Episode 208 - Mistakes Writers Make about Bladed Weapons with Teel James Glenn
October 17, 2023
Teel James Glenn discusses how he got his start as a stuntman and how "the will to push through" physical challenges enabled him to follow his dream; the different varieties of swords; the fact that your first service is to the story; how opponents will never be exactly equal; the fact that tough people don't pose; how to achieve a realistic portrayal of bladed weapon wounds and guidelines for realistic recovery times; and examples of well-done current-day knife and sword fight movie scenes.
If one of those topics piques your interest, you can easily jump to that section on YouTube by clicking on the flagged timestamps in the description.
If one of those topics piques your interest, you can easily jump to that section on YouTube by clicking on the flagged timestamps in the description.
Teel James Glenn has killed or been killed hundreds of times—on stage and screen—as he has traveled the world for forty-plus years as a stuntman, swordmaster, storyteller, bodyguard, actor, and haunted house barker. He is proud to have studied sword under Errol Flynn’s last stunt double, and has made hundreds of appearances in Renaissance festivals, soap operas, and feature films, including having been beaten up by Hawk on the Spenser for Hire TV show. He has also published dozens of novels, and his poetry and stories have been printed in over two hundred magazines including Weird Tales, Mystery, Pulp Adventures, and more. His novel A COWBOY IN CARPATHIA: A BOB HOWARD ADVENTURE won best novel 2021 in the Pulp Factory Award. He is also the winner of the 2012 Pulp Ark Award for Best Author.
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Links
Teel's Links:
Author website: TheUrbanSwashbuckler.com
Facebook profile: Teel James Glenn
Instagram profile: @teeljamesglenn
LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/teel-james-glenn-6a334b1/
Blsky.: @Teelglenn
Matty's Links:
Affiliate links
Events
Author website: TheUrbanSwashbuckler.com
Facebook profile: Teel James Glenn
Instagram profile: @teeljamesglenn
LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/teel-james-glenn-6a334b1/
Blsky.: @Teelglenn
Matty's Links:
Affiliate links
Events
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with TJ! Almost all of what he shared was news to me—what was a piece of information about bladed weapons was news to you? I’d love to hear about your thoughts!
Please post your comments on YouTube--and I'd love it if you would subscribe while you're there!
Transcript
[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to the Indie Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Teel James Glenn, or TJ. Hey, TJ, how are you doing?
[00:00:07] Teel: I'm doing fine. Very nice to meet you and everyone viewing.
[00:00:10] Matty: Oh, we are happy to have you here. And to give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Teel James Glenn has killed or been killed hundreds of times on stage and screen as he has traveled the world for 40 plus years as a stuntman, swordmaster, storyteller, bodyguard, actor, and haunted house barker. He's proud to have studied sword under Errol Flynn's Last Stunt Double, and he has made hundreds of appearances in Renaissance festivals, soap operas, and feature films, including having been beaten up by Hawk on the Spencer for Hire TV show.
He has also published dozens of novels, and his poetry and stories have been printed in over 200 magazines, including Weird Tales, Mystery, Pulp Adventure, and more. His novel, "A Cowboy in Carpathia," a Bob Howard adventure, won Best Novel in 2021 in the Pulp Factory Award, and he is also the winner of the 2012 Pulp Arc Award for Best Author.
I invited TJ on the podcast to talk about what's going to become one of a series of "Mistakes Writers Make" episodes.
[00:01:06] Matty: And we're going to be talking about mistakes writers make about fight scenes and how to avoid them. This is going to join other entries in this series, which are: Police Roles with Frank Zaffiro, Forensic Psychiatry with Susan Hatters Friedman, P. I. s with Patrick Hoffman, The F. B. I. with Jerry Williams. First Responders with Ken Fritz, Coroners with Jennifer Grazer Dornbusch, Police Procedure with Bruce Coffin, and Firearms with Chris Grahl of TacticQuill. That set of podcast episodes became so popular that I finally created a little listening list on theindyauthor.com/podcast. So if you're writing crime fiction or a topic that includes any of those topics, you'll be able to find all those "Mistakes Writers Make" and how to avoid them all in one place.
[00:02:00] Matty: And so we're going to be adding to that list, "Mistakes Writers Make About Fight Scenes," and I'd like to start out asking TJ, what got you started as a stuntman?
[00:02:13] Teel: I was thinking about that actually last night very specifically. I was a very sickly kid. I couldn't take gym. I couldn't do any sports. Asthma. Sickly. I looked like a potato with pipe cleaners stuck in me. And when I was 15, I went to a Phil Suling comic convention. I was a reader of comic books, of course, and I saw chapter two of the "Adventures of Captain Marvel" movie serial, made in 1941, and the stunt work in it by a guy named Dave Sharpe. The editing and shooting were so amazing; you really did believe a man could fly. You really did see guys flipping around. And I went, "I want to do that." I started making Super 8 movies in high school. I read every single thing I could on stunts and movie serials and how they did it. I taught myself how to do stair falls at my high school with washcloths wrapped with ace bandages around my elbows and knees on the marble stairs, still wearing my glasses because I couldn't see otherwise. I learned to do high falls off of garage roofs and how to build box rigs and all of it from reading it, seeing any behind-the-scenes footage I could. And then, of course, I went to art school. But the last night in art school before I was supposed to graduate, I had a party who was auditioning people for a film, and on a lark, because I knew about film and I'd been making my own little stupid Super 8 movies, Captain Marvel, Rocketman.
I went, I got a part in it, and then he needed somebody to choreograph and storyboard it and to choreograph a fight. I knew how they did it in the movies, so that got me started. Once I did that, I ended up getting a lead in the movie, although he lost the equipment halfway through, and the film never got finished. But that led me to other movies, and then I thought, I got to get some training. So I was researching a book I was writing that had a sword fight, and I took a friend of mine who had studied with Ralph Faulkner in California, who was the swordmaster in a lot of the Errol Flynn movies. He said, "Hey, there's this guy teaching stage combat in the city. Do you want to come with me to the class?" I went, "Heck yeah!" So I took Swashbuckling 101, and the minute I held a sword in my hand, I knew that's what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. It was like a heavenly choir with lights shining on me. From that point, I started to train to be able to hold the sword, move, and breathe, and I never looked back. I studied with my first instructor for three to four years. When he started a Renaissance Fair, I was one of the instructors. Then I auditioned for other Renaissance Fairs and ultimately ended up doing 60 Renaissance Fairs, either as the fight choreographer, the assistant choreographer, the jouster, or, for the last bunch of years, I participated in a story show. What was cool about that was I did storytelling with all the voices and characters, and my daughter joined me when she was eight.
[00:05:17] Matty: Oh, cool.
[00:05:18] Teel: Every year we did at least one Renaissance Fair together for a weekend. Where she would beat me up with a quarterstaff at the beginning of the show because everyone likes to see the big guy beaten up. The last time we did it was just before she went off to college, and she was six foot three.
[00:05:38] Matty: Wow.
[00:05:39] Teel: It wasn't funny anymore. It was just an old guy fighting a young woman. It wasn't the giant fighting a little girl. So she did the last quarterstaff fight on her knees, so it looked funny. And she still beat me, of course. So, I mean, that's it. From learning stage combat, I ended up getting parts in low-budget movies, soap operas, where they needed a big guy who could be the tough guy and throw a punch. So I would often get hired as an actor, and then they would add stunts, or they would hire me as a stuntman and realize I could act, so they would start beefing up my part. But many of my roles were like, "You can't come in here," and then there'd be a fight. That was the main part of my career.
[00:06:24] Matty: I have to ask what happened between the asthmatic child that looked like a potato with pipe cleaners. Did something happen that enabled you to take part in those activities, or did taking part in those activities help address it?
[00:06:38] Teel: That's it. I had the will to push through it now because there was something I believed in. I don't care about sports; I still don't. So the idea of training to run around a field and throw a pigskin, why would you do that? But training to be able to sustain a sword fight and do a Shakespearean monologue all in a show? Yes, I would train for that. I used to live at the top of a hill, and you'd have to climb up stone stairs in a park for my stage combat class, which was on Saturday mornings. I would literally have to crawl up the stairs. At the end of the class, I could not function.
I still carry an inhaler with me to this day. I'm still asthmatic, not as bad as I was as a child, fortunately. One of the first fight choreographers, Jim Manley, who hired me as his assistant, was severely asthmatic; he always had his inhaler with him. And I mean, I can't run a block, but I can do a fight. I can jump off a building, and my martial arts, by the end of a martial arts class, I would be almost like a non-functional lump. But I'd made it through alive, and that was always an achievement for me. So it never went away. My reason for fighting it was stronger than the actual disease.
[00:07:58] Matty: That's a great story. We had sort of come up with a couple of categories about which we wanted to discuss the idea of mistakes writers make about fight scenes. We've talked about bladed weapons already a couple of times. So I'd like to start with that one. What are some mistakes writers make? And if you have any good or bad examples from movies people might be familiar with, that's always a fun way to illustrate it.
[00:08:23] Teel: Yeah, I almost always end up using movie references because most people haven't read obscure Raphael Sabatini books or whatever. First thing is when people say "sword," there are hundreds of types of swords, different weights, and each sword has a different purpose. When people are thinking, for instance, of the Conan movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger, I will always and forever say that it was junk because Milius got his samurai instructor to teach Arnold how to use a sword, which makes no sense because samurai swords and broadswords don't work anywhere like each other. It would be the equivalent of having a bicyclist teach someone how to do motocross racing because they're completely separate. So everything he does with the broadsword is essentially wrong, and he moves like such a truck that anyone should have been able to kill him immediately.
