“Quite possibly my favourite scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, a film full of truly wonderful scenes, is the sequence in which a swordsman clad in a black robe engages in a display of fearsome swordplay in front of the titular Indiana Jones. Instead of engaging in some kind of prolonged fight with the swordsman, however, Indie simply whips out his pistol and shoots him dead, immediately breaking the audience’s expectations.
The truth behind this scene is that it was originally meant to be a much more traditional fight scene between Indie’s whip and the black-clad assailant’s sword. However, Indiana Jones had Dysentery on the day of the shoot, making the complex fight scene far too hard for him to pull off, so the crew went for the simple, and far more iconic, idea of Indie simply shooting the man dead.
Not to compare myself to a filmmaker as great as Steven Spielberg, but I think that the story of “The Hit” is very similar to the story of this scene.
I don’t remember exactly how the idea came to me, I just remember that we had to make a film for our cinematography class making use of various different shots and camera angles, and I decided to stick all of these shots together into one big narrative. The idea that the film would be about a hitman came from the fact that I already owned a prop gun, the decision to cast the wonderful Cerig and Alexadner came from the fact that they were both in my cinematography class, and the decision to film at a canal came from the fact that it’s no more than a five minute walk from our university.
I think the reason that the hit works so well is that it doesn’t waste time with exposition, instead trusting that the audience will be able to follow the story from the iconography, music, and strength of the actors. This was not always my intention. In fact, I had written out a substantial amount of dialogue for both Cerig and Alexander, and the only reason it didn’t make it into the film was that I had forgotten to loan a microphone from our university. In retrospect, I am extremely thankful for my forgetfulness, and the fact that we as a group improvised a solution, as the great strength of this short is it’s visual storytelling.
In the words of Raiders of the Lost Ark producer Frank Marshall: “The key there is, when you’re given that challenge, solving it gets you to a better place and gets you to a better idea.”
~Thomas Osian Harvey~
My own participation in this short was an incredibly fun experience. The first collaboration I had done at university and am glad to know people who can make a potentially gruelling task very enjoyable. Tom, Arwen and Cerig recently worked together on a more serious project; a short form documentary called “Playing With Daleks”. ~Alexander~
T H E N A I V E F I L M M A K E R 