The Best Action Scenes In Nobody According To Its Stunt Coordinator - Exclusive
The visual language of action movies, especially, revenge movies, is a mixture of movement and pain. When John Wick (Keanu Reeves) strikes the concrete after his dog is killed in the first film, we feel it. And when we see him pull out those weapons from a career he'd once swore he left behind, we are aware of the pain to come. And boy, oh boy, does it come.
And since the producers of "John Wick" were on a role, they decided to keep that movement going forward with someone new to bring — and receive — the pain: Hutch Mansell (Bob Odenkirk) in "Nobody." And while Mansell, like Wick, is a deadly dangerous ex-assassin finding himself unexpectedly pulled back into the life, there's a massive difference between Odenkirk and Reeves. With decades of action movies under his belt, we anticipate Reeves as an action star like one might anticipate a punch. Odenkirk, on the other hand, with a background in comedy and drama, makes for a surprising and surprisingly brutal action star.
Looper spoke with "Nobody" stunt coordinator Greg Rementer about the best and most brutal moments from "Nobody."
Knives in legs, baseball bats in faces, and Odenkirk in the trunk of a car
"There's a couple that I really, really was proud of on 'Nobody,'" stunt coordinator Greg Rementer said. "When Bob kicks the guy's knife into the guy's leg, it just makes me want to throw up a little bit. When Bob goes out the window, his double's leg gets caught up on the window and it just looks like it pulls his leg out of the socket. It's just violent. It's really dirty. It's real glass. There's no way around it. It's just painful. In the house when he's beating the guys with the baseball bat, just the sound of a baseball bat hitting a person's skull is awful. It's terrible."
Terrible is a term of affection in this case, of course. The whole vibe of revenge films like "Nobody," to borrow from John Mellencamp, is "hurts so good." And "Nobody" does not go halfway with the hurt.
"One of my favorite gags doing the movie, just because I love how it connected the two, was when RZA wrapped the guy up in the barbed wire and sent him out the window, and that guy lands on the ground next to Christopher Lloyd," Rementer said. "That was especially a really fun moment, I think, because I always love trying to find a challenge of taking some stunt and tying it with two storylines, and that takes good planning and again, a great team to achieve that."
There's even a scene that didn't make the final cut of "Nobody" that Rementer is hoping to incorporate elsewhere. "We created this piano gag where we were going to smash a guy's face into a piano and I was sad it didn't make it. We're going to save that for another movie," Rementer added.
But if there's one scene that seems to stand out, it's when Odenkirk's character Hutch gets stuck in the trunk of a car. "One I'm really proud of is we crashed a car into a telephone pole," says Rementer. "And then I think most people overlook the moment, but you'll notice the car flips, lands, and all in one shot without cutting, Bob comes out of the trunk and then continues around. I won't tell you how we did it, but I was really proud of it, because it's really exciting to flip a car and have Bob Odenkirk pop out of the trunk all in the same shot."
"Nobody" is now available on demand and on Blu-ray and 4K Ultra HD.