Nobody is now available on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray, and DVD everywhere; and ahead of its release, we were able to sit down with second unit director and stunt coordinator Greg Rementer to get more insight on the best action movie of the year.
Rementer is well-known for his work in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, having been a part of Captain America: Civil War, Thor: Ragnarok, Black Panther, Avengers: Infinity War, and Avengers: Endgame where he was a stunt performer as well as the stunt double for Chris Evans (Captain America), Sebastian Stan (Winter Soldier), Don Cheadle (War Machine), Frank Grillo (Crossbones), Josh Brolin (Thanos), and Terry Notary (Groot; Cull Obsidian).
In addition to working with the Russo Brothers numerous times, he's also a frequent collaborator of David Leitch and his 87North/87Eleven production banners where he's been able to learn under Leitch and fellow action aficionados Chad Stahelski and Sam Hargrave, amongst others.
During our lengthy conversation, he shared more about what it took to turn Bob Odenkirk (Better Call Saul; Breaking Bad) into a living weapon, crafting intense action sequences like the bus fight, his experience working with different directors, and he even offered up a brief tease of what's to come in next year's hotly-awaited Bullet Train, which stars 2x Academy Award-nominee Brad Pitt (Fight Club; Se7en) in the lead role.
Check out the full video interview below or keep scrolling for the transcript!
ROHAN: First things first - if you're a stunt coordinator, is it a prerequisite to be ridiculously cool? Cause I mean I know we're just meeting, but just reading up on you and looking at you, I just know that you're way cooler than me.
GREG: *laughs* "I beg to differ. A) I’m sure we’re just as cool as each other. If you are a comic book and movie buff fan, who just loves awesome films and great action, then you and I are the same guy. I just got very fortunate to meet some of the right people and come from the right background. I was just a kid who got picked on most of his life and my parents said I should try martial arts and then, you know, (makes hand gesture pointing upward), I love Jackie Chan and I love films and just very fortunate to be apart of what I’ve been apart of. Every day, I can’t believe it myself sometimes. "
ROHAN: Bob Odenkirk is traditionally known for his comedy and, of course, for Better Call Saul. He's not really known for action roles like Keanu Reeves, so what does it take for you to get an actor like Bob and transform him into a believable action hero? What kind of training did you put him through?
GREG: "Yeah, the thing about Bob Odenkirk was I didn’t get him when he was a clean slate, in fact, when I was introduced to doing the project with the producing team, David Leitch and Kelly McCormick and 87North, they said “Are you interested in doing this?” and I read the script, they said Bob Odenkirk’s the lead and I said, “Bob Odenkirk’s the lead? Okay, that’s very interesting… how much time do we have?” and they said “Three-to-four months before we shoot” and I go, “Oh, I don’t know if that’s going to be enough time for me to get him where he needs to go and they go, “Don’t worry, he’s already been training for a year.” So, I’m like “Hold on, what are you talking about, a year?”
So, turns out, they connected him with this incredible stunt actor named Daniel Bernhardt, who is the fight coordinator/fight choreographer who used to be the lead of Bloodsport 2 and 3, and many other projects, works with David and Kelly all the time, he’s been in all the John Wick movies. He comes to hit it off with Bob, they become friends and they just start training on a regular basis, physically and in fighting and stunt choreography, so I talked to Daniel and he shows me some videos and I see that Bob has this aptitude for it and he loves it. He’s hungry for it, so much so that this story, and I don’t know if you know this, but something like this actually happened to Bob, somebody broke into his home, and actually drove him to create this story and this character, so it really meant a lot to him and we just thought, let me talk to Bob, let me talk to Ilya, let me talk to them all about - I was in the minute I read the script and saw the videos of Bob, we then created this visual language of how we thought he was going to fight.
We designed this action set piece that was the bus, we shot a little mini-movie in a fake bus that we kind of built and we pitched it to them after we talked to them about his character and the narrative and everybody loved it and said alright, then, we’re going to take what we built in here, extract pieces and moments and have Daniel start working on it with Bob and get more in tune with exactly the nitty gritty that is, as opposed to a general world spectrum of physical movement and then as we continued to build, design and choreograph these fight scenes, these action set pieces, we would send choreography over to Bob and say, “Alright, today you’re going to work on this and you’re going to do this and you’re going to do it a hundred times and that was about the time, four months out on the movie, Bob is finishing Better Call Saul and he was training on the weekends with Daniel, training sometimes in the morning before he went on set to Better Call Saul, which is incredible, cause he was filming some of those finales and scenes that were super dramatic.
