As most other members played with him relatively softly because of his rank, I thought he would be up for a higher challenge. Entering into the ring, as is characteristic of Capoeira’s philosophy of Malicia, I threw a kick at him right off the bat to catch him off guard.  As I expected he would, he responded with sound timing, got out of the way, and came right back in after me. After that, we were engaged, and despite occasional gasps from onlookers for ‘close calls’ we both found flow. (I found it in my needing to balance aggressiveness with control, and wanting to push him. He found it in the game itself.) As we played, I kicked full speed, so that if he didn’t move, he would catch one to the face. Finally, when he left himself exposed during a kick, I quickly shoulder checked him, knocking him off his balance, but not off his feet. With that , a more experienced senior member signaled that he wanted to enter the Roda.  As soon as I threw my first kick, he slammed me to the ground, and then walked out mumbling something about my bad attitude.

Although I could certainly understand the perspective of the senior (and as such took no personal offense to his action) the experience reminded me that there is another element that is also of utmost importance in finding flow- the teacher.

Oftentimes, in the world of both sports and martial arts, it takes ‘two to tango’, and the instructor can play just as large a role in a student’s ability to find flow as the student themselves. The unfortunate reality however is that not all instructors take the time to know and understand their students. Due to misinterpretations of their personalities and/or skill sets, many an instructor short-changes their own students ability to find flow (and consequently enjoy their training and stick with it) because they either over or (as I believed to be the case this time) under-challenge the student.

As aforementioned in the last blog, the importance of this balance is something that I’ve come to know well from my competition taekwondo days. When I became a state champion in under a week after receiving my black belt, I was told to compete more at the state level to get more experience, but the fact of the matter is, even if only due to my youthful arrogance, after that win, state and local level competitions were uninteresting. As such, my performance became lackluster, and I was told that I had no business trying to compete at a higher level, which prompted me to go to Korea on my own to seek out the best.

Unfortunately however, at that time, I was neither physically or psychologically prepared for the rigors of training full-time with world class athletes, and despite improving by leaps and bounds while I was there, I also got totally burned out.

Eventually, this lead me to believe that ‘I didn’t have what it took’ to be a high level fighter, (despite a room full of metals and trophies that would say otherwise) and to my retirement from competition altogether.

Had I not come to Japan, and stumbled into action cinema by chance, this experience more than likely would have been the end of my martial arts career.

 As martial arts instructors, (or teachers in anything, really) I think it’s always easy to fit students into generic, cookie-cutter molds and equate singular attributes such as age, stamina, fitness, or confidence with certain teaching styles. The great challenge however, comes in taking the time and energy to find the real person in your student; their strengths, their weaknesses, their fears and their passions. It is through this, and only through this that we can guide them to flow.

As my experience in that Capoeira Roda has shown, this is certainly not always the easy road to take, but as educational research scholar, K. Patricia Cross once put it, “The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate “apparently ordinary” people to unusual effort. The tough problem is not in identifying winners: it is in making winners out of ordinary people.”

Chuck Johnson is an internationally recognized martial arts action film actor and author. He currently teaches martial arts and action in Tokyo and Saitama, Japan and his next film Sukeban Hunters will be released this summer.

Chuck’s Action Demo Reel
www.chuck-n-action.com

As time went on however, and I continually worked towards my goal, I stopped focusing on the ground ahead of me. Of course it was in my field of vision, but instead my concentration shifted to the ebb and flow of the board beneath me, and visual concentration on the slope wasn’t as necessary.

By early afternoon, my awareness of the slope, my board, and the snow had caught up with the skill level necessary to achieve my goal, and make my runs effortlessly. It was at that point that I not only started to actualize peak performance- but also peak enjoyment.

I was in flow. Dr. Mihaly Csikszentimihalyi, the architect of the notion of flow defines it as  “an experience that is rewarding in and of itself, a state in which we feel we are one with the experience and in which‘ action and awareness are merged” For myself, this equated to runs that were going by in what seemed like a heartbeat. On each run, I was in a heavenly, almost blistful state of perfect balance, and it stayed that way for most of the afternoon. Unfortunately however, having achieved my goal on this slope, I started to get bored, and the feeling started to wane. Eventually, my mind began to wander and I (painfully) wiped out, and ended my heavenly experience with a crash. At that point, I decided that that meant it was time to up my game, and move on to the next higher slope, and the process began all over again.

Oddly enough, on a microcosmic scale, the pattern actually reminded me of my competition days in Taekwondo. My first local tournament was nerve-racking to the point of almost making me nauseous, but with time, experience, failure, and adaption, stepping into the ring became a natural process that I could acclimate to. With that acclimation came relaxation; and with relaxation came success. So much in fact that only 6 days after receiving my black belt I was able to sweep my division and become a state champion. After that peak however, I became bored competing at the state level and with time, I lost the focus again. My mind began to wander (in both training, and competition), and my performance became lackluster- until I decided to go Korea for higher level training.

It is this balancing act between challenge and relaxation that I’ve found is the essential element in not just effecting progress in the development of a skill, but in truly enjoying the process as well. As Professor Tal Ben Shahar put it in ‘Happier’ , if the difficulty of a task is high and our skill is low, we experience anxiety; if our skill level is high and the difficulty of the task is low, we experience boredom. We experience flow [only] when the difficulty of the task, and our skill level correspond.” Either way, without this balance, we get ourselves nowhere.

