Brad Pitt did "95 per cent" of his own stunts for his upcoming movie Bullet Train.
David Leitch's upcoming action-packed high-octane thriller follows five assassins who discover they are on the same high-speed bullet train and realise their missions have something in common.
The film went into production in the autumn last year and Pitt, who plays the assassin Ladybug, impressed the stunt co-ordinator with how much fight choreography he wanted to do himself.
"Brad did 95 percent of his physical stunts - the fighting," Greg Rementer, the film's second-unit director and stunt coordinator recently told Vulture. "He's like a natural-born athlete. He really got in there!"
Pitt, who won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar last year for portraying a stuntman in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, leads a star-studded cast which includes Sandra Bullock, Michael Shannon, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Joey King, Brian Tyree Henry, Zazie Beetz, and Lady Gaga, among other big names, and Rementer was thrilled by everybody's work ethic.
"Never have I ever done so many huge actors in one feature where all of them excelled at the physical movement of our training," he praised. "So Brad, Brian, Michael Shannon, Hiroyuki Sonada, Andrew Koji - who was already a stud in terms of where he comes from with the show Warrior - all these actors put out some great action and did a lot of their (own) stuff."
The film was a reunion for Pitt and Leitch, who served as his stunt double on films such as Fight Club and Mr. and Mrs. Smith before moving into directing with John Wick. They filmed Bullet Train under strict Covid-19 guidelines in Los Angeles, and Leitch credits Pitt's involvement for attracting such a high-calibre cast.
"We were fortunate to be shooting in LA during a time when artists were ready to get back to work and having Brad on the project - hot off an Oscar win and having a great script by Zak Olkewicz - really did attract the best people," Leitch told Vulture. "We were able to get people back to work safely during a pandemic, which is pretty amazing."
