It’s not much of a stretch to say that legendary stunt performer and action director J.J. Perry helped shape most of the significant action movies and franchises that have come out this century. He’s worked in the biggest modern movie universes imaginable — Marvel, DC, Avatar, Fast and Furious, John Wick. He designed the action on smaller beloved genre projects like Warrior and Undisputed II: Last Man Standing, and even provided strong action beats in comedies like Spy and Murder Mystery 2.
Perry finally got his chance at directing a feature in 2022: the breezy throwback vampire action-comedy Day Shift, starring Jamie Foxx. Two years later, he’s back with his sophomore effort: the delightful action rom-com The Killer’s Game, starring Dave Bautista and a legion of Perry’s friends and collaborators from the action world.
The movie follows Joe Flood (Bautista), a highly capable hitman with a big crush on ballet dancer Maize (Sofia Boutella). While their relationship is still budding, Joe learns he has a terminal illness, and puts out a hit on himself to end his suffering quickly and hopefully get an insurance payout for his new love. But surprise! His doctor gave him the wrong diagnosis, and he’s actually perfectly healthy. With a new resolve to live, Joe has to fight off a swarm of deadly assassins and hold onto his vision of his future.
Joining Bautista and Boutella are Ben Kingsley as Bautista’s handler Zvi, Pom Klementieff as a rival handler, and Terry Crews, Scott Adkins, Marko Zaror, Lee Hoon, Shaina West, Lucy Cork, and WWE wrestler Drew McIntyre as some of the assassins. For action fans, that list is a who’s who of people who kick ass. Combine that with Perry’s unique eye for action design, and you have one of the most enjoyable movies of the fall.
The narrative setup allows for lots of room for expression from Perry, both in the characters and the action design. Zaror’s character, Botas, is a particular standout, a flamenco dancer who fights with spurs on his boots and headphones in his ears. So are Adkins and McIntyre, who play a pair of nearly unintelligible Scottish brothers (subtitles and all). There are motorcycle fights, barroom brawls, tactical shootouts, intense martial arts action, and everything in between. At its best, The Killer’s Game feels like an action anthology series, following the protagonist as he fights his way through the genre, with Joe and Maize’s romance providing a heart at the center of it all.
Polygon spoke with Perry about his approach to the movie’s unique premise, why wrestlers (and Bautista in particular) make such great movie stars, his inspirations for the wacky cast of characters, and his love for matching old-school aesthetics with new-school technology.
This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.
Polygon: Where did this project start for you?
J.J. Perry: Like 12 years ago, I got a script called The Killer’s Game, and they were looking for a stunt coordinator. Somehow that went away. And then three years ago, I got the script again, and they were looking for a second unit director. I was finishing up my first movie, Day Shift, and I invited [producer] Andrew Lazar to see my director’s cut while we were in the editing room. He was like, “Dude, I want you to direct [The Killer’s Game].” And that’s how it all kind of came to me.
Getting the movie was a big win, but getting Dave Bautista to star in it was like winning the lottery for me. It all just kind of fell together after that.
I imagine some of it is his star power and what he brings to the screen, but also, having someone like him attached to the project has to help give it more visibility.
I met Dave in the parking lot of 87eleven [Action Design] when I was prepping John Wick 2 and we were training Keanu [Reeves]. He came to meet Chad [Stahelski], and I chased him out in the parking lot and was like, “Dude, I’m a big fan.”
I’ve worked with a lot of pro wrestlers over the years. As a stuntman, I worked with Hulk Hogan, Randy Savage, just a host of them. But I always felt Dave was special. He has something else. When he came aboard, we had a chat, and I think I won him over by telling him that I’m not setting out to make an action movie. I’m setting out to make a love story.
For me, coming from the action world, I wasn’t that concerned with the action. I can close my eyes and throw the ball and hit it with action. It’s my neighborhood. I know where I’m going. I need to get the love story and the characters right in this movie, and the comedy. I need to hit that. Everyone’s going to expect the action to be good. I’m not really worried about that part, because I know it like the back of my hand, and I’ve got an amazing action team, and all we do is produce stunt biz constantly.
