Producers Shannon McIntosh & H. Daniel Gross Create New Wave of Martial Arts Flicks with Tiger Style Media
This interview was originally posted on Film Obsessive.
Shannon McIntosh and H. Daniel Gross are no strangers to the martial arts genre. McIntosh is a frequent producer for Quentin Tarantino who has showcased various styles of martial arts fighting throughout his filmography. Gross produced two films in the Halloween franchise and spent many years working on various martial arts TV shows like Martial Arts Minute and Rockin’ Rounds. Beyond their careers, the two seasoned producers are longtime lovers of all things martial arts. Together, they have formed Tiger Style Media, a new production company focused on a new era of martial arts cinema that will be released one week at a time on digital platforms.
Shannon McIntosh and H. Daniel Gross sat down with Film Obsessive’s Tina Kakadelis to talk all things Tiger Style Media in anticipation of the upcoming slate of films. The transcript has been edited for clarity and space.
Film Obsessive: For my first question, I want to go back in time. What was your first memory of a martial arts movie that really took your breath away and made you excited about the genre?
Daniel Gross: My first memory was a Shaw Brothers movie called Five Element Ninjas [directed by Chang Cheh] where there’s fire, sun, wood, water, and ground. It’s a very silly, slapstick Shaw Brothers thing. I was a big Marx Brothers fan at as a young child, so it was sort the kung-fu version of the Marx Brothers.
Shannon McIntosh: I think my first martial arts movies that I really fell in love were Iron Monkey or Fist of Legend. I watched so many martial art movies, but when I got to suddenly start working on them, it was just magical. I was determined that one day, when I left the studio world, I would actually make a martial art movie. I’ve made movies that have little sequences in them, but now we’ve made four feature-length ones, so it’s been fun and an adventure to bring to life.
Daniel: Iron Monkey, which Miramax had acquired to distribute, when I saw that, everything changed. What Donnie Yen does in that finale, fighting on the phone poles, it made me want more than anything else to put Donnie Yen in our next Highlander movie. I found him in Hong Kong and put him in the movie because of Iron Monkey.
Courtesy of Tiger Style Media
That’s awesome! How did Tiger Style media come to exist? How did you two come together to make these four films?
Shannon: Well, we go back, for years to our studio days. We both worked at a little company called Miramax Films and Dimension Films. We knew each other for a long time and Dan had been working on the slate [of films that would become Tiger Style Media] and approached me about partnering on them. I had worked on so many martial art movies at Miramax and then launched the label called Dragon Dynasty, I was well versed in martial art movies. When he explained that he thought about doing English language martial arts, I was like, game on, I get it. I’ll let him tell you what really was a genesis for thinking that English language martial arts movies need to be made.
Daniel: My story dates probably 10 or 20 years even earlier. I was working at a martial arts cable channel that was a movie channel. For that channel, we needed and acquired hundreds of movies, both English language direct video ones made in America and lots of Hong Kong ones. I had the opportunity to put them on in 75 countries and see how they did. I saw how the English language ones would beat the famous ones every time in every country. Standard definition versions of American movies beating high definition famous Hong Kong ones. It hit me people that love these movies. Without video stores, no one was making these style movies anymore. It seemed to me that they should be made with a little bit of a modern sensibility, in English, with English speaking leads.
Do either of you practice martial arts?
Shannon: I used to be a boxer, so that’s as close to martial arts as I get. Once I started having kids, I kind of left the boxing world a little bit. Still work out a little bit, but kind of quit, fighting and sparring, so to speak (laughs).
Daniel: Yeah, I did not either other. I’m a student of the film part of it. What you quickly learn is the martial arts in movies is closer to gymnastics than anything because the whole trick is not to beat up the other person. Just look like you did. That’s not an easy thing to be able to do.
Courtesy of Tiger Style Media
Kung Fu Games, Art of Eight Limbs, The Lockdown, and Lady Scorpions are the slate of Tiger Style Media’s first four films. Daniel, you had a hand in writing them and you both produced all four. Can you walk me through the inspiration for each? They’re connected by martial arts, but they’re very different stories that take you to different parts of the world as well.