On the other hand, you see a movie like Ladyhawke with Rutger Hauer, William Hobbs, who choreographed it, was the swordmaster in the 70s, 60s, 70s, and into the 80s. He did the Three and Four Musketeers with Michael York, the Mel Gibson Hamlet, and the Cyrano with Gepard. So he would study the specific weapon and teach you how to use that weapon. The broadsword techniques in Ladyhawke are real broadsword techniques, and you can see he moves completely differently. And, you know, and it really wouldn't have been a bad thing if they said, "We got a samurai guy, okay, we'll give him a curved sword." That's why Sandahl Bergman actually looks like she knows what she's doing, aside from being a dancer. She had a curved sword, so she was actually doing curved sword techniques. Samurai swords cut on the draw; they don't cut on the extension, so it's a completely different way of cutting. So, again, it's a stupid little nuance, but it's the kind of thing that drives me sane.
[00:10:34] Matty: The scene that this reminds me of is, and I'm not coming up with the name of the movie, but there was a movie with Liam Neeson.
[00:10:40] Teel: Rob Roy.
[00:10:43] Matty: Rob Roy, and there's that scene where he has what I guess is a broadsword. You can correct my terminology.
[00:10:48] Teel: A Scottish broadsword, Basket Hill broadsword, and he's fighting the guy.
[00:10:51] Matty: He's fighting a guy.
[00:10:54] Teel: With a small sword.
[00:10:55] Matty: Yeah, like a fencing thing almost.
[00:10:58] Teel: They were contemporary, same time. The Basket Hill broadsword was basically a war weapon, and the walking sword or court sword that ... He's always playing horrible, horrible human beings, and he's also really tiny. But he was using a contemporary sword of what the noblemen would have worn on their hip while walking around. They call it a walking sword. In that fight, he would have killed Liam Neeson in about 20 seconds because he had the lunge. The lunge gives you extension. Also, those basket-hilted swords, Rob Roy, whom Liam Neeson was playing, fought 60 duels in his life and never lost a duel. His last duel was when he was 63 years old, which, at that point, was old. We've pushed the extension of things. They wanted to make Liam Neeson the underdog, but in fact, if Liam Neeson's sword had ever actually contacted the court sword, it would have snapped it in half like a toothpick. So they had to work really hard to make you think the other guy was going to win, whereas if he'd gotten a lunge in that fight, the way it was choreographed, Liam Neeson was dead. In reality, the guy with the big hacking sword with longer arms would have won and gotten him on the first cut. If you miss while you're down there, the guy just lunges, and you're done. There's historical evidence of samurai swords against rapiers in Portuguese against bandits in the China Seas, and the Portuguese always won because a cutting sword requires an arc. A lunging sword does not. So while you're doing this, he's going like a sewing needle, and you're done.
[00:12:41] Matty: A That's an interesting, I mean, I imagine that in Rob Roy, they fussed with the reality because they needed that scene to extend longer.
[00:12:59] Teel: Yes, absolutely. And, yeah.
[00:13:00] Matty: Are there tips you can share that say, even like, how can someone do a realistic sword scene but extend it to extend the drama of the situation?
[00:13:10] Teel: If you ever see any of these commentaries on YouTube where they'll have, you know, a Swordmaster looks at a real thing and tells you, you know, the one thing all of them will say is that most fights, even if they last a long time, it's because nobody's doing anything. As soon as the blades start touching, the fight's over real quick because it is a case of who makes the first mistake. One of the things I write, I have a sword and sorcery series, and in any of my stuff, if I talk about people fighting with swords, I talk about the type of sword. Because certain swords have an innate advantage over other swords. And because of that, you then have to say, I want my hero to have a disadvantage so the other guy will have an arm that's three inches longer or my hero will have a stiff shoulder because he fell off his horse, to give them a disadvantage with that.
But in terms of, it's a case of just looking at the weapons and going, how is it used? And always, it's not the weapon, it's the individual using it. If somebody is skilled, the biggest problem I always see is people pick up a sword in some movie or in some book against someone who's actually trained in that weapon and somehow win. It doesn't work that way. You, even when they were training for combat, you trained with a weapon which was as close to the real weapon you were using as possible, even to the point where in Hamlet's time when they talk about foiled swords, they would take the real swords and wrap it in metal foil and stick a golf ball on the end of it. Because you wanted the actual weight of your weapon in your hand. If it's lighter, you're not going to learn how to use your weapon correctly. The familiarity with it often is the answer.
Now, a good swordsman is supposed to be able to use multiple weapons, but you always have your favorite; everybody. It's like everyone even has their favorite chair. You know, you get used to certain things. With any weapon, that weapon, even when I'm teaching stage combat or choreographing shows, I assign specific stage swords to specific actors and say, "That's yours," because every sword's balance is a little different. The weight of it is a little different. For instance, if you hand me a sword that I've never used before, and I'm immediately in battle, I really am not going to be familiar with how it moves. And that would be a disadvantage, which you can turn, as the protagonist gets used to it, perhaps. It gives you a nice disadvantage, even with a skilled fighter.
The other thing that drives me nuts, this is just the thing about cover artists and comic book artists. You don't switch your sword from one hand to the other unless you're Cornel Wilde, because you always have a strong side. Cornel Wilde in the old movies, the big trick at the end of every movie, he'd get stabbed in the right arm, and he'd have to do the final fight with his left hand. He was really a left-handed guy. He had to learn to do right-handed when he was competing for the Olympics. And so this was actually his strong side, but he learned to use the right. And 99 percent of people, or 98%, are right-handed. So a left-handed fencer always has an advantage because people are not used to going up against it.
[00:16:51] Matty: It makes me think of the scene in The Princess Bride, of course.
[00:16:55] Teel: Yes, yes. Believe it or not, that's the other thing. In the text, they go, "Ah, I see you've learned your Capo Ferro, ah, but I will use my Marozzo against you on Uneven Ground." They quote all these specific techniques, and they don't use a single one of them in the movie. The writer took the time to research them so they actually used real techniques. If you choreograph the fight that's in the book, it's a real fight.
[00:17:19] Matty: Oh, interesting.
[00:17:20] Teel: Using real techniques. Goldman did his research. But for the movie, they said, "Now we just want it to look like an Errol Flynn fight." So they had the dialogue, but they weren't doing Marozzo or Capo Ferro.
[00:17:30] Matty: That's very disappointing.
Your first service is to the story
[00:17:32] Teel: You know what? I still, it's still one of my favorite movies of all time. Because when you're choreographing fights, the first service is to the story. The second, but when you're doing it with real people, the story. And then if you're lucky, you can educate a little. You know, but when you're just writing it, it's always got to serve the story first. You know, and you can always fudge it if you don't know what to do with it. You could make it impressionistic. The feelings of the fight, without actually describing.
[00:18:04] Matty: Well, one of the things that I was thinking that's kind of related to that is that when you were describing, and people who are just listening maybe can pop over to YouTube and watch, but you were sort of illustrating why someone who is swinging a sword is at a disadvantage over someone who's thrusting a sword. We're using different terminology, but that's very apparent. Like, if you were watching a movie scene, I think even someone who knew nothing about swordplay would understand that, but when you're describing it, that would be hard to convey in writing. Do you have any tips for that?
[00:18:37] Teel: Honestly, I don't think it is because you can literally say, "I looked at him, and he had a curved war sword. That meant he had to swing it. I was lucky. Mine was straight. If I could avoid that first swing, I could stab him." I've actually had a scene in one of my books where two friends are fighting different bad guys. One guy has a two-handed sword and he's against a bunch of straight-handed people, and the other one, she's fighting a guy with a curved sword, she has a straight sword. So, literally, in the middle of the fight, they switch so that it goes straight to straight, curve to curve, to even it out a little. Because she had an advantage with the guy with the curved sword, but her buddy had none. She's also the better swordsman than him, so it makes sense she could take on the two guys with straight swords, and he would take on the one guy with the curve. You can build it in as part of the jeopardy for your hero, you know?
Size matters
[00:19:39] Teel: Also, the length of the sword matters. I'm sorry, size matters. If your hero is a petite woman, and even if she's an expert swordswoman, as my character Irina is, she has a sword that's scaled for her body, and so she will have less length than some goon she goes up against who's six inches, eight inches taller than her, who therefore has longer arms, and therefore, even if he had the same length sword, had an advantage. She has to make up for it by being more fleet and trying to get inside his range so that her blade is effective. So you really, there are a lot of factors you can use to even the fights up or uneven them against your hero.
The other thing is there's an old saying that the greatest swordsman in France is not afraid of the second greatest; they're afraid of the worst. And... So literally, someone who has no idea what they're doing can be on their side. They can just swing wildly, hit the right spot. I mean, how many times have you accidentally hit somebody's funny bone when you were reaching for something? You know, that could happen with a sword, to hit that one spot. There's a very funny story about when... if you've ever seen the movie The Court Jester with Danny Kaye, there's a scene in it where he's going up against Basil Rathbone, who was an excellent real fencer and a great stage combat fencer. But Danny's character is hypnotized to be the greatest with a blade. Unless you do this, then he's unhypnotized and he's a complete bumbling oaf. In the sequences where he's the greatest with the blade, Danny Kaye learned it so quickly and so well that the fight choreographer had to double Basil Rathbone because he couldn't keep up with the speed of Danny Kaye. On the other hand, there's a sequence where he's out in a courtyard, and he goes to Rathbone, "Your life's not worth that." Huh? Huh? Huh? And he's suddenly confused, and there's a scene where he's running around screaming, throwing the sword in the air, and you can see Basil Rathbone doing this. Rathbone said, "Neither one of us knew what he was going to do," and it was the only time I've ever been terrified with a sword in my hand because he could have literally stabbed him. He could have killed him. He was just running around being wild and crazy. So that can work too.
