Warrior

Warrior is a 2011 American sports drama directed and co-written by Gavin O'Connor, shot in English. It was filmed in Pittsburgh, including at the Petersen Events Center, and in Atlantic City, where Boardwalk Hall stands in for the main venue of the tournament. Two estranged brothers enter Sparta, a mixed martial arts (MMA) tournament with a five-million-dollar prize, and outside the fights they have to cope with a broken relationship and their own problems. Tommy is played by Tom Hardy, Brendan Conlon by Joel Edgerton, and their father and trainer Paddy Conlon by Nick Nolte. The tournament opponents are played by real professional MMA fighters, among them Kurt Angle, Nate Marquardt, Anthony Johnson, Roan Carneiro and Yves Edwards, while Rashad Evans appears in the film as himself. Edgerton really fought Angle and Johnson on camera and, according to him in an interview for Den of Geek, both were worried about safety because fighting is their livelihood. The leads trained for their roles in boxing, muay thai and jiu-jitsu. According to Wikipedia, Hardy put on roughly 13 kg of muscle before filming and then used the same physique for the role of Bane in The Dark Knight Rises. Nick Nolte was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the role of Paddy Conlon. In 2015 an Indian remake titled Brothers was made.

Martial arts in this work

Origin

According to Joel Edgerton, director Gavin O'Connor stressed realism when filming the fights. In an interview for Den of Geek he put it this way: you learn the choreography, but then you try to forget it is choreography. According to him the fight scenes took two to three weeks to shoot, against reportedly only three days for The Fighter, and there were 20 to 30 shooting days in total, partly because of reshoots after his injury. During filming he tore the medial collateral ligament in his knee and could not box for six weeks. Edgerton gives the length of the shoot from memory, and we did not find it in the production materials.

Fight choreography

In an interview for Den of Geek, Joel Edgerton said the actors arrived in Pittsburgh two months before filming and trained seven days a week, fight training from 7:00 to 15:00 followed by strength work. According to Coachweb, the daily routine was two hours of boxing, two hours of muay thai, two hours of jiu-jitsu, two hours of choreography and two hours of strength training, and both actors were to reach 84 kg to look like middleweight fighters. According to the same source, Tom Hardy trained for three months with Patrick Monro under the motto "train movements, not muscles", and MMA coach Greg Jackson also worked with him. Before the film, according to Coachweb, Hardy had only limited fighting experience: briefly Brazilian jiu-jitsu while filming RocknRolla and about a year of taekwondo in London.

People and martial arts

• Gavin O'ConnorDirector
• Tom HardyActor — as Tommy· MMA (portrays the art on screen)
• Joel EdgertonActor — as Brendan Conlon· MMA (portrays the art on screen)
• Nick NolteActor — as Paddy Conlon· MMA (portrays the art on screen)
• Kurt AngleActor — as Koba· MMA (real practitioner)
• Nate MarquardtActor — as Karl "The Dane" Kruller· MMA (real practitioner)
• Anthony JohnsonActor — as Orlando "Midnight" Le· MMA (real practitioner)
• Roan CarneiroActor — as Marcos Santos· MMA (real practitioner)
• Yves EdwardsActor — as Houston Greggs· MMA (real practitioner)
• Rashad EvansActor — as sám sebe· MMA (real practitioner)

Awards

• Nominated · Academy Awards, Best Supporting Actor (Nick Nolte)