Daniel: I wanted four standalone movies rather than sequels or an episodic thing and I put them into categories. One was a tournament, one was a strong female buddy picture, and another was an homage to my favorite iconic scenes. I also am a news junkie, so the last one is inspired by the story of how the Syrians gassed their own people. It occurred to me what would happen if a couple of the gas canisters disappeared when they were taking them away. Fred Weintraub, a famous kung fu direct producer who discovered American Bruce Lee, was a friend of mine, so it was a little bit of an homage to Fred. I wanted a prison the tournament one. I had worked with Cynthia Rothrock and had promised her I’d develop something for her. They were all ideas that came from different places.
Some of them take place in Asia. Were you shooting on location? Did the crew get to travel out there? What was the location scouting process like?
Shannon: Well, it was interesting. Pre-production was all done for us in LA, so we would get location stills and look at them. I hired a production services company in Thailand. We shot the first two movies that we made, Art of Eight Limbs and The Lockdown in Thailand, back to back. We hired crew and cast from there. Our stunt team was from there, too. We wanted to go to Thailand because some of the world’s greatest martial artists are there. We got to work with the great Seng Kawee . He was our stunt choreographer on both those movies and he did Ong-Bak. He really comes with a very skilled and wonderful team. The people that you see fighting in the films, Ludi Lin, Caity Lotz, and Leo Howard, those are all people from his team for the most part. We went out, had auditioned and cast some other people, but those are people he works with a lot. We were able to put some of the fighters in both movies, so that was fun. It became a second hand between all of us because we were used to working together. The other two we did in Mexico and we shot there and some of our stunt people got to be in a couple of the movies. Again it just becomes kind of a science where you work together, so you know how each other are going to react.
Daniel: My history with Thailand goes back a little further. In 2004 and 2005, I had done a couple four hour mini series there. One was a big pirate, Blackbeard one, and one was Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island. I had worked with the Thai crews, seen how great they were. I worked with this stunt team and kept my friendships up with them. I’d seen how beautiful Thailand is, so my number one goal in this entire project was to go back and make more movies in Thailand. That’s just what we did. I think we did a good job of making the country one of the characters in these film because it’s a very photogenic place.
Courtesy of Tiger Style Media
Some of the shots in The Lockdown when the siblings are exploring the city just makes you want to get on a plane and fly over there. With these fight heavy movies, what is the pre-production like? What is the length from start to finish? I imagine the choreography, the training, and everything takes a lot longer than other movies.
Shannon: There’s the pre-production when you get all of your crew ready and that’s generally about six weeks. There’s a pre-pre-production where you’re identifying and beginning to talk about what the fight scenes would look like with Seng and his team. For our actors, we had them go to Thailand and work with Seng and his team for a minimum of two weeks. The Thailand weather is very different than California where we live. It’s 100 degrees and 99.9% humidity. So, at the same time, they had to learn all their fights and acclimate to the heat as well. Leo, Caity, and Ludi all went and trained for that time ahead of when they had to start shooting. By the time you make it to shooting it, they’ve got it all down. There’s always things that come up on the day and the camera movements and all of that, but they know each other well, and it makes for a believable and exciting fight sequence. And, to tout Leo, Seng said he’s never had an actor who’s performed so well at martial arts. Leo is a black belt in a few things, but that doesn’t mean that as a stunt actor, that you know how to do that, and he landed and was perfect every time. Seng was so incredibly proud. Same thing with Caity. She does parkour and she has many styles of martial arts that she’s trained in before, but she doesn’t do that day in, day out. She did a lot of her own stunts on her DC show [Legends of Tomorrow], but she was great and fearless.
Daniel: I’m going to answer it a little more technically. I did a lot of research for these. I handpicked certain kicks that I wanted to make sure were in the movies like a tornado sweeping kick and Saenchai is one of the most famous real Muay Thai fighters who does a famous cartwheel kick. I would meet first with the stunt team and say, I want to make sure you have these things in the fights. They would do something called a previs where they would shoot with their phones with incredible speed, their version of what they thought we wanted. They’d edit it on the spot and show it to us. Then, we would say, more of this, less of that. When we all agreed on what it would be, then they would start training the actors on these things. One thing worth noting in The Lockdown movie, Leo could do this spinning kick where he does about a 720 spin in the air. It looks like wire work. It is not. Leo could really do this. We said, if you could do that kick, we will put it in the movie and it’s really spectacular.
You bring up something interesting in terms of having particular moves that you’re putting in the movies. Did you know which movie they were going to go into beforehand? Was there a different style of fighting that you felt better summed up the themes of Kung Fu Games versus The Lockdown?
