xXx: The Return Of Xander Cage set visit report

This article comes from Den of Geek UK.

Most set visits start the same way: meeting with the publicists in the lobby of a hotel before jumping on a coach and heading to the filming location. Inevitably, given that the hotels are usually in major cities, those coach rides tend to involve waiting in traffic jams; so it was no surprise when – on our way to the shoot of xXx 3 – there was a long tailback on a bridge up ahead.

After an early start and an hour on a minibus, the prospect of sitting in traffic and losing valuable interview time wasn’t particularly welcome, but as we drew closer to the cars it became clear something wasn’t quite as expected. The vehicles were static, the engines were off, and not one of them was occupied. It finally dawned on us – this was the set.

While a great deal of filmmaking takes place on sound stages and studio backlots, location shoots form the backbone of feature film production in the 21st century – after all, why build an expensive set when city planners or Victorian architects have already done the job for you? And over the years I’ve been on sets in a variety of odd locations, ranging from medieval barns to Cold War submarines, and even a strip club in a provincial English town, but even by these standards, a closed off stretch of highway in a suburb of a small Canadian city was something of a culture shock. Although, one might imagine, not as much of a shock to me as it was to the cast and crew of the movie, who up until a few days prior had been shooting in the somewhat less chilly climate of the Dominican Republic.

We decamped from the minibus, and set up for the day in a tent underneath the bridge that was being used for filming, and as we stood around making small talk with the unit publicist, the call of “Action” was heard, and the cast and crew, out of sight, but still audible on the bridge overhead, began a take. From our vantage point, it was hard to tell what was going on up there – a quick shout here, a sudden thud there – until out of nowhere, Donnie Yen toppled over the side of the bridge, and was suddenly dangling above our heads.

Actors on big budget movies may claim to perform their own stunts all the time, but usually this isn’t the case. Even if they want to, the practical realities (their lack of experience, the high cost to insure them, and the need to have them uninjured for the remainder of the shoot) usually conspire to rule them out of all but the most minor of scenes. Not so, it seems with xXx 3. At least, not in the case of Yen.

Shortly afterwards, with the shot wrapped, and now firmly on the ground, Yen gives a bit of background to his spectacular introduction, “Yeah, I just jumped off a bridge. He’s chasing me, well basically we’re chasing for the same thing, to see who will get there first. I’m kind of teasing him a little bit, catch me if you can.”

Used to this sort of stunt from his years working in Hong Kong cinema, Yen is utterly unfazed by the experience, and his answer, while perfectly in keeping with the man’s cool, confident and understated manner, doesn’t really shed a lot of light on the scene he’s currently filming. Instead that task is left to producer Jeffrey Kirschenbaum:

“The bridge-jump here is the start of it, they’re trapped in traffic and have to get across town to where the bad guy has the MacGuffin, and is going to use it to bring a satellite crashing down onto the city. So it’s a race between Donnie Yen and Vin to get across the city. You’ve seen these chases, we did one in Fast 5 through the barrio of Rio, but this is one through the busiest intersection in the city.” He reveals, “The two of them are being chased through traffic, they’re getting hit, they’re jumping over cars and under cars and going through, grabbing each other – there have been car chases, there have been foot chases, but to have a foot chase in an asteroid field of speeding cars,”

This sequence is one of three major action set pieces throughout the movie. For Kirschenbaum, the main appeal of xXx, certainly for international audiences, is the action: “One of the things Hollywood still does really well are these big action movies that translate globally. What was really critical was ‘what can we show you that you’ve never seen before?’”. Consequently, in addition to the sequence we’re watching being filmed, there is also, “a motorcycle chase that begins on land and goes over the water.”, and “a zero-gravity fight on a C-130 airplane.” Going into a little more detail, Kirschenbaum enthuses: “It’s plummeting and there’s no gravity, so when you shoot a gun it acts as a propellant and shoots you off backwards to the other end of the plane. That’s a phenomenal sequence that you haven’t seen before.”

And while the crew didn’t go so far as to film their aircraft fight in a C130 that was really plummeting to the ground, the amphibious motorcycle sequence was largely practical: “We have these amazing motorcycles that actually do it, they come out of the jungle and into the waves, and it’s a tremendous moment. We have Donnie and Vin on these motorcycles, in water”.

Surprisingly, perhaps, it was this sequence that presented Yen with a genuinely new experience: “I’ve done a lot of action movies! But riding on a motorcycle … there will be a lot of stunts, I’m not a motorcycle specialist. Riding on a motorcycle at that speed, the whole design and choreography of having me riding, with Vin chasing across water and up the land, all kinds of really wild stunts, it’s very spectacular. That’s something that I’ve never done before, something I find very challenging and exciting.”

Yen is just one of many cast members in xXx 3 who have risen to prominence through their work in ‘international’ markets. Featuring alongside the star of Hong Kong cinema are Australians Toni Collette and Ruby Rose, Thai martial arts movie star Tony Jaa, Bollywood star Deepika Padukone, Chinese-Canadian actor/singer Kris Wu, as well as Brazilian soccer legend Naymar and British UFC champion Michael Bisping.

This international casting serves two purposes. First, much like The Fast And The Furious, it provides characters that a wide range of audience members can associate with; as Jeffery Kerschenbaum puts it: “If you take a movie like Fast And Furious for example. There were a few people in the pantheon of that movie that different audiences would say “that’s me!” If you’re not making a movie that’s relevant to your audience, then not only is that bad storytelling but it’s bad business”.