But getting the story right is, I think, what got Dave, and Dave brought Sofia [Boutella]. I was scared shitless of the Maize character. I was like OK, who am I gonna get, a badass actress that can dance, that has chemistry with Dave? And he said, “Oh, I got this friend that I did Hotel Artemis with.”
If you ask an actress in Hollywood if they can dance, they’ll all say, “Yeah, I can dance.” But I don’t mean tap dance in the fourth grade. I’m talking about really being about to dance. Sofia, before she became an actress, she was a dancer, and she’s an amazing actress. Dave also brought with him Terry Crews, which was super cool. We had a hard time casting the Lovedahl role. I’d worked with Terry on Expendables 3. I love him, but Dave, he’s dear friends with him. He called him, and boom, Terry Crews is on a plane.
I got on the phone and called all my friends — Scott Adkins, Marko Zaror, Pom Klementieff, Daniel Bernhardt, Lucy Cork, Shaina West. If you’re going somewhere to get into a damn street fight, what do you do? You call your homeboys and your homegirls to come help you. When you stack your deck full of aces, all you’re holding is aces.
What is it about working with wrestlers in action roles that you like, and how has Dave Bautista distinguished himself there to you?
If you know the movie business, more movie stars have come from WWE than anywhere else. More than football, more than MMA. There’s a reason. They are live-show performers. They’re acting to the guys in the nosebleeds. So it has to be big, and they have to be able to retain the choreography. It is a breeding ground for action stars.
I think that Dave, on the acting level, has really surpassed any and all expectations for me. I know him, and it’s unfair, because he’s a great actor, he’s super talented, he’s super intelligent, he’s super kind, he’s generous. I want to be him so bad it makes my damn teeth hurt. For me, it was a career high to get to do this with him. I just finished another one with him too, [a sci-fi comedy] called Afterburn. We’re cutting it right now.
You mentioned Day Shift earlier, which has a very different approach to action than this one. It’s vampire-centric, you’ve got the contortionist gymnastics stuff going on. The Killer’s Game is a different playground. What was most exciting to you about that as an action director?
Because I direct so much action as a second unit director, it’s about the characters. How do I make the characters different, and create problems for my protagonist, and show how he solves them? And it’s also the set-pieces. Like, the motorcycle fight. We were supposed to do that in a construction site. Do you know why we shot it inside? Because when you film in Budapest in July, you only have four hours of darkness. So I didn’t have the time I needed to shoot for 10 hours straight.
We shot all of that motorcycle business in two days. I didn’t have a lot of time, so I needed to focus on my strengths. But that venue created a lot of opportunities for the motorcycles to do stuff that you might not have seen before. That’s your job, too, is not to regurgitate things you’ve seen. So when I’m directing action movies, I don’t watch action movies. I watch comedies and horror movies.
One of the things I enjoyed most about The Killer’s Game is how the premise allows you to use a lot of different action tools. You get to cycle through action subgenres throughout the movie. When you read the script, did that stand out to you, or did that come naturally in the process?
The movie that I read 10 or 12 years ago and the one I read three years ago are quite a bit different. When we decided I’m directing the movie, I went out and got [screenwriter] James Coyne, who’s a friend of mine, and we rewrote. We put in the Goyang character, we put in the Botas character, we put in the party girls, we put in the unintelligible Scottish guys.
We took some characters out, because that script had been around so long, you’d see people had taken their characters and put them in other movies. So I put my own DNA in it. We wrote those things with Scott Adkins in mind, with Marko Zaror in mind, with Lucy Cork and Shaina West in mind.
With Botas — when I was a young guy, I was competing in taekwondo a lot. There was a guy in my gym that, when he put on his Walkman, if you were sparring with him, he would beat the pants off of you, because he was so into the heavy metal. But when he had the Walkman off, you could walk all over him. I was like, I need to do that. Marko, he’s a special character. We almost lost that character, too. We didn’t have a lot of money.
