Paul W.S. Anderson always played as Johnny Cage.
When the now 60-year-old British director was breaking into the film industry in the early 1990s, he would take a five-hour train ride from northern England down to London to meet with various movie producers in an effort to get his first project off the ground. In between those meetings, Anderson killed time at a nearby arcade, pouring coins into a Mortal Kombat machine and mastering the moveset of the game’s iconic poster boy.
When the now 60-year-old British director was breaking into the film industry in the early 1990s, he would take a five-hour train ride from northern England down to London to meet with various movie producers in an effort to get his first project off the ground. In between those meetings, Anderson killed time at a nearby arcade, pouring coins into a Mortal Kombat machine and mastering the moveset of the game’s iconic poster boy.
“It was film companies, strip joints, and video game arcades.”
“There was a great arcade in Soho at the bottom of Wardour Street, right in the heart of the British film industry and the British pornography industry, where it all intersects,” Anderson recalls with a grin over a video call with Polygon. “It was film companies, strip joints, and video game arcades.”
A couple of years later, Anderson would leverage that experience to land a job directing the Mortal Kombat movie, a gig he was woefully unprepared for but managed to bluff his way into. Against all odds, the result was a cult classic that proved video game movies could succeed at the box office, brought Hong Kong-style martial arts action to American cinema, and launched the career of its director.
Three decades after Mortal Kombat kicked down the movie theater doors in August 1995, Polygon checked in with Paul W.S. Anderson to relive the movie-making challenges, casting what-ifs, and behind-the-scenes deliberations that all added up to one of the most bone-cracking, badass, and spiritually faithful video game movies ever made.
“I had to bluff my way in”
Before Mortal Kombat, Anderson made his directorial debut with Shopping, a stylish frenzy of car chases, helicopters, and attractive young actors (including Jude Law) shot for just $5 million. But Shopping failed to make back even its meager budget, and Anderson’s film career in London was seemingly over before it had even started.
“I was getting myself a new asshole ripped by all the critics who just hated the movie,” Anderson says.
Salvation came from across the Atlantic. Shopping played at the Sundance film festival that year, where it caught the attention of Michael De Luca, the newly minted president of New Line Cinema who would go on to become CEO of Warner. De Luca was impressed by Shopping… specifically, how little money Anderson spent to pull off the action. So he gave the director a shot at his next movie: Mortal Kombat.
New Line, which was still an independent studio at the time, already had a 20-page outline, which Anderson recalls faithfully followed the plot of the first game in which a group of fighters are invited to a mysterious island to face off against fantastical creatures with the fate of the world at stake. “Structurally, it was Enter the Dragon with mythological elements of a Ray Harryhausen movie,” Anderson says; a mix of jaw-dropping (but real) combat and golden age Hollywood magic.
“Somewhere, the Wachowskis were probably thinking the same thing.”
Anderson saw a chance to combine the two into something fresh compared to the “meat and potatoes” punching and kicking and shooting that dominated Hollywood at the time.
“I loved martial arts films, and felt there was an opportunity to combine visual effects with Hong Kong-style wire work — something that hadn’t been done in a Western movie before,” Anderson says. Admittedly, he wasn’t the only filmmaker toying with a similar idea. “Somewhere, the Wachowskis were probably thinking the same thing. Mortal Kombat came out before The Matrix, but we were all pulling from similar influences.”
There was only one problem: Anderson didn’t know how to make any of it happen.
“I had to bluff my way in, pretending that I knew about visual effects and shooting action, when I really didn’t.” he says. Once he’d secured the job, Anderson was able to rely on others to help him learn how to do it along the way.
Kasting for Kombat
Casting Mortal Kombat was a balancing act between going after the biggest names possible and dealing with the financial realities of New Line’s $20 million budget. To achieve the level of realism Anderson and the studio wanted, the movie’s stars also needed to perform their own stunts, which led to at least one pivotal recast.
“Cameron Diaz did test for the role of Sonya,” Anderson says, “but during a fight choreography test she threw a punch and hurt her finger and had to drop out.” In her place, Anderson cast Bridgette Wilson.
As for the franchise’s swaggering mascot, Johnny Cage, a fictional Hollywood action star originally inspired by Belgian martial artist and actor Jean-Claud Van Damme, the part went to Linden Ashby. Anderson says Ashby perfectly embodied the character. Plus, it “helped that he wasn’t bringing baggage from previous roles.”
And while it’s been reported in the past that New Line Cinema actually offered the part to the Muscles from Brussels himself, Anderson debunks those claims.
“Van Damme was never seriously discussed,” the director says bluntly.
“Van Damme was never seriously discussed.”
One piece of casting trivia that is true, however, is that the studio made a serious push to get Sean Connery as Raiden, the god of thunder who defends the Earth and guides its heroes.
“He was a massive star but also the embodiment of a teacher who can impart wisdom,” Anderson explains. Unfortunately, Connery passed on the role, though Anderson doubts the studio could have afforded him anyway. Instead, they went with Christopher Lambert, Connery’s co-star in the 1986 fantasy epic Highlander. “We flipped the dynamic from Highlander, so Lambert would now play the wise teacher.”
Lambert wound up being the film’s biggest star and a major draw, especially in Europe. However, that meant the studio could only afford to hire him for a few weeks of shooting. Anderson loaded up Lambert’s schedule and shot plenty of close-ups that could be edited in after the rest of the cast flew to Thailand to film Mortal Kombat’s exterior shots. But ultimately, Lambert became enamored with the film, agreed to extend his shooting schedule, and traveled to Thailand at no extra cost.
