Road House Remake Director Defends This Controversial Element

CGI fight scenes could become a new trend as Road House director Doug Liman defends the technique from the myriad of criticisms that have since been leveled against it. The movie stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Dalton, a former UFC-fighter turned bouncer, who is hired to protect a Road House in the Florida Keys from increasingly violent customers. The remake of the beloved original (starring Patrick Swayze) co-stars real UFC fighter Conor McGregor as the movie’s main villain, Knox, and, as a result, features relentless action and fight scenes. However, Liman used a relatively new and experimental technique to capture the fight scenes. While some fans hated the end result, the director says there is no going back.

Speaking to Empire Magazine, Liman discussed why he chose to shoot Road House‘s fight scenes using the help of CGI. While most other action movies capture the action in a single shot, using clever camera angles to make it look like the actor is getting punched, Liman shot each fight scene four times, swapping between the actors performing the moves against each other as well as hitting a padded dummy. These shots were then composited on top of one another to make it look like Glyenhall and McGreggor were actually hitting each other. The director defended the use of this technique, saying he gets “bored” watching obviously fake fight scenes, and wanted to “reinvent” how fight scenes are shot in Road House. He explained:

“I can’t spend two hours shooting fake bar-fights. I’m just gonna get bored. It’s not the loftiest aspiration to be like, ‘I’m gonna reinvent how fights are shot just to keep myself from getting bored,’ but when you’re making a movie like Road House, it’s going to have a lot of bar-fighting. How am I going to make that interesting for me, as a filmmaker?

Part of why shooting fights is a little boring to me is that you’re constrained about where you can put the camera and where you put the edits because people are not actually punching each other. I thought, ‘I just want to put the camera where I would put it as a filmmaker if they were actually hitting each other.'”

Doug Liman Wants to Shoot More Action Movies Using CGI

One of the biggest criticisms leveled at Liman’s Road House remake was about how fake the fight scenes occassionally looked. As smart as the technique sounded on paper, and as well as it’s been implemented in the past, in reality it gave each punch in the movie an odd, distorted effect, pulling audiences away from the action. While most audiences disliked the style, Doug Liman has fallen in love with it, and believes it is far superior to the techniques currently used by other action filmmakers. He said:

“Now I’ve done it this way, I could never go back. I look at other movies, and it looks so fake to me.”

While Road House received mixed reviews, it was popular enough for Amazon to greenlight a sequel. Jake Gyllenhaal is confirmed to return for Road House 2. Doug Liman hasn’t addressed whether he will return to direct the sequel, but, if he does, expect the second movie to feature the same CGI-style fight scenes.