From the Interview @ Sci/Fi
Dimensions with Kurt Wimmer
sfd:
The combat sequences in Equilibrium are a distinctive form commonly
referred to as "gun-kata". What's the origin of gun-kata? (And who
coined that term?)
KW:
I
coined the term in the context of the film - DuPont... first mentions
it. I just made the thing up in my yard because I didn't want to waste
my time making the film if I couldn't bring something new to it and
something that excited me.
From the Production
Notes
The film also
presents an entirely
original fighting art: the Gun-Kata, a fast and furious combination of
Western fire-power with Eastern discipline of the body. Says Wimmer:
"Hong Kong action movies brought out the idea that if a man has two
hands, he can shoot two guns but that's as far as they took it. I
wondered: Have we really hit the envelope for gun-play or is there
somewhere new it could go? To me, combining the gun with martial arts
was a natural. No one has ever used a gun before in a Kata form but it
becomes the perfect extension of the body and can be used in ways not
usually seen."
From DVD
Commentary: Kurt Wimmer
The gun kata. Ok. So, I invented the
gun kata in my yard, basically. After I would make sure that my family
was out of the house and my neighbors weren't looking over the fence
and I would, I developed it in the grass behind my house. And I
remember thinking, "Wow, y'know am I crazy?" "Do I actually have the
balls to hang a movie on this concept which may not work at all? Which
may fail completely and if it fails the movie itself will fail?".
The reason I did, I think, it grew out
of frustration and love of, simultaneously, of gunfights on film.
Y'know, about ten years ago, or more actually, Hong Kong invented the
great idea of having two guns in your hands when you shoot. And
Hollywood quickly caught on and soon everyone was holding two guns and
blasting away. And then Hollywood came up, sort of, with their own
urban variation on that which was to turn the gun sideways when you
shooting. And then Hong Kong reabsorbed that, but that simply seemed to
be the end of gun fighting for several years. And it was frankly
getting pretty damn boring. And I asked myself, "Y'know, in a thousand
years, is this really what we're going to be looking at in terms of
gunfights?". And, I just wanted to see something new. And, so I
invented the gun kata.
I remember when I first showed it to
my stunt coordinator Jim Vickers in the hallway in Germany, and I was
going down the hall doing this. He was the first person to ever see it,
and how silly I felt actually and I don't know what he actually thought
when he was watching it. He never said, to his credit, he just embraced
it and he flew with it. And I think together, given our limited
resources, we actually did a pretty decent job of conveying this
cinematic fiction. And it is obviously a cinematic fiction . I tend to
think that the thing most suited for film is dance. I would actually
love to do a musical one day. This is sort of my version of combining
the two and translating them to film.
From
Jim Vickers Interview @ Sci-Fi Online (Fight Choreographer)
JV:
I was brought on board by the producer at which point I met with the
director, who was also the writer, and we talked at length about the
story. He told me what he wanted to do on a martial arts level. He set
me the challenge to develop sequences that had not been done before on
film. We developed a mindset where we were using weapons, like guns, as
extensions of the human body. This is basically the philosophy in the
martial arts where weapons, be they throwing stars or swords, are
strictly an extension of oneself.
