AICN interview with Yuen Woo Ping

I liked this interview with fight choreography legend Yuen Woo Ping.  Here's my favorite part, as it's something I've been trying to ariculate for a long time regarding fights in movies these days.  You can read the whole thing here.

I’m not afraid of long takes, because long takes have more visual power. As you said, you can just sit there and watch the whole scene all together and it’s more enjoyable. The second reason is because it’s more realistic. It’s not fake. You can see very movement and every action in the fight through long takes. If it’s filmed with short takes, all you see is just the editing work, not the actual martial arts work. It’s just really important for you to see every movement is not fake. There definitely are a lot of difficulties with filming long takes, because you have to do it in sequence and all together, so the point is the actors must know martial arts. If they don’t know martial arts, I will train them to let them get into it.