Questions

Good question. Yes, fight scenes can be pretty difficult to film. First, on the bigger budget movies, it looks easy-- but it's the pro's that make it so. Filming takes a lot of extra time on a low budget. To break it down, look at it this way:
* Take the page count of the script (let's say 100 pages).
* How many total shooting days? (SR was shot in 19, but let's say 20 for math simplicity sake).
* So on this example, you need to shoot an average of 5 pages of script a day, or when you reach day 21, you're going to have pieces missing from your movie.
* I can shoot "dialogue" scenes pretty quickly. A 5 page dialogue scene might take the whole day, maybe 3/4 of the day. A fight scene might read 1/2 page, and it could take half your shoot day. So two fight scenes and you've shot one page and killed a whole day. Have much more of that and now you'd better average 7 or 8 pages on a lot of other days and that can kill you.
* I do have a filmmaking friend that has done a martial arts movie very quickly, but he's using the same 4 or 5 stunt people (the bad guys wear masks) and they're from Asia and work extremely quickly. I watched them shoot a scene-- they shoot fights like I shoot dialogue. Amazing. They know all the tricks and in the hands of a good martial art director, it can movie quickly.

On my second film A Promise Kept/The Gunman, I had a little fighting and afterwards realized I missed the mark on some of the stuff. So I started taking martial arts (Kenpo, like Speakman, I'm now a brown belt). I think the fights in SR are better. But as always, I think I can keep improving. (During prepping for SR, I bought the Bourne Supremecy and watched frame by frame the fight in the apartment, taking copious notes).

To answer the other questions-- yes stunt people are generally used. Lou did all his own stunts in this movie as did Speakman. Also, you employ a Stunt Coordinator, who arranges everything. And maybe a fight choreographer. Most low budgets, the Stunt Coordinator will do this. Scott Roland, our SC did a lot. Speakman did his own.

As far as the sequences, I shot the action sequences with 2 cameras on SR and would take a couple of punches or strikes at a time, then change angles and then move on to the next bit. I would have liked to do some different angles (like they used in Bourne Supremecy), but we flat just didn't have the time.

Not sure what you mean by the flash style-- I didn't do that on this one. I did on Promise, because I was trying to hide some bad directing on my part.

Does that answers the questions enough??

Thanks, Dan