Opponents will never be exactly equal.
[00:21:57] Teel: You can work to have the guy you're up against. If you do something insane, they'll be like, "What are you doing?" Because also people who train in a style, and this is what Bruce Lee was against, when you train in one style, you're used to certain answers to certain movements. I do this, he always does this. Well, if you go up and complete a different style you've never seen before, you have no idea what they're going to do. If you, you do this and you expect them to do that, but they do this, suddenly, it throws your whole world out of kilter, which is why, In a lot of cultures, you would go around training in different schools, because everybody had their secret, vota secreta, their secret move, and each school would teach it, and you'd try to stay there long enough to learn their secret, and then you'd go on to the next school to learn their secret, because in a fight, you, you, you're not going to face a peer, you're going to face a peer, maybe. But you're not going to face an equal. No fight is ever equal, even if you both have the same training, the same body, the same skill level. one of you is going to be more motivated, or one of you is going to be tired from not getting enough sleep. So it's always, you might be equivalent, but it's never going to be exactly equal.
[00:23:43] Teel: That also works to give tension. When I have characters who are heroes and have had real training, I have to make sure they don't just Mary Sue their way through a story. You know, they can't walk into a room and kill everybody in the room like John Wick. Otherwise, there's no tension. Nobody really worries that John Wick is going to die; it's just about how he's going to kill them. It becomes like the Columbo of action films. You know he's going to win; you just want to see how.
[00:24:05] Matty: That makes me think of another interesting dramatic twist, which is the calm, cool, and collected combatant against the frantic, desperate combatant. And you can play that either way. You could say, you know, because he was frantic and panicked, he lost the fight. Or because he was frantic and panicked and had nothing to lose and was perhaps not trained. What you were saying before about it.
[00:24:30] Teel: That's a real thing. They train you in martial arts. The reason they want you to fight calmly and not fight angrily or excitedly is because when you have adrenaline in your system, you have the fight or flight response. Because of that, your body thinks, "Okay, I'm going to need energy to run away." It starts shutting down finer motor nerves, cuts off power to certain things. So you're, the old trope about somebody not being able to get their key in the door when the bad guy's coming after them, that's true because when you're in a frightened state, you lose fine motor nerves. So one of the reasons for martial arts repetition, and swords are martial arts, as are guns really, is you want to build a sense of, "This is the way you do it, and you're calm about it." You don't fight angrily, and you don't fight scared. You put that away, and you get angry or afraid after the fight is over.
One of the nice things, if anybody's ever read Modesty Blaise, or maybe I'm giving my age away, they were great books. One of the first true female heroes, who actually Emma Peel was somewhat modeled on, and one of her character traits is she will be phenomenal through a fight, very level-headed. Afterwards, she falls apart hysterically, but only in her friend Willie's arms. That's her complete release. She literally bottles all the emotion, and at the end, she explodes. It's her own way to deal with her own PTS. And he wrote this in the early '60s, before there was a real understanding of PTS. So I give much kudos to him, Peter O'Donnell, the writer. But you can really use the craziness because you will do things and take chances that no sane fighter would do.I had a friend, the first time he was in France, they still have rapier dagger fighting as a competition. And now it's been revived with HEMA, but back in the '70s, HEMA wasn't doing that stuff yet.
[00:26:08] Matty: And what is HEMA?
[00:26:22] Teel: Oh, Historical European Martial Arts. It was an answer to the huge explosion of martial arts, which everyone thinks is everything. They really are mostly referring to... Asian, but there's, I mean, the European martial arts are absolutely sophisticated, but we got guns earlier, and so they sort of became less a part of the world curriculum, but the more isolated communities in the east kept The older techniques alive much longer, but anyway, he was in a competition, and one of the things they allowed there, he didn't realize, he's busy, you know, parrying, blocking with rapier and dagger, he parries something, and the guy goes, whoop, and throws the dagger at him, and he said, I was standing there, and I watched this thing through my mask, coming at me in slow motion, going, this can't possibly be, and the guy won the point because they're allowed to throw the weapons.
[00:27:16] Matty: Interesting.
[00:27:17] Teel: Now, no one in a sane fight would throw away their only weapon, but in this case, he had parried the sword with both of his, so the guy had a free shot, but he wasn't in range to stab him, so he just threw it, and it's an insane move in a real fight, but on the other hand, he hit him. Now, in a real fight, maybe the guy would have dodged his head, but at the same time, that would have thrown his timing off, and you might have been able to kill him with the sword. You know, crazy stuff. It's perfectly justifiable, you know, the best knife fight I ever saw in any movie, the most realistic, was years ago, they used to have little video boxes outside movie theaters, and they would run a clip of a movie, and some Spanish film, I'll never, I don't know what it was, Mexican or Spanish film, because I don't speak Spanish, on 48th Street in Manhattan, and these two guys are in a pool hall, and they both got knives, and they're kind of doing this mirror thing, back and forth, one moves in, the other moves back, the other moves left, that guy moves right, and then, the first time one of them commits, he starts to lunge with it. The other guy reaches back, grabs a pool cue, and breaks it over his head. Most realistic sword-knife fight I've ever seen. Not the fight in Under Siege where they go, and they add in the sound effects of knife blades. You don't really parry with knives. Yeah, they're too small. Even Bowie knives are just too small, and the chances of actually catching it on your blade are minuscule. Again, an insane person or an unskilled person might do it, and that would be the one in a thousand times it worked.
[00:29:26] Matty: Well, I think that pool hall scene suggests an interesting scenario, which is the person who is carrying a knife because they intend to get in a fight and win, and the person who's carrying a knife because they're striking a pose, you know that they're threatening, but they're not positioning themselves in a way that they're imminently about to have an attack. Can you talk about that a little bit? Like if someone's using it mainly as a prop to threaten.
[00:29:51] Teel: Yes. Well, I mean, it's the whole bully scenario. People who bluster very seldom have the courage to carry through. I always tell actors when I'm working with them, don't play tough. Tough people don't pose. Tough people just are. They don't have to go, "Hey, oh," you know, they just look at you and go, "If you do that again, I'll kill you." It's just there. The mindset, and the samurai will talk about this a lot, is that every fight is won or lost before the first blow is struck. It is the mindset and the commitment, because you can't stop someone who's interested in hurting you and doesn't care about whether they get hurt or not. You cannot stop a determined assassin who does not care about their own safety. Which goes back to the crazy person. If a mother is protecting her child, she will leap onto a sword to throw the guy off a cliff with her. She won't parry it. She will do whatever it takes to make sure the child is safe. And if someone feels that the reason for defeating you is greater than their own personal safety, they will win the fight or have to be hacked down to the point where they can't function.
I always say that I fight like Brian Boru until five minutes after I'm dead. He was just that crazy. He would just charge large masses of people. There's actually an incident in Mexico when every year the Foreign Legion salutes a wooden hand. It was because it had been a lieutenant in a detachment when Maximilian was occupying Mexico. The lieutenant had a wooden hand from a previous engagement. There was a bunch of legionnaires that were trapped in a hacienda surrounded by hundreds of juaristas. The lieutenant was killed, but the sergeant made them all swear on his wooden hand they would never surrender. And it got to the point where there were like five of them left. Two of them were wounded. They had no bullets and they fixed bayonets and charged the Mexicans. The Mexicans were like, "You see this?" And they didn't fire because they were like, "These guys are crazy." And they didn't fire and didn't fire. The guys kept getting closer. And finally, somebody went, "Hey, we've got to do something about this." They all got up and surrounded them with bayonets to their throats and said, "Surrender." And the corporal, who was the only leader at that point, said, "The Legion does not surrender, you surrender." They all got bayonets at their throats. The Mexican commander said, "I'll tell you what, let's call it a truce." And he said, "We leave with our colors and our wounded comrades." The Mexicans were like, "You got it." And they saluted them as they marched out. Their determination was like the Alamo, but they won. Their determination. Their spirit was stronger than the people they were fighting because it really wasn't their battle anyway. They were occupying a foreign country, but it was for the honor of the Legion. That's one of the things is we've instilled a lot of artificial values in humans. One of them is the whole honor, flag, country, family. Family is the only one of those that's kind of a natural thing. You would protect your flag, and you would protect your offspring. The others have sort of been manufactured to give a reason for people to do things. Like I said, my reason to become fit, or at least appear to be fit, which is hilarious, people always used to say I was a physical guy, and I'm still not, never was. My reason to be fit was to be able to hold a sword. So that overcame my physical tiredness, my sickness, the exhaustion and stupidity. I mean, sometimes I think back at what I did when I was, you know, a 20, 30-year-old, and I'm like, how come I'm still alive? I mean, I went on to have people set me on fire for money.
Achieving a realistic portrayal of bladed weapon wounds
[00:34:01] Matty: That could be a whole other podcast episode, but I wanted to use that as a takeoff. I want to stick with the bladed weapons conversation because I think we're delving into a great topic, and that is one of the other things we wanted to talk about was the wounds and the reaction to wounds and realistic portrayal. And we talked a couple of times about what adrenaline does for you, and you were just mentioning people fighting for things like family and honor and so on. So what do you see in movies, if you're the recipient of the bladed weapon attack, what do you see that is good or bad? What should people try for or avoid?
