Atomic Blonde is jam-packed with ambitious fight scenes, which the 87Eleven team designed. One of the most memorable is the brutal seven-minute stairwell sequence where Theron vanquishes foe after. Set in 1989, right before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Atomic Blonde is the latest summer blockbuster to star a female lead kicking some serious ass. Charlize Theron, who plays M16 spy, Lorraine Broughton also serves some enviable looks, because she’s Charlize Theron. How can you get her vamp, late ’80s, Euro style? Audition adobe for mac os.

LAS VEGAS — Charlize Theron rocked the Internet with her action-spy trailer for Atomic Blonde. She kicks, she kills, she nails a guy in the neck with a high heel. And Theron has the hottest love.

The new super-stylized, ultra-violent action flick Atomic Blonde wastes no time with pleasantries. In the very first scene of the movie, a British agent running in his boxers through late-‘80s Berlin is smashed by a car and then executed point-blank by a laughing KGB agent, who then dumps his body into the river Spree. The action only intensifies from there, building up to a brutal series of extended fight scenes across East Berlin, including a remarkable sustained burst of hand-to-hand combat in an abandoned apartment complex.

Charlize Theron stars in the film as Lorraine Broughton, the titular atomic blonde, a hardened cipher of an MI6 agent. She’s a walking weapon, with advanced combat skills and a good eye for determining which household objects might best be used as makeshift lethal weapons. That very particular skill comes in handy during the long fight sequences in the East Berlin apartment building, which see Lorraine get the pulp beaten out of her while taking on a squad of KGB agents.

Director David Leitch thinks hard about action, as he was a stunt coordinator and second unit director for 20 years before making his directorial debut with John Wick. And he regarded this sequence as “the pinnacle of the action in the movie,” with its carnage serving a larger purpose than providing simple thrills.

“We planned to arc the action tonally with Lorraine’s journey,” Leitch tells Inverse. “[The movie] is fun in the beginning. You enter this crazy new world in Berlin, and you see her beat up some cops in a really fun Jackie Chan way, you meet crazy Percival (James McAvoy), and the music is fun and ironic. It’s a sexy world, but as the lies start piling up, the movie gets darker and darker, we wanted to have a set piece where we really sort of manifest her bigger physical and extensional crisis.”

The result is a long sequence that begins in the middle of a political protest — the movie takes place during the final days of the Berlin Wall — and then heads to the empty apartment building. A cold and utilitarian structure typical of Soviet architecture, it’s clear of people but still filled with their personal possessions, which came in handy as the fights got more desperate and scrappy.

The apartment building has four extended staircases connecting three floors, and Leitch decided that the camera would follow Lorraine as she descends from the top, stopping at each level — and sometimes on the steps — to throw down with her pursuers. Not everyone was immediately sold on the idea: “I’d presented it to my stunt team before, and everyone’s always kind of like cautious and hesitant, because [they asked] are you really going to be able to stay in it?” Leitch recalled. “Is it going to be compelling? Are you going to want to cut away for energy?”

The scene became more compelling and energetic because of the stakes: Lorraine is charged with protecting the life of a defecting Stasi officer code-named Spyglass, who holds vital information that could change the course of the Cold War, which seems to be winding down. And because Spyglass is no soldier, but instead a wimpy paper-pushing geek, he’s more of a burden than help (minus one clutch assist).

Every inch of the building had to be analyzed and an incredibly detailed production plan had to be mapped out; every punch, flip, blow to the head, gunshot, and furniture-busting body-toss required careful choreography. Kaspersky password manager for mac. Shooting the apartment sequence took four days in total, not an unsubstantial chunk of time for a mid-budget movie shot on foreign soil (mostly in Budapest). It was far too much to realistically film in one continuous take, but careful planning allowed Leitch to give it that illusion.

“There are long, long pieces of choreography, and then there are sort of old school movie stitches, and then there’s a little bit of visual effects, and then there’s camera tricks,” the director says. “We’re stitching together different sections of it, but ultimately we shot it in order, so we could make sure that it all seamlessly worked as one shot.”