He wraps it up, goes back to LA, trains five days a week for two-to-three weeks, super intense, two hour sessions in the morning and an hour session later in the day, gun training, the same place that everybody goes, where The Punisher went, where John Wick went, Taran Tactical. He was just honing, he had a physical aptitude for it at that point and a hunger, a hunger, to be this character. Then, we arrive in Winnipeg about a month, two months out, and at that point, Bob is completely shredded and already kind of knows all the pieces of choreography, so now we’re getting into the sets, now we’re getting into the stunt actors he’s going to fight and now, again, in the set pieces, we’re running it, running it hundreds of times, to the point that maybe almost two years up to the point where we go to camera that Bob has been training, which is absolutely unheard of, so really by the time we went to camera, he was almost Keanu Reeves in a way, he’d been training for so long that he could perform the choreography without actually have to think about what he was doing. It was like driving, you just drive, and he was driving fully.
He was so hungry and so visceral, he actually I think trained for so hard and for so long, he actually thought to himself, “Maybe, I should try to fight, I wonder if I could win a fight,” and that’s why when you watch the bus fight, he looks so visceral because I tell everybody he shows up on the day to do the bus fight and he looked like a lion who hadn’t been fed or a tiger pacing in a cage, ready to attack and I told the guys, “Look, I think Bob is eyeing you, I think he wants to [frick] you guys up, I’m actually kind of concerned and sure enough, if you watch it, he just was spitting and sweating and ripping and angry and that’s what we wanted out of that fight in particular. He progressed to a calmer, cooler, where he found his groove, but in that fight, it was the chance for him to let loose and it was perfect because it was the first fight we shot after two years of training him, he really got a chance to just get it all out there. It wouldn’t have been what it was without him."
ROHAN: You mentioned the bus fight, which is a clear standout in the film. How long did that take to realize from choreography, training, shooting, and everything that comes between?
GREG: "The first thing we did was we saw Bob’s strengths in his physical training, we learned everything from just basic punches to elbows and knees and kicks and jiu-jitsu and judo and we saw that this was his strength and this was that, so actually we’d rather have Hutch do this as opposed to just punching a guy in the face, we wanted him to brutally hammer them down, so we started teaching them that to see his aptitude for that.
I would say for Nobody, in particular, from the minute that we saw that and created our first stunt pre-visualization, which was the choreography in the bus, we had the luxury of time, which you usually don’t and that was about three-to-four months of honing and tuning and building. Then, we shot from the beginning of October through the end of December - the finale, from the minute we saw it three-four months out from the bus fight, we had an additional two months before we did the finale, so that was forever being honed, creating a laundry list of concepts, and ever building them from shotgun shells to rat traps to wrapping that guy in barb wire and sucking him out the window to rebar and air cannons, we constantly came up with ideas that if we didn’t use them there, we could use them there or there, there were things that we built that we fully expected to walk into the day and use that we didn’t because we were just ever evolving the concept, but that was what was so great about Bob being so in tune with his physical nature that if we threw a curveball at him at that point, like “I don’t want to throw this punch anymore Bob, just skip it and go to the knee,” we didn’t have to sit and walk it slowly, he was just like, “Great, let’s go, I got it,” and we would.
I would say time is a luxury on films, especially with a budget like this. You might get a couple weeks, but the producers David Leitch and Kelly McCormick are action affectionados and they understand what it takes to design action set pieces and you could just throw a punch, but if you take the time to train your actor, you take the time to create a narrative through story and that action set piece where they rise and they fall and they have moments where they stop and they breathe and they feel how tired they are, it takes time and they give us that, those guys at 87North and David’s a director and was a stunt coordinator, a second-unit director, so he gets it, he knows and he wanted this to be, as one of his first producing projects with Kelly and his wife, he didn’t want it to be any less and with Bob, he knew what would be special, Bob was what would be special. We couldn’t shorten that. "
ROHAN: This film contains a lot of these well-choreographed action scenes in these confined spaces. What kind of different challenge does that present in comparison to something that has massive set pieces like the Marvel movies or Hobbs & Shaw?
GREG: "I think that the first and foremost one that always lays in front of you is making sure that it suits the story, the narrative and the character. It doesn’t matter how big it is, if you’re just throwing a punch, nobody’s going to want to watch it, nobody cares. You have to connect the audience with the character, you have to create something extra special that involves the story and the person that you’re watching. After that, comes all the logistical challenges that come with time and money.
When you’re working on something like Hobbs & Shaw, you have all the resources, but you have other things up against you, it’s super busy, incredibly talented actors like Dwayne Johnson aren’t as equally as available as guys like Bob, who are willing to come and train with me every day because they need to be on set and they’re running multiple businesses. They’re going to come there and they’re going to crush it, but they do action all the time whereas Bob - the positive side is that Bob hasn’t done a lot of action, so he was hungry to put it all on the table for the first time.