[00:34:37] Teel: I do a lecture on guns and violence with weapons that way. And one of the things is, Matt Dillon in 20 years of Gunsmoke was shot 50 times and knocked unconscious 20 times, and in 8 years on air, Mannix was shot 20 times and knocked unconscious 37 times. Now, if you're knocked unconscious, that's a concussion. You have enough concussions. You don't talk right. You don't walk right. You're neurologically dumb. If you're shot, there's trauma shock. If you're stabbed, one of the things in duels, realistically, most duels post-1600 in Europe, personally, if it was a duel of honor, you fought stripped to the waist, male or female. And the reason for that was they figured out that if you drive fabric into the wound, which you would if you're stabbing somebody wearing a cotton shirt, there's always going to be some cotton fibers in there. They will fester, and you will die of the infection. More people died of infections after sword fights than the actual cuts or thrusts. Now I've been stabbed. I was stabbed in the stomach when I was doing a movie, and one of the guys I was working with, we're doing a sequence, and he missed the mark and he just stabbed me in the stomach, and I looked down and said, "Damn it, Scott, you frickin stabbed me." And he looked at me and went, "Yeah, sorry about that."
[00:36:03] Matty: So, fortunately or unfortunately, I had enough blub, and he stopped it as soon as he made contact with my body. But I still have a stab mark. He went in maybe about an inch, and any penetration anywhere on the torso and in most of the limbs even, any penetration more than two inches, you will hit a vital organ. Which is why there used to be a rule in New York that you couldn't have a knife first. You can't have a knife that's two-edged, ever, because the only purpose for a two-edged knife is to kill. That's a weapon, and you couldn't have it longer than two fingers' width when you hold two fingers up and you're measuring from one side to the other, because that's a little bit less than two inches. It's supposedly to reduce the chance of fatal injuries if someone has a knife and uses it in a fight.
So, swords, you can survive an 8-inch, 10-inch, 12-inch slash with a much greater chance of recovering almost completely than you could a 3-inch stab. Anywhere on your torso, because that three-inch stab will go into the liver, kidney, heart, lungs, and at a point in history, there was no way to stop sucking chest wounds. There was no way to stop a punctured lung. You either recovered or you didn't. Jim Bowie was stabbed and shot and clubbed and spent, I think it was seven months recovering because he had a thrust through the lung, and after that, everybody considered him a superman, that he was unkillable in the famous sandbar fight.
So, infection was a very big risk. One of the things that's odd about history is the Mongols wore very light armor. They wore silk shirts. And one of the reasons they wore silk shirts is because when they were hit with an arrow, it would not penetrate the silk; it would push the silk into the wound, and you could literally grab the edges of the shirt and work it to pop the arrow back out. It reduced the chances of infection since silk didn't promote infection, and it also reduced the chances of penetration because silk was a stronger fabric. It's funny that now we have spiders weaving spider silk Kevlar fibers to be used in bulletproof or bullet-resistant vests. So, we've taken modern technology and gone backward. If you look at modern riot armor, it looks like 15th-century fighting armor because what worked then still works now. If someone's going to hit you with something, you're protected in those areas.
However, there were some wounds they could not heal. There was something called the Coupé de Jeannac, a very famous duel between the Comte de Jeannac and a favorite of one of the Louis. Dueling was forbidden except this was affair of honor. They got all dressed up in their armor, and the Comte de Jeannac asked his sword master, "Look, we're in armor. I'm not that good with a sword. Can you teach me something? Something that I might be able to use, you know, a secret move." His secret move was to parry, slide in on the blade, and then cut the back of the knee—the tendons in the back of the knee—because in armor, you have to leave that area open. Even if you're wearing chainmail, it's much less armored or protected. In this case, most of the time they were not wearing chainmail pants, or they were fighting on foot. It was just too heavy.
They fought for a while. He sliced the back of the guy's leg, and he went down. They moved into the pavilion to try and stitch it up, but they didn't have the capability to really fix it, and he would have been crippled for life. He was so upset he ripped off the bandages and bled to death. The other side of that was that he was the favorite of the king, and the king was so sure that his guy was going to win that he had a big pavilion full of food for the big party afterward. But when the guy died, the king was so disgusted he left, and the populace went in, looted the pavilion, and had a great feast. The Comte de Jeannac had to flee to another country. But it's called the Coupé de Jeannac, the Cut of Jeannac. There are a lot of wounds like that, unhealable. If you were a swordfighter who'd been in any kind of battles for any length of time, you limped, or you were missing a finger, or you had scars on you. You woke up in the morning and you ached like crazy. There was a reason Athos drank a lot of wine. He ached a lot from a lot of fights. The other thing people don't realize is Athos was probably in the ancient age of about 30. He was the old guy. You know, D'Artagnan was 16, and Aramis and Athos and Porthos were probably around 20 because you just didn't live that long then, certainly not in a profession where you were either under fire or being stabbed on a regular basis.
Guidelines for realistic portrayals of recovery time
[00:41:29] Matty: If someone's writing a current-day story and they have someone who's stabbed or otherwise injured with a bladed weapon, can you give some guidelines about what would be an actual realistic recovery time? And maybe you can assume one scenario where the person actually has access to medical care and one where they don't. Can you give some guidelines about that?
[00:41:49] Teel: Yeah, if you're stabbed, it depends on where you're stabbed. They're really big on getting shot in the arm or shot in the leg in Mannix and in a lot of Westerns, and they usually just put a handkerchief on it and wander off. By the end of the hour, they're wandering around. If you're shot in the leg, you're done. It's the largest artery in the body, the largest muscle group. You're going to walk like Chester if you recover. If you're stabbed, it depends on if it's in a muscle group, how much tissue damage is to it. So realistically, let's say it's a four-inch knife. You get cut badly on the forearm and then stabbed in the leg before you break a bottle over the guy's head, and he's out. The forearm, if it's a cut, chances are it'll be stitched up. Unless he cut tendons, you know, a couple of weeks from then, it'll be sore for quite a while, and you may always feel the weather, but you'll be fine.
If he stabs you in the thigh, that could be months of recovery time because it went deeper, and they would actually have to do surgery internally to sew up the layers. We are basically onions, and that's why we cry so much. If your hero has a deep cut like that on the leg, it could be months before they can walk normally, if ever, really. And I said if you're cut on the back, that's what I say if you're in a knife fight, you want to control where you're cut. If you're cut here, there's less damage than if you're cut here. If you're cut here, it's all the tendons that work your hand.
On the outside of the arm, if you're going to get cut or slashed, even in the bicep or tricep area, is the least of two evils. If you're cut on the inside, you have all of the tendons that operate your fingers, and you have a major vein that runs on the inside. The brachial vein runs on the inside of the bicep, so you want to protect that. There's a reason we were built like a cage. We are basically a layer of suet on top to help protect the bones so they're not brittle. That's fine for slashes or contact wounds. A stab can go through and between those bones. So that's why it's always more dangerous.
There's a very famous moment in the historical battle of Agincourt where the French were so jammed together because the English stopped the front line with their longbows. The French were so anxious to get going, they kept moving. So the back lines kept piling up on top of the front lines. They had their distance, so the English just kept shooting bows at them. They got to the point where they couldn't swing their swords. The big cry was, "Estoc! Estoc! Stab! Stab!" Because it was the only way they could fight. Also, when you're wearing armor, stabbing is actually more effective if you can get to the joints. Most knights, when we think of knightly combat, their main weapon was a hammer because you were wearing a tin can, you can't cut that, so they would basically use blunt force weapons, or they would have a pick. One side would be a flat hammer, and the other side would be like what we think of as a railroad pick. You would try to use the pick to get through the armor and pry the guy out. So, you know, it's, and while knights could move very fluidly, you know, up until recently, maybe 30 or 40 years ago, the myth persists because historians never put on armor. Historians sit in places and read books.
You have got guys who actually put the armor on when it's fitted for them. It actually is lighter than modern combat gear and is suspended from more points. A full suit of armor might have 80 points of suspension. You wore an arming coat underneath it. Each section was connected, and it might weigh 60 to 80 pounds. Modern combat gear that a Marine might wear, like going into Afghanistan, weighs 120 pounds. It's basically just over the shoulders and the waist. So it's only got three points of suspension. I liken it to modern-day firefighters with all of their gear. Knights could move faster and more nimbly. They could swim. They could climb. They could swing on ropes. Otherwise, no castle would have ever been invaded. You know, so the illusion that knights were big and clumsy and could move very well was not true. They also were the best-fed of the people. They had the most meat, and that's why the Royal Guards are called the Beefeaters. They got the highest percentage of actual meat and vegetables. They didn't have to live off millet and leeks. They also had a more nutritious diet, which gave them more energy and a higher calorie count.
A well-done current-day knife fight movie scene
[00:46:58] Matty: Well, I wanted to wrap up with one more question. This is to bring it back to writers who are writing more current-day knife fights or bladed weapons fights. Is there a movie scene that you think does an especially good job?
[00:47:14] Teel: The best knife fight I can think of is in a William Friedkin movie, "The Hunted." It stars Benicio Del Toro and Tommy Lee Jones, and they have a brilliant knife fight in it. They have a little bit of a Wolverine thing going on. They play the wounds, but not as seriously as it would really be. They wouldn't have had that much adrenaline to keep going after being stabbed a couple of times. But, yeah, it's very realistic in the sense that they are two experts who know each other, so they can really engage in a fight, checkmate, fight, checkmate kind of thing realistically. It's not terribly drawn out, but it gives you a real sense of a visceral sword fight or knife fight.
The other one, believe it or not, is a Japanese film with Christopher Lambert called "The Hunted." The premise of it is that Christopher Lambert's a murder happens and he sees the face of one of the ninjas. They think they killed him, but he's not dead. This martial arts sect, though contemporary, has been fighting this ninja sect forever. They find out he's alive and they have to protect him.
