Monkey Man ’s Fight Coordinator on How He Made the Fighting as ‘Dirty as Possible’

Photographs: Everett Collection, Getty Images; Collage: Gabe Conte

Monkey Man, Dev Patel’s fiery directorial debut about an underdog street fighter on a quest to avenge his mother’s murder, left us with some questions: Will Dev Patel be the next James Bond? Why does every punching-bag-training montage in a film invoke a primal urge to quit our jobs and pursue new lives as boxers? And how the hell did Patel stab a guy in the neck using only his mouth?

That last one, at least, can be answered by Monkey Man fight coordinator Brahim Chab. The 39-year-old Frenchman turned a childhood love of martial arts into a career as a stuntman, living in Thailand and working with ass-kicking greats like Donnie Yen and Jackie Chan. While Monkey Man was originally slated to film in India in 2020 with the stunt guys from John Wick, the global pandemic forced the production to pivot: it would now be filmed on an Indonesian island, and Chab would come onboard to helm the stunt team. The COVID-19 restrictions also forced Chab to make do with a team of just 12 stunt performers. “Right now I feel like, after doing this movie, I can do anything,” Chab tells me. “Because that was very tough.”

Early on, Patel had strong ideas of what he wanted the fighting in Monkey Man to look like.

“He always wanted to be very realistic, and he always wanted to be the underdog in the fights,” Chab says. “He never wanted to be the handsome hero who was going to get through all these guys without getting hit. He always wanted to show that he's a human being. That he's not always in control and he relies on everything that is next to him to get the job done. So if there’s something on the ground, like a piece of glass, he's going to use it to stab someone. If there is even a coffee mug—anything to get the job done.”

“Fight as dirty as possible,” Chab adds. “Like a scrapper.”

While Monkey Man does feature Patel’s character, the Kid, duking it out in underground boxing matches while wearing a monkey mask, the majority of the action happens in two extended fight sequences. The first, in the bathroom of a high-end club, is a messy, no-holds barred brawl with his adversary, police chief Rana—during which Patel sustained an on-set injury that would be the first of many.

“By accident he punched one of the mirrors, which completely destroyed his hand,” Chab recalls. “But then the crazy thing was his hand was not healing properly. It was swelling and swelling and swelling.” Later, when the bathroom sequence spills out into the streets and, eventually, into a brothel, Patel got hurt again. “By accident, my stunt guy dropped an ax on his foot, which broke two of his toes,” Chab says.

Chab kept movies such as The Raid, The Man From Nowhere, and other Korean and Hong Kong action cinema in mind when plotting out his fight scenes. The final showdown—which starts in the club kitchen and seamlessly works its way up to the penthouse—took inspiration from one film in particular. “The whole concept was kind of like the movie Snowpiercer—the train, it never stops,” he says. “It's really in a linear way. It doesn't stop. That's how I visualized it, like a train, just not stopping, and destroying everything that gets in his way.”

On the way up is that particularly ferocious sequence in an elevator in which the Kid kills someone by stabbing them in the neck with a knife he’s holding in his mouth. After the first draft, Patel asked Chab to come up with something more brutal. “He told me, ‘How about if you just bite the knife? Just bite it and let’s see how it goes.’” Chab remembers. “I'm like, ‘Seriously?’ So I just grabbed the knife and stabbed the guy, and he was like, ‘That's perfect.’”

To Chab, that moment—the knife, the neck—says it all. “It defines the desperation and the desire for revenge, a man that has nothing to lose and just wants to get the job done,” he says. “That single moment defines everything. That's the whole movie right there.”

Originally Appeared on GQ