However, without as big of a budget, and without a lot of time, you just hope that if you don’t get someone like Bob, who is as dedicated and trained for two years, you just hope that you can get that actor for more than a week and make them look like they’ve trained their whole life. That’s an extreme challenge, but also constrictions of sets, when you can get into the set, when you can test the stunts, all those things against you that I think actually a challenge that arises - problems create incredible challenges for me in that I don’t think that someone saying no means I’m not going to be able to do it anymore, it means how can I do it and make it just as good even though I have less resources and that in itself, lies the challenge right there. If I were to tell you to get on the internet and you don’t have a computer, you’re not going to not get on the internet, you’re going to find a way, just might not be able to do it with a computer.
How do I make Bob Odenkirk look like a badass action star with one week in front of me? That’s happened in the past, but again, maybe the fight doesn’t need to be ten minutes long, maybe the fight needs to be three beats long and that three beats need to be so great that that’s what you remember and that’s all that matters. It’s not about the scale or the size or the epicness, if you’ve got that, great, but if you don’t, remember what’s the story, what’s the character, you connected to the character and does it help the narrative. Is it apart of the story? Or do you just feel like you’re watching a movie and then all of a sudden, somebody starts fighting and the movie picks back up, nobody wants that. It’s always the challenge for me."
ROHAN: You’ve generally worked with directors that know action - Ilya, David Leitch, Sam Hargrave, Chad Stahelski - so what is that collaborative process on projects like this where you’re in charge of the stunts versus something where the directors may not be as well versed on stunt choreography like, say, the Russo Brothers initially.
GREG: "Okay, so I would say that with David - this time it’s Ilya directing and he’s done some action too - I think it just comes with a level of comfort and trust and collaboration as is anything. David, Chad, and Sam; the difference with them being mentors of mine and friends of mine, the bar for all of us is set higher because it’s what we do, but I try to set that bar no matter what it is I do, but the best part about working with David and Ilya and Sam and Chad is they continue to push the bar, so just when you think you’ve pushed the bar as far as it can go, they lift the bar and they go, “Now push it up to there,” and until the day, they’re just ever-evolving, but they’re trusting, they know that you are going to go with the right mindset and say we’re going to knock this thing out of the park because that’s what we’re going to do and we LOVE it.
Now, the Russos, yes, earlier on, they weren’t necessarily action affectionados, but after Captain America: Civil War, I mean if you think about it, they had done two of the biggest, most profound action movies ever with Winter Soldier and Civil War. Even with them, by the time we got to Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, they full, whole-heartedly understood the action and collaborated with us. I mean that was ten years of their life from Winter Soldier to Endgame.
I think that no matter who it is, whether you believe that they understand action or not, they key is communication and collaboration and as a second unit director too and a stunt coordinator, my job is that if you’re with someone who doesn’t understand it as much, it’s to help guide them to make the right choices. It’s not my job to take credit for it, it’s my job to make the best product and say, “Here’s why I feel like what you’re saying is great and we should do that and here’s how we’ll achieve it. Here’s why I think this idea could be changed because of this and what are your thoughts on that?,” It’s to ever help evolve the concept and the ideas.
The only difference with Dave and Chad and Sam is that they have fallen down, they have hit that wire, they have hit that wall, they have put that camera up, they have offered those idea, they have been through every step of the process, so they know what it takes and how many times it takes to do it and what equipment is required, so they can say, “I know that doesn’t take a week, I know we can do it in a day,” and it pushes you to just evolve and be more creative. So, that part of it is exciting for that too, but it’s also equally exciting to work with guys like Ilya and the Russo Brothers, who didn’t come from the background of stunts because they look at it in a completely different way, so it’s too mindsets. You have an action mindset and they don’t and you collaborate and you come up with these other incredible ideas.
So, I just think that I’m so fortunate to be apart of both, because some people only get to work with one side of it or one side of it over here and I’ve been beyond fortunate to work with both and a collaboration of both. I’ve worked with Sam, who was the second unit director and stunt coordinator for the Russos and then he went on to direct Extraction and now is moving on to direct other projects. I’ve worked with David and Chad when they were second unit directors and stunt coordinators, so you get to just see, you get to just learn from the best and if you’re around the best, learning from the best, you can only hope to try to strive to reach that level I think."
ROHAN: What can you tell us about Bullet Train and working with Brad Pitt?
GREG: "I can’t say much, but what I can say is that it’s an incredible ride, it’s a wild, incredibly action-packed ride, if you think Nobody is great, Bullet Train is going to be just as great. They’re both two - it’s going to blow you out of your seat. It’s incredible. Again, very fortunate to be apart of it and David Leitch, as a producer for Nobody is incredible, but as a director, he just makes the boldest choices and keeps it so fresh.
Brad’s a stud, he’s the best, so you’re going to see him on the top of his game, just like Bob. That’s what we do."
Nobody is now available on 4K Ultra HD & Blu-ray!