#i am living for Lawrence Fishburne posting

[meanpersonaart]

Young Regis when someone tells him there's blood at the party:

[freeofmundanethoughts]

HANNIBAL Stunts with Ken Quinn and Tommy Chang Panel Transcript (Fannibalfest 2018)

Last one for today! I also have notes on the Sassy Science panels that I’m planning on typing up, and I did take notes during the episode commentaries too, but there’s already a much better transcript of those online on twitter, so I think I’ll probably leave off on those. 

I’ll probably come back and edit these again at some point as well, referencing some twitter posts people made during the event and such to see if I can plug any holes in my notetaking that way. 

More: Hair and Makeup, Set and Food Design

DISCLAIMER: THIS WAS TYPED UP OVER 2 WEEKS AFTER THE EVENT FROM VERY SHORTHAND NOTES. NONE OF THIS WILL BE DIRECT QUOTED, NOT EVERYTHING SAID WAS INCLUDED (due to my writing speed) AND THE SENTENCES MAY BE SLIGHTLY SKEWED FROM ORIGINAL INTENTION (I am aware that some of the answers that I was able to write down do not exactly answer the questions, but I can only fill in what my notes covered). 

If anyone has their own notes that fill in blanks or contradict anything that I noted, please correct me! I extrapolated a little based on the context of the questions to make my noted less caveman and more full sentences, so some of the answers may have veered off in the wrong direction. I would love to be corrected to make this as full and complete as possible!

PANEL:

Ken Quinn (K)

Tommy Chang (T)

Question from Moderator/Audience (Q)

Q: How did you get into the business? 

T: I was offered a job. My role was to get shot and fall down stairs. I didn't realize you needed pads for that and did it without them. It was 1984, so all the stunt work was done really cheaply. I had to pretend I was shot and walk down a live street [with real pedestrians]. 

K: I wanted to be a motorcycle driver, but went into marketing instead. I coordinated stunts, including myself, and was elevated from a regular stunt man to a stunt coordinator. 

Q: How has the industry changed?

K: Color film was big. It's also much safer now. The tech used is different, we have wires and green screen. 

T: Fights have evolved. In the 1980s it was a lot of Karate Kid, and in the 90s you got a lot more females fighting. Then there was a period of mixed martial arts, and now what's popular is what feels "real." 

Q: How did you become involved in Hannibal?

K: I was called in by the production manager. Hannibal was on a tight budget, and some stunt equipment wouldn't work in the cold. We had to keep bringing it into the tent and warm it up, then do another take. But Mads never complained. 

T: I was hired by Ken, so. Why did you hire me? 

K: We had worked together before. Tommy was brought in for the kitchen fight. The flip over the back was Tommy's idea. I can do all around stunts, but Tommy's a fight specialist. He's done a lot of work in fight choreography. 

T: Ken is one of the most respected stunt coordinators in the world. He takes jobs no one else will. 

K: I once did a stunt where I fell 14 stories off a building, on fire. It took 3 takes. 

Q: What fight took the most time, and who was the best actor to work with?

K: The kitchen fight took the longest. Mads is one of the most athletic actors from his background in dance. 

T: I liked working with both Mads and Lawrence. You really try to bring the script to the real world. I'd brake down the fight, block the moves, show Ken, train the doubles, showed Bryan Fuller and so on. The actors all trained really hard. Bryan Fuller called me back for the other fight because he liked my work on the kitchen scene. 

K: It was funny, because Bryan would say things to me like "I want an organic knife fight." So I'd make a knife fight. And then when I showed it to Bryan, he'd say, "this looks too much like a knife fight." And I'd tell him "that's what you said!" And Bryan would just go, "okay, le'ts not do a knife fight." 

Q: Jack and Hannibal have very different fight styles. Jack is a boxer. How does the physicality of the actor factor into the fights? 

K: Lawrence Fishburne was just back from a hernia surgery, so that factored in. Both actors had their own ideas about the scene. They would change the styles to fit their character. Slamming the fridge door was Lawrence's idea. 

T: I'd bring in a template, and the actors would take the choreography and fit it into their characters. 

K: Both actors are gifted and trained. We were lucky. They knew the right fighting distance. Lawrence Fishburne is like a bear of a man, very strong. 

T: Both are in good shape. Other shows might take 3-5 months of training to deliver 1-2 good fight scenes, but the kitchen fight for Hannibal was done in 5 rehearsals. 3 with stunt doubles, 2 with the actors. 

K: Tommy can put a fight together in minutes, but it took a lot to please Bryan Fuller and the network and everyone else. 

Q: Does Hannibal have special abilities, or is he fully human?

