Team PCheng

Director Kitao Sakurai was determined for the new Street Fighter movie to honor the now legendary game moves, but enhanced for the big screen. And to make sure this goal was realized, he worked with a team of fellow fans of the beloved video game. 

“In the same way that the actors were all super involved with how they thought about their characters, Jon Valera, our stunt choreographer, Sandra Balej, our VFX supervisor, are also huge fans of the game, so they were super passionate about bringing all the iconic moves from the game to life,” says Sakurai. “I think audiences are going to be totally blown away by how many of the signature moves we were able to put in the movie.”

Watch the trailer: https://youtu.be/cAVMqVruC8c?si=whKTtPRAzIP-DP5M 

When Sakurai’s team first approached Valera about designing stunts and directing second unit for Street Fighter, his initial reactions were excitement and trepidation.

“There was a lot of pressure behind this movie,” Valera shares, “very high profile, one of the most iconic video games out there. I call it ‘the Bruce Lee effect.’ As martial artists, we always say you never want to touch a Bruce Lee film because it’s almost sacred to us. Street Fighter ranks up there, but if I’m not afraid of a job, then it doesn’t make me work.” Valera, a Filipino-American, is renowned in Hollywood for his work in martial arts and stunts, including for the John Wick series, Marvel Cinematic Universe and DC Extended Universe (now DC Universe), where he worked with frequent collaborator Jason Momoa. Valera and Momoa worked together again in Street Fighter, where Momoa plays Blanka and is also one of the film’s producers. 

Sakurai and producer Cale Boyter wanted to try and keep the fight sequences true to the actual moves in the video game, but to adapt them cinematically.

“In the beginning I wanted to go a little more clean martial arts because it’s been a while since we’ve seen a clean martial arts movie like The Matrix,” adds Valera. “A lot of the fight styles now have gone more John Wick style. Brutal, gritty, messy. Street Fighter takes place in the 1990s, and ’90s action movies were cheesy, clean martial arts. I didn’t want to make it the cheesy, campy, clean martial arts, but to capture the beauty of it.”

With Valera being a trained martial artist, he also wanted it to reflect the Japanese background of the Street Fighter choreography. “Most of my team are also martial artists. We studied Goju-ryu, Shotokan and Judo. We wanted to take a lot of the moves in the game – Japanese based with a little flare – to stay true to the Japanese martial arts and show off the beauty of it.”

The characters all have a different base style, which informed the contrasting styles Valera and his team designed. Chun-Li is trained in the Chinese martial arts – Wu Shu, Tai Chi and Kung fu. Blanka is a self-trained fighter with an animalistic fighting style and a capoeira flair. Guile’s is military – a lot of big, brutal hits.

“Dhalsim has a unique style – we built his character on a yoga style break dancing movement,” explains Valera. “If yogis were throwing punches, that’s how you get the feel of it. Mike Tyson was a good model for Balrog, as well as one of my favorite characters in boxing, ‘Clubber Lang’ from the Rocky films because his style was all power hits.”

Valera brought together an international team, from the UK, France, New Zealand, Australia, Canada and Japan, with a range of niche talents and equipment that could take the choreography even further. “One of our guys who helped with the spinning bird kick was a Cirque du Soleil performer, who has all kinds of special harnesses and rigs. With them, a character could be suspended in the air, with a little bit of an assist so they could stay up just a little longer than a normal human. Most of these characters are not superheroes, they’re just above a regular human.”

Pre-visualizations were also key to showing the cast what was required of them and how each scene would play out.

David Dastmalchian, who plays M. Bison, explains: “Because we’re rehearsing really complex scenes, using wires that pull you up into the air, through breakaway walls, the stunt team and VFX created these fully acted out, fully blocked, fully choreographed fights, so we could watch and get the complete sense of how this goes from beginning to end, all the little beats.”

The VFX and SFX teams assisted in the process, but only when a pure stunt wasn’t logistically possible.

“We worked with SFX on explosions and breakaways, with everything safety tested,” Valera says. “Plus, there’s always situations where we can’t do everything with a real human, it’s either a safety issue or highly time consuming, so the VFX team was amazing too. This was one of the most collaborative efforts I’ve been on with those two departments.”

The team spent almost two weeks shooting one of the showpieces of the film, the ‘burlesque scene,’ featuring dozens of extras, actors flying through the air, and timed pyro effects.

“The burlesque scene is insane, it’s the longest fight sequence in the movie,” says Orville Peck (Vega). “It’s pretty much every fighter. We were all really looking forward to it because it’s the moment where all of us are together in one massive explosion of action.”

Reflecting on the entire process, Andrew Koji, who plays Ryu, says: “There was so much love put into Street Fighter, from so many people – Cale, all the producers, the writers, from Kitao, from the stunt team trying to find every little technique, from all the crew and cast. The level of care and love put into this film is unlike the making of any big film that I’ve heard of or been involved with.”

Sakurai adds: “There was a special energy on the set that goes beyond words. A lightning in a bottle feeling of this group of people together creating something special. I think that also comes across on screen. That special energy is something that people can experience in the theater when they see Street Fighter.”

Are you ready, fighters? Street Fighter, which also includes Noah Centineo, Callina Liang and WWE’s Joe “Roman Reigns” Anoai and Cody Rhodes, opens in Philippine cinemas October 14. Get your tickets now! #StreetFighterMovie