From the very first trailer for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Marvel fan were enamored with the “Bus Fight.” The trailer featured a few seconds of star Simu Liu fighting several men within the tight confines of a passenger train speeding through downtown San Francisco. As expected, the full scene in the film was even more impressive, considered by many to be one of the best action sequences in the entire franchise.
The cooler a scene like that looks, the more difficult it was to put together, which is certainly true of Shang-Chi‘s bus brawl. There was the challenge of fitting several fighters into one small space, made even more difficult by the fact that Florian Munteanu — the actor playing Razor Fist — is an absolute behemoth of a man. On top of that, Munteanu is a traditional boxer who had to learn to fight with an imaginary knife on the end of his hand. Fortunately, fight coordinator Andy Cheng and the rest of the stunt team were up to the challenge.
For Shang-Chi‘s VOD release this week, ComicBook.com spoke with Cheng about putting the film’s more difficult fights together, and he opened up about the factors that made the bus scene such a unique challenge.
“Florian as Razor Fist, he’s a boxer, but we need to train him using the weapon and the weapon’s not actually in his hand,” Cheng told us. “So he had to imagination the blade, how long the blade is. We had to make the green slate so he knew the distance, so Shang-Chi, Simu, wouldn’t get cut. So we need to make sure of those things to make everyone very fit, we had a lot of training.”
“For Florian, it’s a little difficult because he’s more like boxing, and then now he’s fighting with the weapon. And then he had to learn, with the other hand, how to move, so he had to adapt to it. And then also because the bus very narrow with all the hand-pulls and then with the passengers, and then just standing there his head’s already touching the ceiling. He’s a gigantic guy, so you imagine the big guy into a little box, so he’s had to do all the moves. For him, it’s challenging, so we had a lot of rehearsal with him. We had to bring him into the bus and start, ‘Okay, you swing this.’ ‘Oh, I hit my hand here.’ He had to learn all the moves in a specific room. So, for him, it was a little difficult.”
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is now available on Digital HD platforms and on Disney+.