K: Just his intelligence. Bryan Fuller was very involved in character development. 

Q: Did Mads' background [as a dancer] come into play in the Tobias fight? The choreography looks like a dance. 

T: I wasn't involved in that scene. 

K: The issue with that scene was that there was a lot of distance to cover in the office. Bryan Fuller really wanted the ladder involved, but the ladder didn't originally move, so we had to edit the ladder to move. But Mads knows how to cover space. Demore was not so good at moving. 

Q: What qualifies as a stunt?

K: A stunt is any physical action. For insurance purposes, it's required to hire a stunt coordinator to supervise a stunt. This could be for anything from grabbing, tripping, anything physical. Even those little stunts use spine protectors and pads to keep the actors from getting majorly hurt. The police can get involved in stunt accidents. Lots of actors don't want to do stunts. With Mads, it was the opposite. He wanted to do all the stunts. We had to tone down some of the stunts to make sure he wouldn't get hurt. 

Q: Demore said he swung the piano wire into his crotch. Were there any stunt accidents or bloopers? 

T: Mads wanted to spin kick Mason in the pig barn scene. That took 15 takes, and he'd hit the stunt man at the same place each time. The stunt guy actually really hurt in the stomach, but to tease him, I kept telling Mads to kick him harder to make it look better. 

K: Fights take so long, I think car chases are much more fun. Fights require much closer choreography and more safety measures. 

Q: For the cliff fall, how did they not hurt each other while falling intertwined like that onto a pad?

K: Luck. Things like that are often messed up. It's easier to keep them in position with wires. 

Q: In the Tobias fight, we heard that the piano wire kept breaking. How did that impact the scene? 

K: The prop department built that. It was constantly being repaired on set, they had no replacement for it. There was a time restraint, so it wasn't built properly. 

Q: Was there an actor you wanted to work with but couldn't? 

T: I wish the show wasn't cancelled. The actors were all great to work with. We could have done so much. I had a lot of ideas, because I had to keep topping my own work. 

K: Bryan Fuller asked me what I wanted to do, and I said a car chase. I wanted to see more action in Hannibal. We could have had more and different action than on other shows. 

Q: As a stunt coordinator, is there any stunt or fight you just wouldn't do because of the danger level?

T: Air ram. 

K: An air ram is a piece of equipment that launches people like from a bomb explosion. 

T: I did a scene where I was hit with a dragonball z type strike, and landed wrong. That was the worst experience. People didn't know the danger of these things and would just build them in their garages. 

K: One scene, Mads was on the bucket? The bucket was built to be stable, but Mads said it wouldn't be realistic, he wanted it to be unstable. Then he wanted to look like he was straining on the rope. He was on that bucket for 12-14 hours that day, and it was really cold in the studio. He got sick. And his neck was raw from the pressure of the cable for days. 

Q: Anything you remember from the small, intimate fight scenes? 

K: Honestly, I forget a lot. It's been a while since I worked on Hannibal. I remember the window scene, with Abigail and Alana. We were really far behind then, and had to build part of the house. The director wanted sparkles in the shot, but Bryan didn't like that, so we had to remove the sparkles in a reshoot. We had a stunt girl for Alana. The window was scored so it would break. We usually used tempered or breakaway glass for scenes like that. We did 2-3 takes. Also, the hand under the bed scene was a disaster. When they built the bed for that scene, they forgot that someone had to fit under the bed. Because the set wasn't built right, we had to saw the wall out.

[jdsbloghoughtonhouserehab-blog]

Going Into The Matrix of Addiction

“Denial is a big part of drug matrix of addiction. And I certainly deluded myself a lot during active addiction. What I believed of myself. And what I believed of others, which included being deeply distrustful.”

by J.D

In The Matrix, young hacker Neo is in search of the truth about the world he lives in. Finally, after he makes contact with the mysterious Morpheus, he’s offered a choice: the red pill, which will show him what Reality really is, or the blue pill, which will allow him to live the comforting lie he always has.

I think addicts would have taken both pills. We being all about excess.

Now living in Recovery, thanks to the help of Houghton House, I need to control my desires for excess. Too much sex leads to carpal tunnel syndrome. Too much gym leads to too much real sex, which leads to too many crabs. Too much cake in the morning leads to insulin injections. Too much broccoli leads to too many hippy-flavoured farts.

Too much time on my computer leads me to feeling like I’m living in a virtual world, same as Neo. But that’s okay. Being an addict, I’m a natural blue piller, and I prefer that “reality’.

But that was taken away from me recently. I discovered I had a particularly nasty bit of malicious code (malware) on my laptop. Trying to get rid of it nearly drove me over the edge of sanity.