Daniel: Well, the two in Thailand were both ring movies where they are fighting in a boxing ring. It had to be moves that worked in the context of a real fight. Kung Fu Games was completely different. I literally said, what are the most famous things everyone would know? The bamboo forest from not just Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but House of Flying Daggers and five others. I wanted to have the Bruce Lee yellow suit, nunchuck fight. I wanted to have the Hammer Girl subway car fight from The Raid 2. I wanted to have a tearoom like from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Those, to me, were the most iconic things. I wanted to have a Shaw Brothers slapstick fight. I went back to my favorite movie of Five Element Ninjas. I have to say, the production designer in Mexico did us proud because I was very specific about what I wanted, but he delivered beyond. The sets he built were just gorgeous and really sold what we were trying to push of image to the original. For the Shaw Brothers fight, you can’t tell the difference between the original and what we did. It’s just because of our love for what they did back then and try to bring it back. Not everybody knows the Shaw Brothers anymore, and they should.
Shannon: After doing three others, we really wanted to homage some of our favorite movies. We hope that people would, when they watch, the younger generation especially, we hope they go, well, what are these inspired by? Maybe they’ll go back and watch some of those wonderful oldies but goodies.
Courtesy of Tiger Style Media
That, kind of that kind of leads me to my question about the cast. You have this really wonderful mix of very storied martial arts actors who have a long career in the martial arts genre. Then you also have people like Caity who are most known for more, current superhero work. Also, you have people who are primarily stunt actors who are now getting to fully act. How did these casts come to be? How did you make those calls? Who were you so excited to bring on?
Shannon: I mean, every person that’s in the movie, we were excited to bring on. The casting process is pretty arduous on every movie because you really had to have someone who could act and could also do their stunts. It’s not like there’s a site or a casting director that specializes in doing that. It really came down to me and some of my team that have worked with me for a long time, scouring everywhere. Literally under every rock looking for the right actors that could also do martial arts and also hope that their schedules would work with the timing. The people that we did bring on who have not really acted before, like Jade Xu and Caitlin Dechelle, they had to audition. Caitlin, for example, she’s been in Wonder Woman and many other giant TV shows and movies. I kept finding a bunch of footage on her and then I saw a short that she did with my friend King Bach. She was so funny and I was like, all right, I’m going to find this young woman and we’ll see if she’s really interested in acting or if that was just kind of thing that she did for a friend. We had her read with our director of Lady Scorpion, Bruce Del Castillo, and felt that she had what it takes. She is probably one of the most decorated martial artists ever in the history of martial arts. She and Cynthia [Rothrock] share in that legend of women who are legendary martial artists turned actresses. Caitlin’s got two movies with us and I think she’s got a bright future ahead of us. There’s no one more agile and also just willing to do whatever it is it takes.
Jade Xu had been in a bunch of other giant movies as well. She’s who fights Scarlett Johansson in The Black Widow. I was watching all her videos. She’s born in China, raised in Italy, and I wasn’t sure our English was going to be. I finally got to talk to her, then had her do an audition, and we knew that there was no question that she could do whatever we needed her to do. She delivers. I think her performance is magnificent and the world has got a wonderful discovery in Jade Xu. With Leo, it was actually kind of humorous. His agent that he had just signed with didn’t even know that he could do martial arts. So I kind of brought that to his attention. He hadn’t done much of the martial arts on camera in a while. Lucky for us, he practices every day, so he was ready. In Thailand, we found Grace Vorananth who has been acting and doing some martial arts and fighting. We auditioned tons of women to play that role opposite Ludi and she was the winner. She’s beautiful, a good actress, and scares the daylights out of most men. So there we had Grace Vorananth.
What more do you need, you know?
Daniel: I want to put in a good word for one other actor. Shannon really is gifted at finding these people. Mark Strange is a British actor who fought in Ip Man under Woo Ping. He fought with Jackie Chan in The Medallion. He fit us in before he went off to do Deadpool & Wolverine. He’s just a gem of a good actor, a great martial artist, and a treat to work with as was everybody, but he was a particular friend for life that was great to work with.
ART OF EIGHT LIMBS & THE LOCKDOWN double feature in select theatres August 16. LADY SCORPIONS & KUNG FU GAMES double feature in select theatres August 23
ART OF EIGHT LIMBS on Digital August 20
THE LOCKDOWN on Digital August 27
LADY SCORPIONS on Digital September 3
KUNG FU GAMES on Digital September 10
4-Film Bundle on Digital September 10
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