I had once read that only one out of every one hundred people who starts a martial art ever becomes a blackbelt, and that only one out of every one hundred black belts ever becomes a master. Perhaps, be it by design or by chance, that one individual out of a thousand who finds his way to mastery is not the toughest, smartest or the strongest- but that 1 person out of a 1,000 who found their flow.

References:

http://www.brainchannels.com/thinker/mihaly.html

http://books.google.com/books?id=oJ3uZnRm2gsC&pg=PA86&dq=happier,+flow,+Tal+Ben+Shahar&ei=WKKLS-n6MZX6lQT8mImYDQ&cd=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false

Chuck Johnson is an internationally recognized martial arts action actor, and published martial arts author.
He currently lives in Japan, and teaches action and martial arts in Tokyo, and Saitama. His next film, Sukeban Hunters will be released this summer.

Chuck’s action demo reel

What is an action director?

There’s a lot of different titles for people  who are responsible for creating a fight scene; the action director, the stunt coordinator, the fight coordinator, etc, so it’s easy to get confused. An action director is like the overseer. They are the ones who have to think about the drama portrayed by the action, the camera angles, the editing, and the sound.

How is an action director different from a stunt coordinator?

The stunt coordinator is the person responsible for making a scene that could be potentially dangerous real, and yet safe enough to execute. The action director thinks about the image of the scene from the script, and how it pertains to the movie.

Why are there no ‘action directors’ in the west?

The position of the action director is something that was developed in Hong Kong. In HK, the director and the action director works together. During the filming of dangerous scenes, the AD would have all the say. (Although it’s quite common for A.D.s to transition into directing as well.)The position of the action director started in Japan about 10 years ago, but it still isn’t really recognized in Hollywood.

Once Hollywood took an interest in the HK style of fight scenes, they tried to only import Hong Kong’s most talented stunt men, but it didn’t necessary work. Next, they tried to import action directors but they gave them credit as other things instead of recognizing the position. Even Yuen Woo Ping,who worked on the Matrix and is  one of HK’s most reknowned action directors, still isn’t credited as such in the film.

What are some of the challenges unique to directing action in Japan?

A lot of directors in Japan conceive of the action and the drama as separate things instead of seeing them as both integral parts of the film as a whole. They aren’t good at integrating the action scenes into the story.

If there’s action and drama in the same film, oftentimes the action is seen as holding less value, and the action sequences will be the first thing to get cut.

Sometimes a film will start off with multiple fight scenes, but the director will cut out the action sequences claiming that the bottom line is just that the good guy kills the bad guy.  For us as action directors however, the fight scenes are as important and as potentially emotion envoking as the dramatic scenes; and how the good guy kills the bad guy is just as important to the story as why he’s doing it.

Another challenge we face is that ,Japan, having the island mentality that it does, film makers always concentrate on making films that will appeal to the Japanese market, and aren’t as outward looking as film-makers in Korea or Hong Kong. That’s one reason why there hasn’t been a major international action hit here.

If they do want to make something to sell internationally, usually they try to make something that reflects Japanese culture so they go the route of history films instead of action.

This is our challenge as action directors here- to push the envelope of creating entertaining films that can reach farther audiences.

Do you prefer working on Japanese action films or international ones?

It’s easier to work in foreign movies. They allow you to spend more time because they have a bigger budget. At times, for something that should take a month or two to film we only have 2 weeks . Also, as a function of smaller budgets, the economics of the filming are often considered more important than the creation of true entertainment value.

Have you always wanted to simply be a director? Was there ever a time that you wanted to be an action movie star yourself?

Of course. Like a lot of people in Japan’s action industry, I got into it during the ‘Kung Fu Boom’ because I wanted to be like Jackie Chan or Jet Li. I started making Indy films with my friends (See Sample) and as we produced the films, I’d spend hours and hours studying Hong Kong films to see how we could produce fight sequences with the same level of quality.  In doing so, I realized that every action director has a certain taste, a flavor.  The same actor with the same martial arts ability can look completely different depending on the action director they are working under. The more I learned, the more exciting the process of creation became for me, and eventually, it outweighed my desire to be in the films myself.

What do you see for yourself and U’den in the future?

I don’t want to create a huge action team per se. The future vision that I have for Uden is for it to simply be a group of ‘creators’ who can work without borders and integrate different elements of film with action.

When people fight, there is always a reason that they are fighting. The more meaning the fight has, the harder hitting the impression needs to be. In the future, I hope that we can develop and pioneer new ways of expressing this idea.

Yuji Shimomura is the head action director at U’den Flameworks, and is one of the first action directors in Japan. He has worked on over 50 films to date in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, New Zealand, and Romania. Death Trance, (which I had the honor of appearing in myself) was his directing debut, and a smash hit internationally. Recently, I also had the honor of working under him again in the short film, Yassy.

English/Japanese Interpretation by Ichiro Gutierrez

]]> http://blog.gaijinpot.com/living-guide/legal/the-art-and-the-science-of-action-directing-interview-with-yuji-shimomura/2850/feed/ 0