Fight Clip Club: Oldboy

the one-shot wonder that started the trend

No Fight Clip Club would be complete without talking about Oldboy, and in particular, *that* hallway fight scene. You know the one I mean, even if you aren’t familiar with the movie. It’s one of the longest one-shot fights ever done, and it started a creative fight trend where so many people made fights go down hallways or up staircases and didn’t cut them at all. I’ve written about a couple of these homages before—the Daredevil hallway and the Atomic Blonde staircase. So I thought I’d come around to this one, so you can enjoy the one that arguably started them all.

I have included a couple interviews here with the director of Oldboy, so you can hear some more details of why he decided to do this fight scene this way. I found it fascinating that it wasn’t for any athletically flashy reason, only that he noticed how exhausted and lonely-seeming the actor was after a runthrough, and wanted to keep that emotional expression intact in the final shot. So he made it into a one-shot, and the rest is cinematic history.

But enough musings about the back story! As one of my stage combat teachers used to always say, “Enough talk, we fight!”