Was Cyril Raffaelli the director of the fight scenes?
He was his own choreographer. Cyril suggested various choreographies and highly different fight sequences to us, and we did our utmost to adapt them into the script. They were prepared far ahead of time. They were surrounded by stuntmen, genuine martial arts fighters, specialists in kung-fu, ultimate fighters and top-level boxers. In the small world of fighters, they all more or less know each other. Cyril has a special background: he started in circus school before moving on to martial arts. Only after that did he become first a professional stuntman, then an actor. So he brought to the film a large number of people from many different fields. The great precision of the scenes is really striking. Is it important to be rigorous? Given the blows they exchange, if they’re improvised, they’d really hurt each other. So, each blow was calibrated to the very fraction of an inch, both for the jumps and David’s Parkour. We wanted to make these actions as realistic as possible, and tried not to