It has some of the most realistic sword fights, and it's contemporary, from around 1990. There's a fight on a train that's phenomenal, where they're literally fighting guys in the middle of the smoking car, basically on a train. It very much kind of has Highlander vibes in that sense. Brilliantly shot, but both movies are called "The Hunted," so you have a nice, realistic and well-done knife fight, and another slightly less realistic but really well-done sword fights in the Lambert movie.
Matty: Well, DJ, thank you so much. This has been so interesting. I appreciate you sharing your insights and expertise with us. And please let the listeners and viewers know where they can go to find out more about you and everything you do online.
Teel: I have a website called theurbanswashbuckler.com. My books are on Amazon. I have "Dragon Throat," which is a novel of Alteva, a sword and fantasy, and "Journey to Stormrest," from the same series. I also have a book about a modern-day ninja, which I call "Martial Arts Noir." It's a murder mystery story, but his mother was an assassin for the Japanese during World War II, and he was raised by her. She taught him how to kill people. It's called "Killing Shadows," and they're both out from Airship 27. I'm around, I'm on Facebook with Teel James Glenn, T E E L, James Glenn. It's very hard for me to hide. I'm too big.
[00:49:55] Matty: Perfect. Thank you so much.
[00:49:57] Teel: Thank you.
[00:00:07] Teel: I'm doing fine. Very nice to meet you and everyone viewing.
[00:00:10] Matty: Oh, we are happy to have you here. And to give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Teel James Glenn has killed or been killed hundreds of times on stage and screen as he has traveled the world for 40 plus years as a stuntman, swordmaster, storyteller, bodyguard, actor, and haunted house barker. He's proud to have studied sword under Errol Flynn's Last Stunt Double, and he has made hundreds of appearances in Renaissance festivals, soap operas, and feature films, including having been beaten up by Hawk on the Spencer for Hire TV show.
He has also published dozens of novels, and his poetry and stories have been printed in over 200 magazines, including Weird Tales, Mystery, Pulp Adventure, and more. His novel, "A Cowboy in Carpathia," a Bob Howard adventure, won Best Novel in 2021 in the Pulp Factory Award, and he is also the winner of the 2012 Pulp Arc Award for Best Author.
I invited TJ on the podcast to talk about what's going to become one of a series of "Mistakes Writers Make" episodes.
[00:01:06] Matty: And we're going to be talking about mistakes writers make about fight scenes and how to avoid them. This is going to join other entries in this series, which are: Police Roles with Frank Zaffiro, Forensic Psychiatry with Susan Hatters Friedman, P. I. s with Patrick Hoffman, The F. B. I. with Jerry Williams. First Responders with Ken Fritz, Coroners with Jennifer Grazer Dornbusch, Police Procedure with Bruce Coffin, and Firearms with Chris Grahl of TacticQuill. That set of podcast episodes became so popular that I finally created a little listening list on theindyauthor.com/podcast. So if you're writing crime fiction or a topic that includes any of those topics, you'll be able to find all those "Mistakes Writers Make" and how to avoid them all in one place.
[00:02:00] Matty: And so we're going to be adding to that list, "Mistakes Writers Make About Fight Scenes," and I'd like to start out asking TJ, what got you started as a stuntman?
[00:02:13] Teel: I was thinking about that actually last night very specifically. I was a very sickly kid. I couldn't take gym. I couldn't do any sports. Asthma. Sickly. I looked like a potato with pipe cleaners stuck in me. And when I was 15, I went to a Phil Suling comic convention. I was a reader of comic books, of course, and I saw chapter two of the "Adventures of Captain Marvel" movie serial, made in 1941, and the stunt work in it by a guy named Dave Sharpe. The editing and shooting were so amazing; you really did believe a man could fly. You really did see guys flipping around. And I went, "I want to do that." I started making Super 8 movies in high school. I read every single thing I could on stunts and movie serials and how they did it. I taught myself how to do stair falls at my high school with washcloths wrapped with ace bandages around my elbows and knees on the marble stairs, still wearing my glasses because I couldn't see otherwise. I learned to do high falls off of garage roofs and how to build box rigs and all of it from reading it, seeing any behind-the-scenes footage I could. And then, of course, I went to art school. But the last night in art school before I was supposed to graduate, I had a party who was auditioning people for a film, and on a lark, because I knew about film and I'd been making my own little stupid Super 8 movies, Captain Marvel, Rocketman.
I went, I got a part in it, and then he needed somebody to choreograph and storyboard it and to choreograph a fight. I knew how they did it in the movies, so that got me started. Once I did that, I ended up getting a lead in the movie, although he lost the equipment halfway through, and the film never got finished. But that led me to other movies, and then I thought, I got to get some training. So I was researching a book I was writing that had a sword fight, and I took a friend of mine who had studied with Ralph Faulkner in California, who was the swordmaster in a lot of the Errol Flynn movies. He said, "Hey, there's this guy teaching stage combat in the city. Do you want to come with me to the class?" I went, "Heck yeah!" So I took Swashbuckling 101, and the minute I held a sword in my hand, I knew that's what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. It was like a heavenly choir with lights shining on me. From that point, I started to train to be able to hold the sword, move, and breathe, and I never looked back. I studied with my first instructor for three to four years. When he started a Renaissance Fair, I was one of the instructors. Then I auditioned for other Renaissance Fairs and ultimately ended up doing 60 Renaissance Fairs, either as the fight choreographer, the assistant choreographer, the jouster, or, for the last bunch of years, I participated in a story show. What was cool about that was I did storytelling with all the voices and characters, and my daughter joined me when she was eight.
[00:05:17] Matty: Oh, cool.
[00:05:18] Teel: Every year we did at least one Renaissance Fair together for a weekend. Where she would beat me up with a quarterstaff at the beginning of the show because everyone likes to see the big guy beaten up. The last time we did it was just before she went off to college, and she was six foot three.
[00:05:38] Matty: Wow.
[00:05:39] Teel: It wasn't funny anymore. It was just an old guy fighting a young woman. It wasn't the giant fighting a little girl. So she did the last quarterstaff fight on her knees, so it looked funny. And she still beat me, of course. So, I mean, that's it. From learning stage combat, I ended up getting parts in low-budget movies, soap operas, where they needed a big guy who could be the tough guy and throw a punch. So I would often get hired as an actor, and then they would add stunts, or they would hire me as a stuntman and realize I could act, so they would start beefing up my part. But many of my roles were like, "You can't come in here," and then there'd be a fight. That was the main part of my career.
[00:06:24] Matty: I have to ask what happened between the asthmatic child that looked like a potato with pipe cleaners. Did something happen that enabled you to take part in those activities, or did taking part in those activities help address it?
[00:06:38] Teel: That's it. I had the will to push through it now because there was something I believed in. I don't care about sports; I still don't. So the idea of training to run around a field and throw a pigskin, why would you do that? But training to be able to sustain a sword fight and do a Shakespearean monologue all in a show? Yes, I would train for that. I used to live at the top of a hill, and you'd have to climb up stone stairs in a park for my stage combat class, which was on Saturday mornings. I would literally have to crawl up the stairs. At the end of the class, I could not function.
I still carry an inhaler with me to this day. I'm still asthmatic, not as bad as I was as a child, fortunately. One of the first fight choreographers, Jim Manley, who hired me as his assistant, was severely asthmatic; he always had his inhaler with him. And I mean, I can't run a block, but I can do a fight. I can jump off a building, and my martial arts, by the end of a martial arts class, I would be almost like a non-functional lump. But I'd made it through alive, and that was always an achievement for me. So it never went away. My reason for fighting it was stronger than the actual disease.
[00:07:58] Matty: That's a great story. We had sort of come up with a couple of categories about which we wanted to discuss the idea of mistakes writers make about fight scenes. We've talked about bladed weapons already a couple of times. So I'd like to start with that one. What are some mistakes writers make? And if you have any good or bad examples from movies people might be familiar with, that's always a fun way to illustrate it.
[00:08:23] Teel: Yeah, I almost always end up using movie references because most people haven't read obscure Raphael Sabatini books or whatever. First thing is when people say "sword," there are hundreds of types of swords, different weights, and each sword has a different purpose. When people are thinking, for instance, of the Conan movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger, I will always and forever say that it was junk because Milius got his samurai instructor to teach Arnold how to use a sword, which makes no sense because samurai swords and broadswords don't work anywhere like each other. It would be the equivalent of having a bicyclist teach someone how to do motocross racing because they're completely separate. So everything he does with the broadsword is essentially wrong, and he moves like such a truck that anyone should have been able to kill him immediately.
On the other hand, you see a movie like Ladyhawke with Rutger Hauer, William Hobbs, who choreographed it, was the swordmaster in the 70s, 60s, 70s, and into the 80s. He did the Three and Four Musketeers with Michael York, the Mel Gibson Hamlet, and the Cyrano with Gepard. So he would study the specific weapon and teach you how to use that weapon. The broadsword techniques in Ladyhawke are real broadsword techniques, and you can see he moves completely differently. And, you know, and it really wouldn't have been a bad thing if they said, "We got a samurai guy, okay, we'll give him a curved sword." That's why Sandahl Bergman actually looks like she knows what she's doing, aside from being a dancer. She had a curved sword, so she was actually doing curved sword techniques. Samurai swords cut on the draw; they don't cut on the extension, so it's a completely different way of cutting. So, again, it's a stupid little nuance, but it's the kind of thing that drives me sane.
[00:10:34] Matty: The scene that this reminds me of is, and I'm not coming up with the name of the movie, but there was a movie with Liam Neeson.
[00:10:40] Teel: Rob Roy.
[00:10:43] Matty: Rob Roy, and there's that scene where he has what I guess is a broadsword. You can correct my terminology.