This actually happens, for one reason or another, fairly often. Imagine, if you will, a ninja. Dressed from head to toe in black, with only cruel eyes showing, and an ability to hide completely in the shadows. Able to bypass the guards at J.D Castle, while going about the business of espionage and the possible assassination of your financial affairs through stealing credit card details.

That’s a rootkit. Called “root” because they gain access to your root directory, they can make changes on your computer as if they were you. They also, like that popular (but dangerous) kid from high school, will organise a party at your house while your parents are away – the kind of party that makes you think, “Maaaybe this wasn’t a good idea.”

Then they invite the most unsavoury bunch of delinquents they can think of. For instance, viruses, those replicants who infect your machine much the same way as floating bits of DNA would infect your body and give you a cold. Or, if you’re a guy, man-flu.

Agent Smith was very much a virus in this respect. Hugo Weaving, the actor who played him, is Australian. And as anyone who follows the Hollywood scene would know, the Australians have been multiplying like viruses there for eons.

Viruses on your computer are just part of the line-up. Think also keystroke loggers, trojan horses, adware, spyware, elopewithyourdaughterware.

My machine would constantly go on the fritz. Applications I’d load up would hang. Haaaaang for a very long time. Or the screen would flash, as if to say: “I’m about to explode in your face!”, and then go back to normal: “Juuust kidding!”

This is incredibly stressful as my computer is how I make my living. I can’t go back to typewriters. What would I do without spellcheck? Ut wouldm’t look prretty.

Back to the rootkit metaphor, finding the f#$kers is really difficult. Deleting them more so. And they hide the existence of all the other malware so it’s like your parents are now back from holiday. They see their prize poodle floating away on a dagga cloud, but they don’t see the circle of reprobates puffing on the porch. They can’t understand why the pool is the colour of beer with a floating crate in the middle (and it isn’t that colour just because of the beer). Your parents certainly don’t see the cause of the broken bed in the guest room. They just know they never, ever want to take a blue light in there.

I spent a lot of time and energy trying to get rid of this thing, which I was barely able to detect. The logs your Windows system keeps will have their entries deleted by the rootkit to hide its nefarious activities. But Karspersky, my anti-virus programme, does keep its own logs, and they appear as incorruptible as an isolated government official on Mars. Through them, I saw dodgy entries of executable files being downloaded and run, files with names like imperfectlylegithehheh.exe.

I took it to a company I for the sake of decency won’t name here, but let’s call them Incredibly Incompetent. (Wait for my post on Hello Peter for more.) A gent there was asked to do a clean reinstall of the operating system. That’s when a copy of Windows is booted up through an external DVD drive, and the entire hard drive is formatted before placing a completely fresh installation of Windows on it.

Clean reinstall. I think that’s a lot like what Houghton House did for me. My own operating software was faulty thanks to the rewiring that happens through drug abuse and addiction. They performed the reboot I needed, to take me out of The Matrix-like fabrication I had spun myself into.

Denial is a big part of drug addiction. And I certainly deluded myself a lot during active addiction. What I believed of myself. And what I believed of others, which involved a deep distrust of them.

If anything, I’ve become a bit too trusting of people now as I walk the journey of recovery. This chap didn’t do a clean reinstall. He merely hit a button I could have pressed, and reset my system. Heck, I could have done the clean reinstall anyway, I just didn’t have access to a clean computer to download the Windows install files needed.

Enough of this technical talk. I found out later he lied, because the rootkit came back and when I revisited him, he let slip. Rootkits have this ability to hide in another section of the computer – and a system reset isn’t going to kill them. So they can then reinfect you. But, they “blue pill” you into thinking everything is fine. For awhile. Eventually, just as Neo sensed something was wrong with his world, I sensed something was wrong with mine.

Finally, I found my Morpheus. He wasn’t as suave as Lawrence Fishburne, but he wielded the screwdriver that opened my laptop’s casing like a katana, and after removing the hard drive, he cleansed it in a bullet-time salvo strike that decimated all enemy code into ashes. Of course, there could still be a rootkit lurking in the motherboard’s firmware. It could be blue pilling me into thinking I’m safe. I don’t trust oddities in my laptop’s behaviour anymore. I am more suspicious of sudden quirks than a counsellor at Houghton sniffing naughty behaviour (oh yeah, you’re not allowed to insert your “USB” into anyone’s port at any treatment centre – one of the reasons is, it could ruin your chances of keeping clean, more on this in a different blog post).

But at least I don’t live in the manufactured (by chemicals) world of active addiction. Like Neo, I’ve been liberated from my personally made Matrix.

Because at Houghton House, they teach you the truth about your matrix of addiction.

And the truth shall set you free.

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