Secondly, it helps to ensure that there is an audience for the movie internationally. The actors brought in are successful in their own countries, and this means they have their own fans who are likely to see the movie. A point that Donnie Yen drives home: “I think it’s wonderful, I think the world’s getting smaller and it’s very smart for the producers and Paramount to put together all the talent from around the world and make it a very diversified, multicultural and a sure winner. You know the audience will love it, because you’re not only covering many countries – you know in the film industry today, in marketing, that’s the strategy. You can’t only cover one country anymore, you’ve got to have an international hit. One of the elements is having a lot of cultures in one film, and that’s what we have. I think it’s going to create a lot of attention.”

It’s a subject that Diesel himself discusses when we catch up with him on a soundstage the following day: “When I became a producer on Fast and Furious, something I wanted to do was bring a new form of multiculturalism to the Hollywood blockbuster. I wanted to prove a point that a family table could consist of people of all different nationalities, and that an audience would embrace the idea of an international family. What I wanted to do on the onset of xXx was one step further. In part, because of the success of Fast And Furious 7 I started to realise how these movies play on a global scale. When we make films in Hollywood it’s so easy to think that we’re making them for Hollywood, and so many of us have been thinking that for so long. And then after travelling the world and seeing that these Fast And Furious movies were playing on a global scale, I thought that it would be wonderful for xXx to lead the way in Hollywood, and cast the movie on an international scale. Beyond the borders of Hollywood, beyond the casting directors of Hollywood, beyond all the actors that have migrated into Hollywood. Literally going into other film markets.”

One of the keys with this sort of casting is to avoid tokenism. Movies like Iron Man 3 have featured actors who are enormous names in their home countries, and used them simply as featured extras. The team behind xXx 3 were keen to avoid that, as Kerschenbaum explains: “Deepaka has for a long time been at the top of her game in India and it was really important to her that she didn’t come in and just play the damsel in distress. She is bad-ass, and she is every bit Vin’s equal in this movie. It was the same with Donnie Yen. He’s such an icon in China, they have him on stamps. Ip Man was such a tremendous movie, he wasn’t going to come in and play a two-dimensional villain. That’s why it feels like it was more than just a ploy to slot in those characters.”

The only downside to this is that it presents some logistical issues. “This has been really challenging because we have so many cast members who are number one on the call sheet in their respective worlds, and trying to get their schedules worked out meant that we had to shoot out of sequence to accommodate these schedules,” Kirschenbaum explains, “We had to go to Toronto, then to the Dominican Republic, then come back to Toronto. Usually you want to minimise your moves, but having a big famous ensemble cast, yes it’s a strength, but it’s also challenging as far as scheduling goes.”

When we meet Diesel it’s in the much more civilized surroundings of a soundstage in Toronto’s branch of Pinewood Studios. More civilized for us, but perhaps less so for Diesel, who spends most of the day dangling from a trapeze, hurtling along a wire at a rate of knots. From our perspective, every take seems spot on, but every time it seems like Diesel is done, the crew reset for another go. When Diesel finally gets his feet on the ground, we ask how it feels to be back on the set of a xXx movie after all these years. His response is simple: “How do I feel right now? Dizzy” before going on to explain, “I know this is a bad thing in Hollywood, but I’m a perfectionist, and I walked in to do this, one of many incredible, spectacular stunts, I saw you all here, and I said I was going to talk to you, and I know some of you have to leave, and I wanted to make sure that I honoured my press.”

While Diesel comes across as a confident, tough as nails hero in his movies, in person, after a tiring morning repeating the same stunt over and over he seems much calmer, much more introspective. He muses on the reasons for coming back to the xXx franchise, and the character of Xander Cage: “I remember feeling as though a lot of the fans of the first xXx were let down that I didn’t return for the second one. That was at a time, earlier in my career, when I would turn down movies because of the script, because I had that old-millennium philosophy that the script has to be perfect before you film the movie.” He confides: “There was a point in my life where I realised that the audience had more faith in my ability to course-correct once we got in production, and that they adopted and owned the character more than my whole philosophy or process.”

While for Diesel the logic of returning to the franchise was to make up to fans for his absence from the first sequel, for Kerschenbaum, the justification had much more to do with the place in the market: “When the first xXx came out, it was a response to James Bond. You remember at the beginning there was a spy in a tuxedo and he didn’t fit in anymore. Xander Cage was a response to the fact that, that portrayal of the world of the secret agent was out of touch with the audience, and so here came Xander Cage, this multi-ethnic hero who had an extreme sense about himself. I think that’s why xXx was a bit of a phenomenon when it came out, it was such a breath of fresh air.”

Since the first movie, the spy genre has been through a huge change. The Bourne series, and to a lesser extent, even the Bond franchise have made things much grittier and more immediate, while the level of spectacle on display in the Mission Impossible sequels is second to none, while movies like Kingsman and The Man From UNCLE have added a sense of fun that so many movies in the genre completely miss. This is something that Kirschenbaum is fully aware of, as he muses: “If we’re going to do another xXx movie, then why?”

Ultimately, though, his logic for another movie starring Xander Cage is simple: “Nobody looks like Xander Cage”. And perhaps, with its focus on an international audience, and ensuring that no matter where they’re from, viewers have someone on screen they can relate to, that’s reason enough.