You could say Kelly Hu nailed her role for X2, the nation's top film. As Lady Deathstrike, she wears nine-inch nails, which come to full effect in a brutal battle with Wolverine.
During the X2 press junket, Hu addressed several elements of the production. Following is an edited transcription of the interview.
QUESTION: How important is martial arts training in a film like this?
KELLY HU: Well this film, actually, in the choreography, they didn't want it to look very martial artsy, per se. They didn't want it to come out looking like a Jackie Chan film or anything. The choreographer was very, very adamant about making it look like these two vicious mutant fighters, rather than something that was choreographed like martial arts.
When you get to work in this sort of realm of fantasy, you're not limited to what humans can do. You can take it so much further. I think the choreographer was able to come up with these really amazing, amazing ideas, putting it to actual, practical use is like a different story. You can imagine a person flying around the room, but to actually have them flying around the room is a whole different story.
I think, though, that they were able to come up with some great choreography and great ways to actually execute it, and I'm so incredibly thrilled with the final outcome of it. I can't even tell you. I'm just in awe -- of myself.
QUESTION: What did they actually put on your nails to make it look like claws and also how hard was it to deal with those things?
HU: They actually took molds of my hands and fitted each claw to the fingertip of my hand. I grew out my fingernails, and they were able to crazy glue them onto the bottom of my fingernails. These pieces that they were able to shape are just beautiful works of art, really. If you look at them closely, they're really beautiful. They made it out of a very pliable plastic, so they were very light and easy to work with and they wouldn't actually hurt anyone if I really managed to hit someone, namely myself. They were able to make them light enough and it wasn't hard for me to move in them or anything.
There were some points, a lot of times where they show me stabbing through him and things where it was just too dangerous to have them in, or just not practical, because you can't show my claws going through his body if I can't get close enough to his body. So a lot of that stuff was CGIed.
As I watched the film I remembered doing some things with the claws and doing some things without and I watched the film to see if I could tell the difference, and you can't. You can't even tell the difference between the real claws and the fake ones. It's amazing.
QUESTION: When you're filming and you've got the claws on and then you take a break and want to get a glass of water or something, what do you do?
HU: It is such a challenge to be walking round the set with these eight-inch nails, nine-inch nails -- that's a band, isn't it -- and you can't do anything. You're basically held hostage by your hands. I mean, you can scratch your head, but you can't like, take off a coat. You can't take anything off the craft service table. Using the bathroom was a huge challenge. I got very, very close to my wardrobe people and I tried not to drink water all day. It was really difficult.
QUESTION: Were you ever able to cut loose with Hugh [Jackman, Wolverine] or was every bit of the fight scenes filmed in short, sectional pieces where you can't really see the bigger picture?
HU: Yeah, you know when you shoot a fight scene like that, especially when you're working with wires, you have to shoot little pieces at a time, because every move is wired differently. It has to be lit differently and shot differently. It takes weeks to come up with the little fight scene that we have. I don't know exactly how many minutes it is on camera.
But, yeah, there is no master shot. Because you just can't. You're flying through the air through half of it. You can't do a master going, "OK. At this part, this is where she flies and she lands here." It wouldn't work. So you do have to take little bits and pieces.
The way the choreographer and director of this fight did it was just genius, though. He put it all together, on his computer, with the stunt doubles. So we kind of had an idea of what it was gonna look like because he showed us, sort of, sloppily edited together on his computer. So we knew each piece that we were doing. We could see it as we were doing it, with the doubles having done it with the wires and everything. So it gave us a much better idea of what was coming up next and the rhythm of the fight.
QUESTION: We heard a lot about what came out of that scene to keep it PG-13. Was there initially a lot of blood in your performance?
HU: We worked with a little bit of blood, but the challenge was...you know, the fact that they both have regenerative powers, you can't have the blood and then not have the blood in the same shot. So a lot of that stuff is CGIed. I think a lot of the parts that they had to take away because of the ratings were the strikes and maybe the blood in the tanks and things like that. Otherwise we had little bits of blood on our face and whatnot, but it would all heal if you had regenerative powers.
QUESTION: The wire work looks so cool when you see it on screen, but I would imagine it's not so much fun. What does it take to get used to that?
HU: Oh my God. It's so hard. You think you're physically fit and you think you have coordination until you get hoisted up on wires and just hung from different pick points on your body and you quickly discover what your body distribution is like. You know, I thought that I was very agile and I could probably get my butt over my head very easily but I didn't realize how heavy my butt is, how heavy that whole part of my body was.
It's a whole different muscle. A lot of the muscles that you're working with when you're on wires is like internal stuff, using your stomach muscles to hoist you around.
And it's not a science, either. It's quite scary sometimes. There's this one part where I do this sort of helicopter spin. Basically they just pick point you from the back of the neck, so you can spin around this wire, and they have one wire that wraps around your body and they just pull it. So you're like a top, spinning in the air. It's a little bit scary because it's not a science and it's very easy to get hurt and get tangled up in the wires. When you're upside down especially you don't know where the wires are and you don't have an idea of what direction you're even in