Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
At this years New York Comic Con,Daredevils new showrunner, Erik Oleson, made a daring boast.
Remember the hallway fight?
hetoldthe huddled crowd at his shows official panel.
Yeah, we top that.
It was natural to doubt him.
And yet, Oleson just might be right.
Its as exhilarating as it is seamless.
There are no secret cuts or CGI stitches.
As proud of the sequence as Oleson is, he cant claim credit for the idea.
That honor goes to the episodes director, Alex Garcia Lopez.
I just kept reading it and it just kept yelling at me,This should be a oner.
Olesons interest was piqued, but he didnt initially get the extent of what Lopez imagined.
Erik was like, So wait, youre gonna cut it there, right?
Like, we get to that moment, youre gonna cut?
And I was like, No, I think we should keep going.
Oleson says with a big belly laugh.
But even a showrunner has bosses.
I had to call all the financial people and say, Guess what?
Were gonna stop filming for a day but have the entire crew there to rehearse, Oleson says.
From television production, thats definitely caused some agita.
The higher-ups in the bureaucracy were initially skittish.
I was like, This is 12 pages of script, Lieber says.
Hes like, Yeah, I know!
Im like, Yeah, it is!
Lieber and his peers discussed the idea with trepidation.
Our camera [operator] was really excited about it.
Alex was beaming about it.
We were like, We should just do it.
We should just try it.
We have to set them up for success with this.
Lopez and Oleson got the go-ahead.
Of course, then everyone had to actually pull the thing off.
The team converged at an abandoned prison in Staten Island and got to work.
Lopez had directed fight scenes before, but nothing on this scale.
What Alfonso Cuaron did inChildren of Menwas obviously a very big reference for this, Lopez says.
But he didnt want them to know when they were watching Coxs stunt double, Chris Brewster.
That required some delicate and lightning-quick choreography, which the stunt team started practicing even before the main rehearsal.
The stunt guys came up with some very clever ways of doing it, Lopez recalls.
So theres these constant Texas switches happening throughout the oner.
How to pull that off?
We put little glasses of blood in all these specific places, Lopez says.
That way, Charlie could drink and then hed get hit and then hed throw up blood everywhere.
Those cameras are pretty bloody heavy, Lopez says.
But there was a factor that played into his confidence: the insanity of a prison riot.
Rehearsal was completed and the big day arrived.
We had 12 hours to do it, but not really 12 hours to do it, Lopez recalls.
It was a very physically demanding fight and you cant really push your guys.
After four or five times, things can start going wrong when fatigue starts to play.
You could get injured.
So we knew we only really had four or five times to really nail it.
Slight reassurance arrived early.
The first take we did, we completed it, Lopez recalls with a laugh.
From beginning to end.
And then, as he recalls, it kinda went a little bit sour.
They kept running into problems with the first fight portion, which takes place in the prisons doctors office.
Take two, three, four, we just kept hitting this wall, Lopez says.
The stunts kept misfiring something that wasnt surprising, given the presence of three Texas switches in the sequence.
Thats when, suddenly, everyone started to go,Oh my God, oh shita little bit.
As daylight waned, everyone sweated bullets.
So we had one more go.
And just like that, everything went off without a hitch.
It was this eruption of glee that they had pulled it off.
It was actually Charlie Cox who told me.
(The take was eventually cut down a bit on the front end for the finished version.)
And I was like,Holy shit, they got it.So then I yelled, They got it!
I probably sounded like Janine fromGhostbusters, just yelling.
Everyone was like, Holy shit, they got it, they got it, they got it!
A victory lap was in order.
I watched it and my jaw was on the floor.
Every single moment of it.
He was especially impressed with Cox.
Charlie was brilliant, Lieber says.
When he gets in that cab, he is legitimately exhausted.
At take six or seven, Charlie was fucking exhausted, and understandably so, he recalls.
All of the actors to remember their lines.
Or, to put it another way: It was fucking nuts.
