Interview: Justin Yu on the Stunts in ‘The Brothers Sun’

One of the most remarkable things about Netflix’s The Brothers Sun was the stuntwork, and that’s thanks in large part to Stunt Coordinator Justin Yu. Recently nominated for his work on the show in the Outstanding Stunt Coordination For Comedy, Yu sat down to talk to us about what it took to bring those complicated and hilarious moments to life. Read on or listen below for the full conversation.

Ayla Ruby: So again, congratulations on the nomination. It’s so well deserved and it’s just like… It’s brilliant. It’s an amazing thing.

Justin Yu: Thank you so much. Thank you for enjoying the series of Brothers Sun.

Ayla Ruby: What does the nomination mean to you? How does it feel?

Justin Yu: Honestly, I’ve been competing all my life in martial arts. So the stunt aspect of it, it’s really amazing and awesome, but it didn’t actually hit me until the whole entire crew came up and said, “Hey, congratulations.” Because for me, it’s just doing my job. It’s an everyday thing. We’ve been doing this for over 15 years. The team and I have been together for over 10 years, and we clicked. Kevin Tancharoen brought us in, and thank you Kevin Tancharoen and Brad Falchuk for putting this awesome team together and allowing us to display what their vision was. It’s more of a thing for the team rather than me. I feel like it’s the crew that deserves it rather than myself because it wasn’t just me. But it was awesome to see that we were represented and people enjoyed our stuff.

Ayla Ruby: Yeah. No, we talked very briefly before the interview and everything was so well done. I think just from the moment the show starts, there’s this opening scene where we see Charles, he’s doing his thing, baking. And then there’s this incredible fight scene and all these stunts. You can’t not watch it. You can’t see it. You can’t look away.

Justin Yu: Yeah. That was crafted brilliantly by Kevin Tancharoen, Brad Falchuk, and Byron, because we knew we didn’t have time to shoot that. It was a stage build, and that was one of those things that we talked about early on in the creativity side of things.

He was just like, “Hey, I have four pages to five pages of dialogue. Some of it is in Chinese or most of it is in Chinese, and we have to be able to still make an impact right on screen and grab the audience.”

And I was like, “Let’s do it.”

And he is like, “But I need it done in three shots.”

And I was like, “Whoa, that’s a challenge.”

And he is like, “And it’s got to be played with music.”

So there was a lot of variables and we came together. We had a lot of time. Our line producer, Rad, really gave us the time to really deep dive into how to explore every single camera angle, every single fight move, what looks good on camera, what transition helps. It was awesome to have such a outstanding team behind it all.

Ayla Ruby: So you mentioned you get script pages, you talk and get this kind of idea for what it should look like. How does that work for you? What’s that whole process from making it happen?

Justin Yu: So first, we wanted to utilize the environment, being in a kitchen. It was such a big influence on the cooking scene. We call it, excuse my language, food porn, but we wanted to show it to the audience. We wanted to utilize the rolling pin, which was a thing that Kevin really wanted to hit the mask off and show them how visceral, and angry, and mean the character was. Because it’s the first time introducing a character that we’ve never seen before, and we don’t see it until the end of the fight, which is the reveal of who he is. Yeah, the fight team came together. We played to our strengths. Michael Lehr who doubled Justin Chien in the fight, we used his strengths and our three goons that we call it, under the mask, Ryu Minami, Jay Kwon, and Bryan Cartago who did the high fall at the end.

Really outstanding, phenomenal stuntman. They are the cream of the crop, the top of the players when we just let it play, and it was just a wide shot. And we’re just like, “All right. 3, 2, 1, action boys.” And they just gave it to us, and we were so happy that we had these guys on our team to make that thought work.

Ayla Ruby: That’s amazing. A lot of your actors also have martial arts backgrounds. How does that come into play when you’re designing the stunts, designing all of that? How do you know when the actors should step in or when it should be the amazing stunt people? How does that work?

Justin Yu: I and some of our team members who are on the stunt team of Brothers Sun are a part of 8711. We designed some of the action for John Wick, Fast & Furious and such other featured films. So while designing that or early on in the casting phases, Jenny Jue, our casting director, we kept in touch very closely and Kevin Tancharoen, and we would look at all the people that were submitted for these roles, and we’d see who had the background of it. Early on, we kind of pushed for the people that we knew who had a strong martial arts background like Yoshi Sudarso, Andy and Brian Lay, some of these. And then Justin Chien actually had a jiu-jitsu background, which we really capitalized on. So we saw that that was his strength and something he loved, and we utilized that. He loved going to the gun range, so we took him straight to Taran Tactical where John Wick does the three gun. He immediately showed us how well he could work one-handed with a gun, and we’re like, “Let’s do that. Let’s do it. Let’s make them look amazing.”