[00:10:48] Teel: A Scottish broadsword, Basket Hill broadsword, and he's fighting the guy.
[00:10:51] Matty: He's fighting a guy.
[00:10:54] Teel: With a small sword.
[00:10:55] Matty: Yeah, like a fencing thing almost.
[00:10:58] Teel: They were contemporary, same time. The Basket Hill broadsword was basically a war weapon, and the walking sword or court sword that ... He's always playing horrible, horrible human beings, and he's also really tiny. But he was using a contemporary sword of what the noblemen would have worn on their hip while walking around. They call it a walking sword. In that fight, he would have killed Liam Neeson in about 20 seconds because he had the lunge. The lunge gives you extension. Also, those basket-hilted swords, Rob Roy, whom Liam Neeson was playing, fought 60 duels in his life and never lost a duel. His last duel was when he was 63 years old, which, at that point, was old. We've pushed the extension of things. They wanted to make Liam Neeson the underdog, but in fact, if Liam Neeson's sword had ever actually contacted the court sword, it would have snapped it in half like a toothpick. So they had to work really hard to make you think the other guy was going to win, whereas if he'd gotten a lunge in that fight, the way it was choreographed, Liam Neeson was dead. In reality, the guy with the big hacking sword with longer arms would have won and gotten him on the first cut. If you miss while you're down there, the guy just lunges, and you're done. There's historical evidence of samurai swords against rapiers in Portuguese against bandits in the China Seas, and the Portuguese always won because a cutting sword requires an arc. A lunging sword does not. So while you're doing this, he's going like a sewing needle, and you're done.
[00:12:41] Matty: A That's an interesting, I mean, I imagine that in Rob Roy, they fussed with the reality because they needed that scene to extend longer.
[00:12:59] Teel: Yes, absolutely. And, yeah.
[00:13:00] Matty: Are there tips you can share that say, even like, how can someone do a realistic sword scene but extend it to extend the drama of the situation?
[00:13:10] Teel: If you ever see any of these commentaries on YouTube where they'll have, you know, a Swordmaster looks at a real thing and tells you, you know, the one thing all of them will say is that most fights, even if they last a long time, it's because nobody's doing anything. As soon as the blades start touching, the fight's over real quick because it is a case of who makes the first mistake. One of the things I write, I have a sword and sorcery series, and in any of my stuff, if I talk about people fighting with swords, I talk about the type of sword. Because certain swords have an innate advantage over other swords. And because of that, you then have to say, I want my hero to have a disadvantage so the other guy will have an arm that's three inches longer or my hero will have a stiff shoulder because he fell off his horse, to give them a disadvantage with that.
But in terms of, it's a case of just looking at the weapons and going, how is it used? And always, it's not the weapon, it's the individual using it. If somebody is skilled, the biggest problem I always see is people pick up a sword in some movie or in some book against someone who's actually trained in that weapon and somehow win. It doesn't work that way. You, even when they were training for combat, you trained with a weapon which was as close to the real weapon you were using as possible, even to the point where in Hamlet's time when they talk about foiled swords, they would take the real swords and wrap it in metal foil and stick a golf ball on the end of it. Because you wanted the actual weight of your weapon in your hand. If it's lighter, you're not going to learn how to use your weapon correctly. The familiarity with it often is the answer.
Now, a good swordsman is supposed to be able to use multiple weapons, but you always have your favorite; everybody. It's like everyone even has their favorite chair. You know, you get used to certain things. With any weapon, that weapon, even when I'm teaching stage combat or choreographing shows, I assign specific stage swords to specific actors and say, "That's yours," because every sword's balance is a little different. The weight of it is a little different. For instance, if you hand me a sword that I've never used before, and I'm immediately in battle, I really am not going to be familiar with how it moves. And that would be a disadvantage, which you can turn, as the protagonist gets used to it, perhaps. It gives you a nice disadvantage, even with a skilled fighter.
The other thing that drives me nuts, this is just the thing about cover artists and comic book artists. You don't switch your sword from one hand to the other unless you're Cornel Wilde, because you always have a strong side. Cornel Wilde in the old movies, the big trick at the end of every movie, he'd get stabbed in the right arm, and he'd have to do the final fight with his left hand. He was really a left-handed guy. He had to learn to do right-handed when he was competing for the Olympics. And so this was actually his strong side, but he learned to use the right. And 99 percent of people, or 98%, are right-handed. So a left-handed fencer always has an advantage because people are not used to going up against it.
[00:16:51] Matty: It makes me think of the scene in The Princess Bride, of course.
[00:16:55] Teel: Yes, yes. Believe it or not, that's the other thing. In the text, they go, "Ah, I see you've learned your Capo Ferro, ah, but I will use my Marozzo against you on Uneven Ground." They quote all these specific techniques, and they don't use a single one of them in the movie. The writer took the time to research them so they actually used real techniques. If you choreograph the fight that's in the book, it's a real fight.
[00:17:19] Matty: Oh, interesting.
[00:17:20] Teel: Using real techniques. Goldman did his research. But for the movie, they said, "Now we just want it to look like an Errol Flynn fight." So they had the dialogue, but they weren't doing Marozzo or Capo Ferro.
[00:17:30] Matty: That's very disappointing.
Your first service is to the story
[00:17:32] Teel: You know what? I still, it's still one of my favorite movies of all time. Because when you're choreographing fights, the first service is to the story. The second, but when you're doing it with real people, the story. And then if you're lucky, you can educate a little. You know, but when you're just writing it, it's always got to serve the story first. You know, and you can always fudge it if you don't know what to do with it. You could make it impressionistic. The feelings of the fight, without actually describing.
[00:18:04] Matty: Well, one of the things that I was thinking that's kind of related to that is that when you were describing, and people who are just listening maybe can pop over to YouTube and watch, but you were sort of illustrating why someone who is swinging a sword is at a disadvantage over someone who's thrusting a sword. We're using different terminology, but that's very apparent. Like, if you were watching a movie scene, I think even someone who knew nothing about swordplay would understand that, but when you're describing it, that would be hard to convey in writing. Do you have any tips for that?
[00:18:37] Teel: Honestly, I don't think it is because you can literally say, "I looked at him, and he had a curved war sword. That meant he had to swing it. I was lucky. Mine was straight. If I could avoid that first swing, I could stab him." I've actually had a scene in one of my books where two friends are fighting different bad guys. One guy has a two-handed sword and he's against a bunch of straight-handed people, and the other one, she's fighting a guy with a curved sword, she has a straight sword. So, literally, in the middle of the fight, they switch so that it goes straight to straight, curve to curve, to even it out a little. Because she had an advantage with the guy with the curved sword, but her buddy had none. She's also the better swordsman than him, so it makes sense she could take on the two guys with straight swords, and he would take on the one guy with the curve. You can build it in as part of the jeopardy for your hero, you know?
Size matters
[00:19:39] Teel: Also, the length of the sword matters. I'm sorry, size matters. If your hero is a petite woman, and even if she's an expert swordswoman, as my character Irina is, she has a sword that's scaled for her body, and so she will have less length than some goon she goes up against who's six inches, eight inches taller than her, who therefore has longer arms, and therefore, even if he had the same length sword, had an advantage. She has to make up for it by being more fleet and trying to get inside his range so that her blade is effective. So you really, there are a lot of factors you can use to even the fights up or uneven them against your hero.
The other thing is there's an old saying that the greatest swordsman in France is not afraid of the second greatest; they're afraid of the worst. And... So literally, someone who has no idea what they're doing can be on their side. They can just swing wildly, hit the right spot. I mean, how many times have you accidentally hit somebody's funny bone when you were reaching for something? You know, that could happen with a sword, to hit that one spot. There's a very funny story about when... if you've ever seen the movie The Court Jester with Danny Kaye, there's a scene in it where he's going up against Basil Rathbone, who was an excellent real fencer and a great stage combat fencer. But Danny's character is hypnotized to be the greatest with a blade. Unless you do this, then he's unhypnotized and he's a complete bumbling oaf. In the sequences where he's the greatest with the blade, Danny Kaye learned it so quickly and so well that the fight choreographer had to double Basil Rathbone because he couldn't keep up with the speed of Danny Kaye. On the other hand, there's a sequence where he's out in a courtyard, and he goes to Rathbone, "Your life's not worth that." Huh? Huh? Huh? And he's suddenly confused, and there's a scene where he's running around screaming, throwing the sword in the air, and you can see Basil Rathbone doing this. Rathbone said, "Neither one of us knew what he was going to do," and it was the only time I've ever been terrified with a sword in my hand because he could have literally stabbed him. He could have killed him. He was just running around being wild and crazy. So that can work too.
Opponents will never be exactly equal.
[00:21:57] Teel: You can work to have the guy you're up against. If you do something insane, they'll be like, "What are you doing?" Because also people who train in a style, and this is what Bruce Lee was against, when you train in one style, you're used to certain answers to certain movements. I do this, he always does this. Well, if you go up and complete a different style you've never seen before, you have no idea what they're going to do. If you, you do this and you expect them to do that, but they do this, suddenly, it throws your whole world out of kilter, which is why, In a lot of cultures, you would go around training in different schools, because everybody had their secret, vota secreta, their secret move, and each school would teach it, and you'd try to stay there long enough to learn their secret, and then you'd go on to the next school to learn their secret, because in a fight, you, you, you're not going to face a peer, you're going to face a peer, maybe. But you're not going to face an equal. No fight is ever equal, even if you both have the same training, the same body, the same skill level. one of you is going to be more motivated, or one of you is going to be tired from not getting enough sleep. So it's always, you might be equivalent, but it's never going to be exactly equal.
