Jon M. Chu used to play with GI Joes in his childhood – and now he’s directing one of the biggest action blockbusters to hit screens this year about the live action versions. Talk about a dream job. From dancing to intense gunfire, GI Joe: Retaliation offered him the chance to cut his teeth on creating a world filled with the heroic characters he knows so well – pulling all the different branding and perceptions together into one film designed to re-invigorate what it means to be a GI Joe. Danielle Muir chats to the director of GI Joe: Retaliation on what it’s like to mastermind your dream action flick – AND have Bruce Willis starring…
TOM: GI Joe: Retaliation begins explosively, killing off one of the first films major characters and introducing three new leaders – why did you decide to go with this approach to the sequel?
Chu: Well we definitely wanted to feel more grounded and have a human element to it. With Duke passing away, to me it helped realise that everyone could be in trouble. Anyone can die at any moment. It changed the dynamic of our movie that nobody was safe and I think the movie sort of needed that. I think it would have surprised the audience a bit, that it was a shocking thing that we would do that. A fun way to come into this movie and say everything that you think you know, you don’t.
TOM: Well that then made way for the three new leaders that you introduce. When you were casting those leads what sort of traits were you looking for in the actors that you believed embodied what it means to be a GI Joe?
Chu: Each one we wanted to be very different. Everyone has individual talents and individual characteristics, and that’s where we started. So we tried to find the most interesting people that would be great GI Joes. That was the main thing that each one had to be an individual. Obviously when you have a legend like Bruce Willis or an icon like Dwayne (Johnson) that sort of sets it up, in the same way that you have Adrienne Palicki whose this kick-ass soldier and then Flint (D.J Cotrona) is the up and coming new guy that may eventually become a leader. Any team, any family has pieces of those kinds of characters.
TOM: Obviously GI Joe started off as an action figure by Hasbro – was there any desire by you and the creative team, bar what was established in the first film, to make links between what the persona of the action figure had or did you want to change what it meant to be a GI Joe?
Chu: Well I grew up with GI Joes. I already had a blueprint of what Roadblock is and who Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow are with all these things. There was already sort of a DNA and at the same time we wanted to re-invent these things. That’s one of the best things about the GI Joe tradition, is that it gets re-invented every several years. It goes from the comic book to the cartoon to the toys to a new cartoon to the movie – every time that someone gets to re-interpret it, I think that’s a fun element. So we just wanted to put our mark in and give it a new signature.
TOM: Was it mainly due to cast availability that you decide to discontinue with so many characters from the first film or was it a creative move on your part?
Chu: I think it was both. It was a creative move in that really we wanted to give it a re-attitude. It’s not a reboot, it’s a sequel, people loved that first movie and we wanted to honour that. At the same time we wanted to have our own part to give the GI Joes a new voice for a new generation and we wanted to bridge the gap between even the original GI Joe – the twelve inch action figure – with Bruce playing the original Joe. It was fun to bridge all the different GI Joe brands into one, because the brand does span a lot of different things and people maybe get confused by what GI Joe actually is. One of the big questions was ‘who’s playing GI Joe?’ There is no GI Joe, that’s the group, so finally we gave an answer to that, that the original GI Joe would be Bruce Willis.
TOM: That’s a pretty good person to have as GI Joe.
Chu: Not too shabby.
TOM: One of the film’s star action pieces is the fight between Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes in the Himalayas. Tell me more about how exactly you and your team managed to film that scene because it looks like it would have been a bit of a struggle!
Chu: It was a big thing to take on, not something we’d just go out and shoot. This took months and months and months of pre-production, production, post-production, and it was literally all of the team coming together. Some guys actually building a zip-line thousands of feet in the air in mountains…
TOM: That’s a real zip-line that you’re using?
Chu: Yep. We were using some green screen but what we really wanted were to have real stunts so that you couldn’t tell where it crossed over. It helped dictate a lot of the CG stuff to know how we would actually shoot this, what limitations we had. Like how to add little errors and actions into the camera to make it seem more real. Chinks and bumps, so it’s not always perfectly in the centre. We didn’t want to make it feel like a videogame. We wanted to make it so you were there, up on that rope, especially in 3D, to give you that vertigo feeling that you could fall off the edge at any time.
TOM: It definitely worked for me.
Chu: We actually designed the thing with couches. All these couches together with our computer team. We would leap from couch to couch, positioning here, here and here. The CG guys would turn the couches into mountains, and we had a mountain expert who showed us how, if they were going to swing from one place to another, the physical things they would need to pinpoint everything – landing point here, landing point here. So we designed it as a group which was really fun.
TOM: So the villain in the film is Zartan, and his motive in the movie is world domination. This motive in villains is pretty similar to a lot of action films with this theme – how did you go about putting your own spin on the character, and was it also mainly the technology that he wanted to use that was different? How did you make that motive your own?
Chu: GI Joe has a lot of hero/villain archetypes, like a classic fairytale in a way. We weren’t afraid of that. What does he want? He just wants to dominate the world. How do you do that? Becoming the President of the United States. So the Joes job is to assassinate the President of the United States is a bold, bold move. And now Cobra would sort of become heralded as the GI Joes in America. It was fun flipping it around and playing it with people’s expectations. That’s how I really wanted to approach Zartan, I wanted him known as the master of disguise. To convince the American public and the world that he is their leader and they don’t even know it, we thought was really fun. We modelled it a little bit after Dr Strangelove, that exaggerated crazy.
TOM: What was your favourite gadget or gun that the characters get to play with?
Chu: There were lots of fun gadgets and cool vehicles that for fans of the toys – we always wait for the coolest new gun or new vehicle whether it was a tank or a helicopter with jet engines on the back…I loved the guided bullets, the smart bullets and the heat gloves that can melt fences.
TOM: So before GI Joe: Retaliation your best known for your involvement with the Step Up films, did you find that the skills you had shooting choreography came in handy for filming the combat sequences?
Chu: I think shooting action is very very different but I think a lot of logistics are similar. I think the lesson in not getting caught up in all of the logistics and being focussed on the story and what you need to communicate between an actor and the camera and the synergy that happens between that…if it was my first time using all those elements together I think I would get distracted very quickly. On the Step Up movies you need to put all your actual energy into on the set. Sure in pre-production you could prep all that stuff so logistically it’s going to go well. So you know that when you’re on the stage, you can flip things around and make it work with your actor, with your artist and that’s where the best stuff comes from. So sort of more than anything else it made me comfortable with juggling multiple things at the same time and stay focussed on the essence of what you’re trying to tell in the scene.
TOM: Is there anything you’ve taken from the experience of directing GI Joe: Retaliation that you’ll take into your future films?
Chu: Yes, for sure. I love that we got to create a world, and sometimes creating that world, you can’t do it alone – you have to have a lot of people. Amazing crew, production designers, cinematographer, someone like Bruce Willis and Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, Channing Tatum and to have them as your tools in this was like a big masterclass in how to make an action blockbuster movie. So to me, the crew is always number one. You have to have that support system because it is a collaborative, big effort. That’s why it can’t be done just on a small screen or smaller scale. It takes an army, and that’s my army.