The longest continuous take in the movie lasted about two minutes, which is a huge number for such a complicated scene, with so many moving and exploding pieces. It’s a battle between Lorraine and a Russian assassin with a Macklemore-style haircut, and they beat the ever-loving hell out of one another: Lorraine stabs him with a corkscrew and clocks him with a large double record turntable (or a big hot plate, it’s hard to tell), while he tosses her around into wooden furniture that shatters on impact.

The long, continuous take is even more notable because Theron was in the arena herself, taking the punches and abuse that, while carefully staged, is punishing nonetheless.

“There are a few details where you just can’t risk slamming your actress ten times into a breakaway cabinet, so we found a way to graft in a stunt performer. But all the fighting, all the brutality in that fighting and the selling of fighting, it’s all her,” Leitch says.

It also helped that Theron was facing off against trained professionals. With two decades of stunt work and choreography under his belt, the director feels an allegiance to stunt performers and also believes deeply that, if it’s their ambition, they can transcend the category and do more on screen. And so, he cast actual stuntmen as the KGB agents in the stairwell, so that the fighting could be more authentic and expertly planned out; this way, he didn’t have to worry about training other actors for some shots and stitching their faces in digitally over stunt performers’ for others.

“It was crucial to the whole scene in that they could practice the choreography with her, and make subtle adjustments for camera and for her,” he explains. “We know that it’s going to be safe — they’re going to be the right distance and they’re not going to hit her. I’m not prejudice. I mean, if they can act and they can do stunts, then I’ll let them do both.”

Given Theron’s extreme training and action scenes, it’s clear that Leitch’s maxim goes both ways, resulting in some of the most intense, complicated fight sequences in recent studio cinema history.

Atomic Blonde hits theaters on Friday, July 28.

If you’ve watched a lot of violent action movies, you may have seen the old knife-in-forehead trick or its subtler cousin, the cheek key-jab. But you’ve never seen those moves in a picture that stars Charlize Theron, the tall drink of gunpowder that gives Atomic Blonde its mighty kick. She plays slinky MI6 agent Lorraine Broughton, who is sent to Berlin to retrieve sensitive information just as the Wall is about to come down. There she links up with fellow operative Percival (James McAvoy), a loose cannon with a thug’s bristly haircut and a side business selling black-market Jack Daniel’s. Their mission: to spirit a Stasi turncoat to safety. (He’s played by Eddie Marsan, whose eyes radiate the innocence of a baby dormouse.)

Something goes wrong. We know that from the start because the story’s framing device shows Broughton—bruised and scratched from some as-yet-unseen battles—being grilled by two humorless interrogators, played with deadpan pomposity by John Goodman and Toby Jones. Adapted from Antony Johnston’s graphic novel The Coldest City, this film is basically a tour of crushed ribs, cracked skulls and busted femurs. Its plot is tangled and mildly nonsensical. Director David Leitch (John Wick), a longtime stunt man, may not be the most meticulous storyteller, but he knows how to direct a bold and brutal action sequence. The picture’s showpiece is a wild hand-to-hand combat sequence that goes on for minutes in one unbroken take, a savage ballet in which Broughton fends off baddies with feral grace but also takes more than a few roundhouse kicks and body slams herself.

MORE:How Charlize Theron Invents a New Kind of Badass in the Stylish Atomic Blonde

That’s the key to Theron’s performance: as tough and cool as her Broughton is, she’s not soulless. It hurts to see her take a punch. But oh, how good it feels to see her throw one! Theron is all limbs, standing tall in a wicked assortment of stilettos and narrow, svelte trousers. When she moves, every muscle is in tune with the picture’s robust, new-wavey soundtrack (which makes fine use of, among other songs, David Bowie’s ominously seductive “Cat People”). When she takes a smooth drag on a cigarette, that sound you hear rustling across the earth’s surface is the collective swoon of 50 million ex-smokers.

Glowering from beneath the bangs of her moonbeam-platinum bob, Theron’s Broughton is equal parts air, light and iron. We’re just the moths clustering around her flame.

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