[00:23:43] Teel: That also works to give tension. When I have characters who are heroes and have had real training, I have to make sure they don't just Mary Sue their way through a story. You know, they can't walk into a room and kill everybody in the room like John Wick. Otherwise, there's no tension. Nobody really worries that John Wick is going to die; it's just about how he's going to kill them. It becomes like the Columbo of action films. You know he's going to win; you just want to see how.
[00:24:05] Matty: That makes me think of another interesting dramatic twist, which is the calm, cool, and collected combatant against the frantic, desperate combatant. And you can play that either way. You could say, you know, because he was frantic and panicked, he lost the fight. Or because he was frantic and panicked and had nothing to lose and was perhaps not trained. What you were saying before about it.
[00:24:30] Teel: That's a real thing. They train you in martial arts. The reason they want you to fight calmly and not fight angrily or excitedly is because when you have adrenaline in your system, you have the fight or flight response. Because of that, your body thinks, "Okay, I'm going to need energy to run away." It starts shutting down finer motor nerves, cuts off power to certain things. So you're, the old trope about somebody not being able to get their key in the door when the bad guy's coming after them, that's true because when you're in a frightened state, you lose fine motor nerves. So one of the reasons for martial arts repetition, and swords are martial arts, as are guns really, is you want to build a sense of, "This is the way you do it, and you're calm about it." You don't fight angrily, and you don't fight scared. You put that away, and you get angry or afraid after the fight is over.
One of the nice things, if anybody's ever read Modesty Blaise, or maybe I'm giving my age away, they were great books. One of the first true female heroes, who actually Emma Peel was somewhat modeled on, and one of her character traits is she will be phenomenal through a fight, very level-headed. Afterwards, she falls apart hysterically, but only in her friend Willie's arms. That's her complete release. She literally bottles all the emotion, and at the end, she explodes. It's her own way to deal with her own PTS. And he wrote this in the early '60s, before there was a real understanding of PTS. So I give much kudos to him, Peter O'Donnell, the writer. But you can really use the craziness because you will do things and take chances that no sane fighter would do.I had a friend, the first time he was in France, they still have rapier dagger fighting as a competition. And now it's been revived with HEMA, but back in the '70s, HEMA wasn't doing that stuff yet.
[00:26:08] Matty: And what is HEMA?
[00:26:22] Teel: Oh, Historical European Martial Arts. It was an answer to the huge explosion of martial arts, which everyone thinks is everything. They really are mostly referring to... Asian, but there's, I mean, the European martial arts are absolutely sophisticated, but we got guns earlier, and so they sort of became less a part of the world curriculum, but the more isolated communities in the east kept The older techniques alive much longer, but anyway, he was in a competition, and one of the things they allowed there, he didn't realize, he's busy, you know, parrying, blocking with rapier and dagger, he parries something, and the guy goes, whoop, and throws the dagger at him, and he said, I was standing there, and I watched this thing through my mask, coming at me in slow motion, going, this can't possibly be, and the guy won the point because they're allowed to throw the weapons.
[00:27:16] Matty: Interesting.
[00:27:17] Teel: Now, no one in a sane fight would throw away their only weapon, but in this case, he had parried the sword with both of his, so the guy had a free shot, but he wasn't in range to stab him, so he just threw it, and it's an insane move in a real fight, but on the other hand, he hit him. Now, in a real fight, maybe the guy would have dodged his head, but at the same time, that would have thrown his timing off, and you might have been able to kill him with the sword. You know, crazy stuff. It's perfectly justifiable, you know, the best knife fight I ever saw in any movie, the most realistic, was years ago, they used to have little video boxes outside movie theaters, and they would run a clip of a movie, and some Spanish film, I'll never, I don't know what it was, Mexican or Spanish film, because I don't speak Spanish, on 48th Street in Manhattan, and these two guys are in a pool hall, and they both got knives, and they're kind of doing this mirror thing, back and forth, one moves in, the other moves back, the other moves left, that guy moves right, and then, the first time one of them commits, he starts to lunge with it. The other guy reaches back, grabs a pool cue, and breaks it over his head. Most realistic sword-knife fight I've ever seen. Not the fight in Under Siege where they go, and they add in the sound effects of knife blades. You don't really parry with knives. Yeah, they're too small. Even Bowie knives are just too small, and the chances of actually catching it on your blade are minuscule. Again, an insane person or an unskilled person might do it, and that would be the one in a thousand times it worked.
[00:29:26] Matty: Well, I think that pool hall scene suggests an interesting scenario, which is the person who is carrying a knife because they intend to get in a fight and win, and the person who's carrying a knife because they're striking a pose, you know that they're threatening, but they're not positioning themselves in a way that they're imminently about to have an attack. Can you talk about that a little bit? Like if someone's using it mainly as a prop to threaten.
[00:29:51] Teel: Yes. Well, I mean, it's the whole bully scenario. People who bluster very seldom have the courage to carry through. I always tell actors when I'm working with them, don't play tough. Tough people don't pose. Tough people just are. They don't have to go, "Hey, oh," you know, they just look at you and go, "If you do that again, I'll kill you." It's just there. The mindset, and the samurai will talk about this a lot, is that every fight is won or lost before the first blow is struck. It is the mindset and the commitment, because you can't stop someone who's interested in hurting you and doesn't care about whether they get hurt or not. You cannot stop a determined assassin who does not care about their own safety. Which goes back to the crazy person. If a mother is protecting her child, she will leap onto a sword to throw the guy off a cliff with her. She won't parry it. She will do whatever it takes to make sure the child is safe. And if someone feels that the reason for defeating you is greater than their own personal safety, they will win the fight or have to be hacked down to the point where they can't function.
I always say that I fight like Brian Boru until five minutes after I'm dead. He was just that crazy. He would just charge large masses of people. There's actually an incident in Mexico when every year the Foreign Legion salutes a wooden hand. It was because it had been a lieutenant in a detachment when Maximilian was occupying Mexico. The lieutenant had a wooden hand from a previous engagement. There was a bunch of legionnaires that were trapped in a hacienda surrounded by hundreds of juaristas. The lieutenant was killed, but the sergeant made them all swear on his wooden hand they would never surrender. And it got to the point where there were like five of them left. Two of them were wounded. They had no bullets and they fixed bayonets and charged the Mexicans. The Mexicans were like, "You see this?" And they didn't fire because they were like, "These guys are crazy." And they didn't fire and didn't fire. The guys kept getting closer. And finally, somebody went, "Hey, we've got to do something about this." They all got up and surrounded them with bayonets to their throats and said, "Surrender." And the corporal, who was the only leader at that point, said, "The Legion does not surrender, you surrender." They all got bayonets at their throats. The Mexican commander said, "I'll tell you what, let's call it a truce." And he said, "We leave with our colors and our wounded comrades." The Mexicans were like, "You got it." And they saluted them as they marched out. Their determination was like the Alamo, but they won. Their determination. Their spirit was stronger than the people they were fighting because it really wasn't their battle anyway. They were occupying a foreign country, but it was for the honor of the Legion. That's one of the things is we've instilled a lot of artificial values in humans. One of them is the whole honor, flag, country, family. Family is the only one of those that's kind of a natural thing. You would protect your flag, and you would protect your offspring. The others have sort of been manufactured to give a reason for people to do things. Like I said, my reason to become fit, or at least appear to be fit, which is hilarious, people always used to say I was a physical guy, and I'm still not, never was. My reason to be fit was to be able to hold a sword. So that overcame my physical tiredness, my sickness, the exhaustion and stupidity. I mean, sometimes I think back at what I did when I was, you know, a 20, 30-year-old, and I'm like, how come I'm still alive? I mean, I went on to have people set me on fire for money.
Achieving a realistic portrayal of bladed weapon wounds
[00:34:01] Matty: That could be a whole other podcast episode, but I wanted to use that as a takeoff. I want to stick with the bladed weapons conversation because I think we're delving into a great topic, and that is one of the other things we wanted to talk about was the wounds and the reaction to wounds and realistic portrayal. And we talked a couple of times about what adrenaline does for you, and you were just mentioning people fighting for things like family and honor and so on. So what do you see in movies, if you're the recipient of the bladed weapon attack, what do you see that is good or bad? What should people try for or avoid?
[00:34:37] Teel: I do a lecture on guns and violence with weapons that way. And one of the things is, Matt Dillon in 20 years of Gunsmoke was shot 50 times and knocked unconscious 20 times, and in 8 years on air, Mannix was shot 20 times and knocked unconscious 37 times. Now, if you're knocked unconscious, that's a concussion. You have enough concussions. You don't talk right. You don't walk right. You're neurologically dumb. If you're shot, there's trauma shock. If you're stabbed, one of the things in duels, realistically, most duels post-1600 in Europe, personally, if it was a duel of honor, you fought stripped to the waist, male or female. And the reason for that was they figured out that if you drive fabric into the wound, which you would if you're stabbing somebody wearing a cotton shirt, there's always going to be some cotton fibers in there. They will fester, and you will die of the infection. More people died of infections after sword fights than the actual cuts or thrusts. Now I've been stabbed. I was stabbed in the stomach when I was doing a movie, and one of the guys I was working with, we're doing a sequence, and he missed the mark and he just stabbed me in the stomach, and I looked down and said, "Damn it, Scott, you frickin stabbed me." And he looked at me and went, "Yeah, sorry about that."