[With the Mackenzie brothers], I worked in Scotland on F9. We locked up Edinburgh, and I couldn’t understand a word of what my crew were saying, but it was fun, and they laughed when I talked. We had a great time. Every other word was the C word. I was like. Whoa, you guys can just say that? And then the party girls… I spent most of my youth researching those girls.
With the Mackenzie brothers, there’s a bit of a commonality between Day Shift and this movie. Is there always going to be room in your movies for Scott Adkins to play half of a brother duo with a new accent?
I love Scott. I’m going to cast him in everything. I’ll cast Marko and Daniel in everything. When you’re going to go somewhere and do something hard, you’re going to bring your friends. They all could be their own movie stars. They’re all action-movie stars, but they could be movie stars. I will always offer that to Scott, but hopefully I can offer him something bigger next time.
The movie has a very comic book-y narrative, even though the source material isn’t a comic book. You have split panels, wipes, match cuts — there’s a lot of playfulness in the movie. How did you approach marrying the style to the narrative?
After Day Shift, I wanted something that looked a bit different, and I watched the old Thomas Crown Affair, and I watched some Guy Ritchie. So some of the split screens and some of the transitions from scene to scene [were inspired by those]. I just wanted it to feel different. We didn’t have a lot of time. It wasn’t a big budget. We shot it in 42 days. It was what it was, but we made a meal of it.
I didn’t want it to seem like a standard action movie. There’s some dolly zooms, 360 dolly shots, a lot of Trinity shots where we’re wrapping around. I wanted to take a lot of liberties with the camera, but I also wanted to take a lot of liberties with the edit and the pacing. I did Day Shift, and I’m super proud of that movie. But it was very scene to scene to scene. I wanted to do something that was a little more stylized.
When we talked about Day Shift way back, we talked about how some of the movie harkens back to an ’80s or ’90s style of action movie. You like to mix older aesthetics with new-school tech. What appeals to you about that?
I learned how to do this job when I got out of the Army in the ’90s, when I became a stuntman. And back then, you couldn’t say “Let’s just fix it in post.” Somebody had to figure out how to do it — you couldn’t just lean on visual effects. There wasn’t CGI, there was no YouTube for a tutorial, there was none of that. So you had to be a clever filmmaker. And I got to work with those guys and really pay attention as a stunt coordinator and second unit director.
These stuntmen and women are next-level. Parkour champion, world drifting champion, UFC fighter, just next-level. But they’re all young men and women that I don’t fucking understand a word of what they’re saying. And I love them, and they love me, and I’ve learned so much from them, but I think they learn from me, too. That mix for me has always been super interesting.
Photo: Csaba Aknay/Lionsgate
I’m stuck in the middle of Gen X, and I still listen to Mötley Crüe, but at the same time, I work with all these tech-savvy young bucks and young women that are amazing. You saw it in Day Shift with Dave [Franco] and Jamie [Foxx]’s characters, and it’s here in The Killer’s Game. That’s something that I really love. It’s a part of my life that I really love and laugh at, and it’s something that I wanted to bring across to the audience.
I was thinking that is something that the protagonists of The Killer’s Game and Day Shift have in common: They’re each hyper-proficient at a violent job, but they’re also kind of clueless in their life outside of the job. Is that a character trait you’re attracted to in stories?
[Points at self.] It’s kind of my story. I’m 57, but I’m a 15-year-old trapped in a 57-year-old’s body. I’ve been in a business where we crash cars and fight and shoot things and fall off a building. We don’t really have to grow up. You just have to be careful. You’re doing a bunch of kids’ stuff. And I urge people: Don’t grow up. It’s way overrated. Don’t do it. You’re not going to dig it. You’re going to want to go back. My wife and I, we’ve got a 12-year-old, and she’s going to grow up way sooner than I will.
The Killer’s Game is in theaters now.
