Watch the Badass Single Take Fight Scene from DAREDEVIL and Learn How it Was Made
One of my favorite scenes in Marvel's Daredevil series was the final fight sequence at the end of Episode 2. The scene is a five and half minute continuous shot that features Daredevil taking on a gang of thugs in a hallway to rescue a boy, and it's one of the most insane fight sequences I've seen in a long time. It actually might by my favorite fight sequence in any of the Marvel movies I've seen so far. I love how brutal it is, and that our hero is portrayed as completely human, who gets extremely tired during the fight and has to take brief breaks before he gets back into kicking ass.
We have three minutes of that fight scene below for you to watch. After you watch the video we have a couple of quotes from showrunner Steven DeKnight and actor Charlie Cox on how that scene came about.
This is what DeKnight had to say about the scene in an interview with /Film:
"You know, when I first came onto the show, when I took over for Drew Goddard, who had to leave to do the Sinister Six movie, the first two episodes were written. So I got to the end of reading that Episode 2 thing and, you know, it was described as this long, continuous fight in a hallway. And I thought oh that’s great. I don’t know how the hell we’ll ever be able to do it, but that’s great. So the next key was our Stunt Coordinator and we hired Philip Silvera. If you remember the elevator sequence from Winter Soldier, he’s actually one of the guys in that sequence, which I didn’t know until much later. But he had worked with Marvel before. And he gave us a great test reel for the fight in the Episode 1 [sic]. He put together a little test and he said, that’s exactly it. I had always approached it this way as I wanted this world to be very grounded. So we wanted more Jason Bourne, The Raid movies and not a lot of flying wire CGI stunts. And then he was instrumental. He brought in a fantastic stunt guy, Chris Brewster, who doubled Chris Evans in The Winter Soldier. So he was our main double for Charlie for some of the more extreme stuff."
Cox is asked the same question and he reveals that is was in fact a single take shot:
"It was incredible. It was as a special day as it was to as the scene has turned out [sic]. We dedicated our whole day to it. The first half of the day was just the camera movements. And then we got into, it was as you know it’s one take, so we had to get everything right. Each attempt that we had at it. And it’s incredibly tricky because it’s not like a long tracking shot with two people speaking, it’s a long tracking shot with people punching. And if one punch doesn’t land, it no longer works. It ceases to work as a scene. So I think we did it 12 times. I think three of them we made it all the way through to the end. And one of them was the one in the show, which is kind of almost flawless. I mean, it’s very hard to pick holes in that."
Amazing.