[00:36:03] Matty: So, fortunately or unfortunately, I had enough blub, and he stopped it as soon as he made contact with my body. But I still have a stab mark. He went in maybe about an inch, and any penetration anywhere on the torso and in most of the limbs even, any penetration more than two inches, you will hit a vital organ. Which is why there used to be a rule in New York that you couldn't have a knife first. You can't have a knife that's two-edged, ever, because the only purpose for a two-edged knife is to kill. That's a weapon, and you couldn't have it longer than two fingers' width when you hold two fingers up and you're measuring from one side to the other, because that's a little bit less than two inches. It's supposedly to reduce the chance of fatal injuries if someone has a knife and uses it in a fight.
So, swords, you can survive an 8-inch, 10-inch, 12-inch slash with a much greater chance of recovering almost completely than you could a 3-inch stab. Anywhere on your torso, because that three-inch stab will go into the liver, kidney, heart, lungs, and at a point in history, there was no way to stop sucking chest wounds. There was no way to stop a punctured lung. You either recovered or you didn't. Jim Bowie was stabbed and shot and clubbed and spent, I think it was seven months recovering because he had a thrust through the lung, and after that, everybody considered him a superman, that he was unkillable in the famous sandbar fight.
So, infection was a very big risk. One of the things that's odd about history is the Mongols wore very light armor. They wore silk shirts. And one of the reasons they wore silk shirts is because when they were hit with an arrow, it would not penetrate the silk; it would push the silk into the wound, and you could literally grab the edges of the shirt and work it to pop the arrow back out. It reduced the chances of infection since silk didn't promote infection, and it also reduced the chances of penetration because silk was a stronger fabric. It's funny that now we have spiders weaving spider silk Kevlar fibers to be used in bulletproof or bullet-resistant vests. So, we've taken modern technology and gone backward. If you look at modern riot armor, it looks like 15th-century fighting armor because what worked then still works now. If someone's going to hit you with something, you're protected in those areas.
However, there were some wounds they could not heal. There was something called the Coupé de Jeannac, a very famous duel between the Comte de Jeannac and a favorite of one of the Louis. Dueling was forbidden except this was affair of honor. They got all dressed up in their armor, and the Comte de Jeannac asked his sword master, "Look, we're in armor. I'm not that good with a sword. Can you teach me something? Something that I might be able to use, you know, a secret move." His secret move was to parry, slide in on the blade, and then cut the back of the knee—the tendons in the back of the knee—because in armor, you have to leave that area open. Even if you're wearing chainmail, it's much less armored or protected. In this case, most of the time they were not wearing chainmail pants, or they were fighting on foot. It was just too heavy.
They fought for a while. He sliced the back of the guy's leg, and he went down. They moved into the pavilion to try and stitch it up, but they didn't have the capability to really fix it, and he would have been crippled for life. He was so upset he ripped off the bandages and bled to death. The other side of that was that he was the favorite of the king, and the king was so sure that his guy was going to win that he had a big pavilion full of food for the big party afterward. But when the guy died, the king was so disgusted he left, and the populace went in, looted the pavilion, and had a great feast. The Comte de Jeannac had to flee to another country. But it's called the Coupé de Jeannac, the Cut of Jeannac. There are a lot of wounds like that, unhealable. If you were a swordfighter who'd been in any kind of battles for any length of time, you limped, or you were missing a finger, or you had scars on you. You woke up in the morning and you ached like crazy. There was a reason Athos drank a lot of wine. He ached a lot from a lot of fights. The other thing people don't realize is Athos was probably in the ancient age of about 30. He was the old guy. You know, D'Artagnan was 16, and Aramis and Athos and Porthos were probably around 20 because you just didn't live that long then, certainly not in a profession where you were either under fire or being stabbed on a regular basis.
Guidelines for realistic portrayals of recovery time
[00:41:29] Matty: If someone's writing a current-day story and they have someone who's stabbed or otherwise injured with a bladed weapon, can you give some guidelines about what would be an actual realistic recovery time? And maybe you can assume one scenario where the person actually has access to medical care and one where they don't. Can you give some guidelines about that?
[00:41:49] Teel: Yeah, if you're stabbed, it depends on where you're stabbed. They're really big on getting shot in the arm or shot in the leg in Mannix and in a lot of Westerns, and they usually just put a handkerchief on it and wander off. By the end of the hour, they're wandering around. If you're shot in the leg, you're done. It's the largest artery in the body, the largest muscle group. You're going to walk like Chester if you recover. If you're stabbed, it depends on if it's in a muscle group, how much tissue damage is to it. So realistically, let's say it's a four-inch knife. You get cut badly on the forearm and then stabbed in the leg before you break a bottle over the guy's head, and he's out. The forearm, if it's a cut, chances are it'll be stitched up. Unless he cut tendons, you know, a couple of weeks from then, it'll be sore for quite a while, and you may always feel the weather, but you'll be fine.
If he stabs you in the thigh, that could be months of recovery time because it went deeper, and they would actually have to do surgery internally to sew up the layers. We are basically onions, and that's why we cry so much. If your hero has a deep cut like that on the leg, it could be months before they can walk normally, if ever, really. And I said if you're cut on the back, that's what I say if you're in a knife fight, you want to control where you're cut. If you're cut here, there's less damage than if you're cut here. If you're cut here, it's all the tendons that work your hand.
On the outside of the arm, if you're going to get cut or slashed, even in the bicep or tricep area, is the least of two evils. If you're cut on the inside, you have all of the tendons that operate your fingers, and you have a major vein that runs on the inside. The brachial vein runs on the inside of the bicep, so you want to protect that. There's a reason we were built like a cage. We are basically a layer of suet on top to help protect the bones so they're not brittle. That's fine for slashes or contact wounds. A stab can go through and between those bones. So that's why it's always more dangerous.
There's a very famous moment in the historical battle of Agincourt where the French were so jammed together because the English stopped the front line with their longbows. The French were so anxious to get going, they kept moving. So the back lines kept piling up on top of the front lines. They had their distance, so the English just kept shooting bows at them. They got to the point where they couldn't swing their swords. The big cry was, "Estoc! Estoc! Stab! Stab!" Because it was the only way they could fight. Also, when you're wearing armor, stabbing is actually more effective if you can get to the joints. Most knights, when we think of knightly combat, their main weapon was a hammer because you were wearing a tin can, you can't cut that, so they would basically use blunt force weapons, or they would have a pick. One side would be a flat hammer, and the other side would be like what we think of as a railroad pick. You would try to use the pick to get through the armor and pry the guy out. So, you know, it's, and while knights could move very fluidly, you know, up until recently, maybe 30 or 40 years ago, the myth persists because historians never put on armor. Historians sit in places and read books.
You have got guys who actually put the armor on when it's fitted for them. It actually is lighter than modern combat gear and is suspended from more points. A full suit of armor might have 80 points of suspension. You wore an arming coat underneath it. Each section was connected, and it might weigh 60 to 80 pounds. Modern combat gear that a Marine might wear, like going into Afghanistan, weighs 120 pounds. It's basically just over the shoulders and the waist. So it's only got three points of suspension. I liken it to modern-day firefighters with all of their gear. Knights could move faster and more nimbly. They could swim. They could climb. They could swing on ropes. Otherwise, no castle would have ever been invaded. You know, so the illusion that knights were big and clumsy and could move very well was not true. They also were the best-fed of the people. They had the most meat, and that's why the Royal Guards are called the Beefeaters. They got the highest percentage of actual meat and vegetables. They didn't have to live off millet and leeks. They also had a more nutritious diet, which gave them more energy and a higher calorie count.
A well-done current-day knife fight movie scene
[00:46:58] Matty: Well, I wanted to wrap up with one more question. This is to bring it back to writers who are writing more current-day knife fights or bladed weapons fights. Is there a movie scene that you think does an especially good job?
[00:47:14] Teel: The best knife fight I can think of is in a William Friedkin movie, "The Hunted." It stars Benicio Del Toro and Tommy Lee Jones, and they have a brilliant knife fight in it. They have a little bit of a Wolverine thing going on. They play the wounds, but not as seriously as it would really be. They wouldn't have had that much adrenaline to keep going after being stabbed a couple of times. But, yeah, it's very realistic in the sense that they are two experts who know each other, so they can really engage in a fight, checkmate, fight, checkmate kind of thing realistically. It's not terribly drawn out, but it gives you a real sense of a visceral sword fight or knife fight.
The other one, believe it or not, is a Japanese film with Christopher Lambert called "The Hunted." The premise of it is that Christopher Lambert's a murder happens and he sees the face of one of the ninjas. They think they killed him, but he's not dead. This martial arts sect, though contemporary, has been fighting this ninja sect forever. They find out he's alive and they have to protect him.
It has some of the most realistic sword fights, and it's contemporary, from around 1990. There's a fight on a train that's phenomenal, where they're literally fighting guys in the middle of the smoking car, basically on a train. It very much kind of has Highlander vibes in that sense. Brilliantly shot, but both movies are called "The Hunted," so you have a nice, realistic and well-done knife fight, and another slightly less realistic but really well-done sword fights in the Lambert movie.
Matty: Well, DJ, thank you so much. This has been so interesting. I appreciate you sharing your insights and expertise with us. And please let the listeners and viewers know where they can go to find out more about you and everything you do online.
Teel: I have a website called theurbanswashbuckler.com. My books are on Amazon. I have "Dragon Throat," which is a novel of Alteva, a sword and fantasy, and "Journey to Stormrest," from the same series. I also have a book about a modern-day ninja, which I call "Martial Arts Noir." It's a murder mystery story, but his mother was an assassin for the Japanese during World War II, and he was raised by her. She taught him how to kill people. It's called "Killing Shadows," and they're both out from Airship 27. I'm around, I'm on Facebook with Teel James Glenn, T E E L, James Glenn. It's very hard for me to hide. I'm too big.
[00:49:55] Matty: Perfect. Thank you so much.
[00:49:57] Teel: Thank you.
