“It wasn’t the comedy or the action, but this meditation on fate and this big existential question was at the center of it,” director David Leitch tells Daron James at the Motion Picture Association’s The Credits about his new movie Bullet Train. “I felt that was so subversive and irreverent in a big bombastic assassin movie.”
All entertainment today is “twists, violence, drama, no message — what are we supposed to learn?” Lemon, one of the assassins in the film, complains.
Bullet Train is exactly one of those movies, and as James points out, “that’s all it wants to be.”
The $90 million off-the-rails actioner stars Brad Pitt as Ladybug, an assassin hired to do a job while confined on the fastest train in the world. This non-stop ride of ultraviolence puts Ladybug on a headlong collision course with various lethal adversaries played in cameo by actors from Channing Tatum and Sandra Bullock to Michael Shannon by way of Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Brian Tyree Henry, Zazie Beetz and Bad Bunny. Even Ryan Reynolds pops up.
Polygon’s Joshua Rivera describes the film as “a Looney Tunes-esque actioner with a buzzy cast playing a batch of goofy assassins all on the same train to Kyoto, and all after the same briefcase.”
READ MORE: Bullet Train is the Looney Tunes version of John Wick we didn’t know we needed (Polygon)
Leitch co-directed (uncredited) the original John Wick with Chad Stahelski — a film that has earned them the title of “Godfathers of fight-vis,” in reference to a technique where complex fight sequences are filmed to visualize the action prior to shooting the real thing.
“Chad and I were definitely on the forefront of something that now every stunt team on the planet does,” he says to James. Leitch attributes his approach, in part, to his working with Hong Kong director Ringo Lam and directing a number of Jean-Claude Van Damme movies like Maximum Risk (1997).
READ MORE: “Bullet Train” Director David Leitch on His Breathless Brad Pitt-Led Action-Comedy (The Credits)
Before helming Atomic Blonde (2017), Deadpool 2 (2018), and Hobbs & Shaw (2019), Leitch had a decades-long career as a stunt performer, fight choreographer, and stunt coordinator. He was Pitt’s stunt double in Fight Club, Spy Game, Ocean’s Eleven, Troy, and Mr. & Mrs. Smith.
Director David Leitch was drawn to “Bullet Train” not because of the action or comedy, but because of what he calls “this big existential question” at the center of the story. Bryan Tyree Henry as Lemon and Brad Pitt as Ladybug. Cr: Scott Garfield/Sony Pictures 
Brian Tyree Henry as Lemon in director David Leitch’s “Bullet Train.” Cr: Scott Garfield/Sony Pictures 
Bad Bunny as Wolf and Brad Pitt as Ladybug in director David Leitch’s “Bullet Train.” Cr: Scott Garfield/Sony Pictures
While unconventional, Leitch feels the road from stuntman to choreographer to second unit director to director was perfect for him.
He views designing action as just part of the bigger narrative, always seeking to service the story and characters first. As he explained to Den of Geek’s Gene Ching, “I decided to start to lean into directing because I’d had a lot of time practicing these mini-stories within action sequences.”
READ MORE: How Bullet Train Pulled Off a Brad Pitt and David Leitch Reunion Years in the Making (Den of Greek)
Shooting On the Sony Lot
The production was one of the first out of the gate post-pandemic, but that still meant travel to Japan for principal photography was not an option. So, virtually the whole movie was shot on an LED volume at Culver City.
Production designer David Scheunemann built two full-sized train cars on the lot along with a train station set that could be redressed for each stop to Kyoto, while the LA Convention Center stood in for the Tokyo Station. A side street in downtown LA was transformed into bustling Tokyo streets replete with flashing neon signs, food stalls, and market stands.
A second unit did visit Japan to shoot footage for the LED plates of landscape viewed through the train windows. They used specialized array cameras filming routes similar to the Tokyo-Kyoto passage taken by the movie’s Shinkansen train.
However, these views were shot not from a Shinkansen but from vehicles on Japan’s freeways, traveling within speed limits that are significantly less than the 250 mph that the bullet train can reach. VFX supervisor Michael Brazelton and team sped the footage up to the train’s proper velocity. Lux Machina designed and constructed the high-resolution interactive background of the LED wall for the film.
| Listen: The Next Best Picture Podcast Interviews Bullet Train Visual Effects Supervisor Stephen James and Editor Elisabet Ronaldsdottir |
“The biggest source of pressure for me was how do we sell the scope of our movie when we’re shooting in a sound stage on the Sony lot in two train cars that are supposed to feel like a twelve car train,” Leitch says. “The immersive environment for our actors was really helpful. Immediately you’re feeling the rhythm and the pace of the movie, instead of looking at a blue screen and trying to visualize it.”
Scheunemann’s designs allowed for the two full-sized train cars that his construction team built to be interchangeable, allowing each train car to be redressed and repurposed to serve as multiple cars.
“The only way to design a good set is to integrate every piece of lighting that you will need later on,” Scheunemann says. “It’s about crafting a set that works visually and technically on every level. Every single light source has been designed, tested, discussed, and built into the set piece to cover almost every scenario in DP Jonathan Sela’s lighting design and David’s shot list.”
Indeed, the filmmakers relished the idea of imagining and choreographing the film’s copious fight scenes in within the tight sets.
“We were in such confined spaces that it lent us to do two or three moves and then cut, or two to three moves and change the camera angle. And that heightens the physical comedy in the fights,” the director told Motion Pictures. “It all had precise timing for the comedic beats.”
For all the ingenuity the virtual production involved, Leitch nonetheless says he’ll always be more of an organic filmmaker.
“I need to be inspired by a location,” he tells Collider’s Steve Weintraub. “I need to be inspired by the touching and feeling and seeing things. I honed my comedic chops with Deadpool, and worked on sort of a comedy balance and dramatic narrative on Hobbs & Shaw. And now I’ve taken away more of a technical idea of this sort of VFX virtual production, and I’ll use it. But at the heart of me is still the stuntman choreographer who goes to a location, is inspired by that fall potential, or by those arches, and I want to shoot them. And so, I think I’ll always be that.”
READ MORE: ‘Bullet Train’ Director David Leitch Breaks Down Filming the Movie on a Soundstage and Landing Brad Pitt (Collider)
Original IP But Not Totally Original
Leitch insists he wanted to make an original movie, and yet Bullet Train is adapted from the Japanese mystery-fiction book of the same name by Japanese best-selling novelist Kōtarō Isaka.
“What was great about Bullet Train is that the IP was relatively unknown there outside of Japan and so I could put my creative input on it,” he tells Simon Thompson at Forbes. “We’re trying to bust out some original IP that can land in the summer or spectacle space.”
The director envisages Bullet Train as the start of a franchise.
“I see it as a universe. I know that’s the buzzword that everybody uses, and they’re like, ‘We want to build a universe and all the spin-offs,’ but organically, on the page already, you had that. Not everybody’s left at the end of this film, but that doesn’t mean we can’t explore different times and places when these fun characters existed.”
READ MORE: David Leitch On Brad Pitt’s Superpower, ‘Bullet Train’ And Possible Sequels, Prequels, And Spin-Offs (Forbes)
Vox says the film’s novelty stems purely from celebrity cameos, adding “it’s pure escapism at its finest, with no message or lesson at its core.”
By Hollywood standards, it adds, “in this age of reboots and sequels and nothing else, Bullet Train counts as an original screenplay. It’s not; it’s adapted from a book, and more importantly, everything in it has been seen before.”
READ MORE: Bullet Train is deeply derivative, and that’s its appeal (Vox)