For Anderson, it’s those on-location scenes that elevate the entire movie.
“The island in the story is like a character itself,” he says. “I wanted extraordinary exteriors.”
On-lokation khaos
Mortal Kombat’s sweeping exterior shots and sunlit fight scenes may take place on a pristine Thai beach, but the rest of the movie was shot on the cheapest Los Angeles sets imaginable. Anderson recalls filming in a “semi-derelict warehouse on Washington Boulevard” along with a pair of aircraft hangars on active airfields “because they were cheaper than soundstages.”
This was even more inconvenient than it sounds.
“Shooting in hangars was a nightmare because of airplane noise,” Anderson says. “None of the hangers were soundproofed. So as soon as the planes came in, you couldn’t use any dialog. We’d have a guy outside with the radio going, OK, you’ve got two minutes. Go before the next plane comes in! There’s a plane circling. It’s coming in now. You’ve got to hurry up!”
This became particularly difficult while trying to film Raiden’s big inspiring speech, which Anderson had decided to record as one single shot. “I was young and foolish,” he says.
“We made up for it by just having damn good fight scenes. Rather than just relying on blood.”
For Mortal Kombat’s most ambitious action sequences, Anderson leaned heavily on a trio of advisers: his director of photography, John Leonetti; his fight and stunt coordinator fight and stunt coordinator Pat E. Johnson; and Robin Shou, a Hong Kong stuntman-turned-actor he’d cast in the movie’s central role, the warrior monk Liu Kang. Early on, the director made the decision to film a master wide shot of each combat scene, capturing the entire fight before moving in to get close-ups. What he didn’t realize was that, for a movie like Mortal Kombat, not only was that totally unnecessary, but it almost ruined the scenes. Eventually, Robin Shou intervened.
“Robin came to me and said, ‘Dude, you’ve got to stop doing this, because by the time you come in for my cut, I’m exhausted. I won’t be able to be able to do anything.’”
“He was very twitchy”
Alongside the movie’s human cast and crew, the success of Mortal Kombat arguably hinged as much on Goro, the four-armed prince of the subterranean realm and reigning tournament champion. Goro was an impressive feat of animatronics that still looks good three decades later (the same can’t be said for much of the film’s CGI). But behind the scenes, bringing the 8-foot creature to life was a challenge.
Goro was created by Amalgamated Dynamics, the pioneering company behind the visual effects in the Alien movies, Mars Attacks, Starship Troopers, and more. At the time, Amalgamated Dynamics was really just two people: Alec Gillis, who ran all the computers and animatronics, and Tom Woodruff, the guy in the suit.
“He had a lot of problems, but he delivered great for us.”
Woodruff controlled Goro from inside, using his hands to pilot the creature’s lower two arms while the upper arms and head were puppeteered by Gillis. A “huge amount of cables” trailed out of Goro’s back, and Anderson recalls working carefully to hide those from the camera as much as possible.
“He was very twitchy and broke down a lot,” the director says. “He had a lot of problems, but he delivered great for us.”
A secondary “stunt Goro” swapped the animatronics for arms and a head on springs. “If the stuntman started moving in a certain way, you could get the arms and the head jiggling around,” Anderson says. For this reason, most of Goro’s fight scenes are filmed in wide shots.
The original script also called for Goro to appear on the beach in several crucial scenes. However, Anderson quickly realized that was impossible.
“There’s no way this amount of machinery could survive the humidity and heat in Thailand, and the sand on the beaches,” Anderson says. “So we rewrote the script to make sure that he could be shot in L.A.”
Fatality!
The Mortal Kombat games may be best-known for the ultra-violent action blood-soaked fatalities, but New Line Cinema was dead set on releasing an adaptation with a PG-13 rating. The studio’s logic was sound: The game’s core fanbase consisted mostly of teenagers, so making a movie those teenagers couldn’t see would lead to box office failure.
As a young director, Anderson wasn’t exactly in a position to argue.
“At the time, I trusted the studio,” he says. “They wanted PG-13. Those were the marching orders. And I marched to that drum.” That said, Anderson adds that he “pushed the limits of PG-13” as much as possible. “I wanted to make it as violent and as edgy as possible within the slightly more restrictive rating. You just couldn’t rip any spines out.”
Mortal Kombat the movie might not be quite as gory as the game that inspired it, but Anderson that the combat he delivered is still just as satisfying, if not more so.
“We made up for it by just having damn good fight scenes,” he says, “rather than just relying on blood.”
Ultimately, the studio was right. Mortal Kombat was a massive financial success (even if the critics disliked it). The movie made $122 million in theaters on a budget of $20 million and ruled the box office for three straight weeks. More importantly, it helped transform Mortal Kombat into a franchise that’s still going strong today — and set up its director with an equally impressive Hollywood career making sci-fi action.
The one thing Anderson seemingly hasn’t done in the three decades since Mortal Kombat’s release is revisit the franchise. When I ask if he’s played any of the new games or watched the new movies, he smiles politely and shakes his head.
“Not really,” Anderson says. “Not because I don’t love Mortal Kombat, but because I always want to try new things. That’s why I didn’t direct the sequel. I wanted to spread my wings and did Event Horizon instead.”
“I made my Mortal Kombat, and I’m happy with it. I always look forward, not back.”
