actually swapped so we can put in his double, but a lot of sneaky in-camera tricks were used.
Silvera: Both Kevin and Woody work really hard. Kevin has muscle memory, like you show him something at one time and it’s in his body pretty fast. He will learn things quickly. Woody put in the work with our fight coordinator, Micah Karns. He would just rep those beats over and over again, and I’ve got to say, I think like 90 to 95% of Woody’s scenes are him, though there would be small moments where we’d say, “We should throw the double to the deck for this one.”
Hughes: I think the giveaway is that, generally, it’s Kevin and Woody’s stunt doubles when their characters are actually getting hurt. If you see someone getting thrown through a wall or off a building, it’s not Kevin and it’s not Woody. I wouldn’t do it either. I used to go up in helicopters to do crazy filming and get all these cool shots. You wouldn’t see me dead in that now, thanks.
Woody Harrelson is incredibly fit, but he’s still 60 years old. He’s got to have limits. Silvera: He does tai chi and martial arts. Kevin is always in the gym working out and boxing. Both of those guys are physical athletes who are probably on par with our stuntmen, and sometimes they’re probably better than them.
Hughes: They are both super fit and very energetic, and they have that ability to bring it, which is good, because it’s tough on the actors. The gym scene is just one scene, and we’re shooting everything else around all these action set pieces. The difficulty is making sure you find the time and the actors that are willing to do the homework to go in and rehearse stunts before we get there to shoot it. We were very grateful to have two actors that wanted to engage on the project to give it their all.
How do scenes with explosions work? I have to imagine you didn’t have Kevin and Woody anywhere near exploding cars. Hughes: There are different types of explosions. There’s a craft to figuring out the size, the scale, the tone or the color of the explosion. You put all different bits and pieces in there to give it different textures. It’s sort of like painting with light, but it’s literally the light that’s coming from an explosion.
There are certainly explosions we have on set — we call them poppers — where they don’t have any force that comes off them. They’re quite safe. We know the radius. Then there’s explosions that are much bigger, that actually do have a force, and you don’t want to be standing anywhere near those. There’s a lot of safety involved. That’s where we’ll use an overlay approach for the shot.
I think we blew up, like, 10 cars in that parking lot. That’s certainly not a scenario where you want to have people running close or through that. We did it with an overlay, and I think it works really well.
For a bunch of hitmen, they’re not very discreet... Hughes: We always talked about playing it like those old classical Westerns where everyone comes with a history and a story and a name. It’s kind of fun. I mean, it’s subtle, but the main street of the town does sort of have that high-noon vibe with the bad guys coming, and we’ve got to batten down the hatches to get ready for war.
The Men from Tacoma might be loggers, but still, axes and chainsaws aren’t conventional hitman weapons. Hughes: We played around with that a lot. We were trying to work out where they should all be from. That was the thing about the weapons, too. Phil went off with a weapons scout and would come back with references.
Again, we didn’t want everyone using guns because that’s boring. So it’s like, “What’s another fun weapon they can have?” So one guy’s got that bow and arrow and another has axes. Then you have the ability to throw them or use them in hand-to-hand combat. Phil had a lot of fun brainstorming stuff like that.
Silvera: Once we get those weapons in, it’s about thinking, “What’s the most dangerous but also comedic way we can use this?” How can we put them in harm’s way while still hitting that tone of comedy — but also still have everyone believe the intent that they are trying to kill them?
Kevin’s got his way of reacting, and the Man from Toronto is no nonsense, so he throws kettlebells right into people’s chests all the time. It was a lot of fun, to say the least.
Tell us about the roof and the upstairs room. Silvera: That was a whole location change. Thankfully, we were able to stitch the scene together through the chase up the stairs. That was fun. We all went off the roof together.
Hughes: That was crazy. I was watching because I was shooting right next to you when you were doing that. You jumped off the roof with the camera around the same time I was filming cars exploding downstairs. I got a tap on the shoulder, and they said, “Everyone keep quiet. Phil’s doing a shot,” and then I turned around and you were jumping off the rooftop attached to a crane with a rig and all sorts of stuff going on.
Silvera: I had a 40-pound camera, and I was chasing two stuntpeople. It was just fun.
Hughes: I remember when we were making the movie, the studio was like, “Do you really need the roof sequence?” But I just thought, “You need them to go off the roof, and we need them to go out the windows,” because we’d been around this gym space. We wanted to build it to a climax, and at that point, we’d done everything we could in the gym, so we had to do a very tricky location move because that gym and that stairwell are two completely different locations on opposite sides of Toronto. It’s like a two-hour drive away, but the way it’s stitched together works really well.
Was there anything you wanted to do for the scene but couldn’t? Like, did you try to figure out how to fight on a treadmill? Hughes: I do think we did discuss that at one point. There was a situation where we said, “If there was a running treadmill, we could have someone’s face getting burnt on the spinning mat.” Like that’s just the kind of stuff we were thinking about. We did all sorts of brainstorming. You come up with more ideas than you need, and then you whittle it down once you start to get a sense of the timing.
Last question: What happens when the Man from Toronto gets the chainsaw? What’s happening off-screen? Hughes: That’s the one shot where I was like, “Wow, this is pushing the PG limit.”
Silvera: It was an off-camera haircut.
Hughes: I remember turning to the producer and saying, “This is good family fun entertainment.” It’s amazing what you’re allowed to do off-screen, I’ll tell you that much.
