There have been fight masters on a couple of our shoots thus far. A fight master is basically a director for scenes involving violence.
I talked to one of them for a while on a previous shoot, and he talked about how difficult it could be to constantly direct people to be raped and abused. I had never thought that a fight master would be used for a rape scene.
Non sequiturs aside on the shoot we’re working on right now there is a scene where a mother slaps her daughter. As the director of photography, I sat with the fight master for a while, watching him direct the actress to give a believable slap.
Later in the week we were filming the slap sequence he had prepared me for. I asked the director if she wanted to go through the fight master blocking, but she told me “it’s alright, I’m going to have her really slap her.”
What was interesting was watching how the real slap actually looked less believable on camera than the fake one. I imagine that this applies to all sorts of acts, both violent and nonviolent. The camera sees reality differently than a human being does. This is why it doesn’t matter if an actress is sitting on an apple box so she’s at the right height (as long as it doesn’t affect performance). The camera is not reality, it is a higher reality. It’s interesting to see how it shapes things.