Yeah, it worked really well. But before we get the actors and actresses and the cast, we actually do assessment with them and see what their strengths are and seeing, oh, this person is flexible, and they can move in this direction better than this person, so let’s utilize that in this one. Like Madison [Hu] and I want to say in the dim sum kitchen fight, all that kind of stuff, we really utilize our cast right there. Madison really had the aggression and the punch. So on the wides we were like, “Hey, show us that big… Stretch it all out. Show us all these moves.” And it worked out outstanding.

Ayla Ruby: So we talked a little bit about, I guess, the intro, the food scene with the baking and the Great British Baking Show, but there’s also the inflatable dinosaur scene, which has gotten a ton of attention, rightly so because it was hilarious and just amazing.

Justin Yu: Absolutely.

Ayla Ruby: Can you talk about that? What can you share about that?

Justin Yu: So that scene in particular, that was one of the scenes that when I read in the series of scripts that I was like, “We are doing that. That is awesome.” And then when Kevin and I started talking about it… And it was actually Byron and Brad’s idea.

And they’re like, “Dude, it’s going to rock the world, you know those dinosaurs?”

And then we’re just, “Yeah, let’s test it out. We’ve got to test it out.”

So Vera got the costume. Vera’s our costume designer. She brought it out. The difficulties and the challenges of it were realistically, if a knife were to cut it, it would deflate. So a lot of the choreographers, they come from the movie world where it’s like everything’s got to be realistic plus 10%, not 100%.

And I’m like, “Hey guys, we’ve got to open up our imagination and let’s have fun with it.” So I was like, “What can we use?”

“Let’s use a baseball bat.”

“And what do we have over here? What if we use a ball?”

And they’re like, “Oh, no, that’s too goofy. Maybe the ball thing. Let’s use a baseball bat. Let’s hit them a couple of times, and then have them do a big reaction towards camera.”

So it was super fun choreographing that. It was harder for the performers, obviously, because there’s difficulties. It’s very hard to grab things with inflatable, and it was hot. I want to say we were shooting in Arcadia, from what I remember, in a mansion, somebody’s house backyard. It was so hot outside. It was 107 degrees that day.

Ayla Ruby: Oh, wow.

Justin Yu: Yeah. We’ve got these canopies and we’re blowing air. Any chance they could get there, they would just run in there. On one of the takes, Justin Chien, he just… The camera that Kevin had placed and he really wanted, it was such a hard sell. And I was like, “Hey, you’re really going to have to make contact with the dinosaur.” I remember after that hit, when Ryu went down, it was so hot. He stood up and he is like, “I’m good.” And I can hear him through the thing, but I can see the mask on like this when he’s breathing.

Ayla Ruby: Oh, boy.

Justin Yu: And I’m like, “Oh, dude. You’ve got to open that thing up.” So they opened it right away, and it was just a woof of hot steam air. He’s like… But it was fun. To be able to accomplish that and then the spin into the water special effects, Mikey had to test that out for us as well, because having an inflatable little motor inside, in water, plus …But it all worked out well, and we had so much fun.

Ayla Ruby: Yeah. So there are just so many moving pieces to all of the stunts and everything. How do you keep it all straight? How does that work?

Justin Yu: Again, there’s a lot of inspirations. So Kevin would come up to us and he’d be like, “Hey, for this thing at the end, for example, I want to pay homage to Jurassic Park and when he does the Rawr.” So those little nuggets, Kevin, Byron, and Brad would come up to us as we’re choreographing. While we’re choreographing, we usually do this thing called Pre-vis. We would then do a first pass of what we think the action should be following the scripts and the notes that our director and our writers give us. And then we present that Pre-vis using the skeleton of the geography of where we’re shooting. So for instance, like you said, the dino, we would get a blueprint of the backyard, and we’re like… So then we go back to the stages and it would mock it up with our pad. We’re like, “Okay, this is the water zone.”

We’ll put the blue pads in the water zone. Like, “Okay, you’re going to dive in here.” And then we’ll block it out with boxes so that we all know where our maximum… where we could go left or right, geography wise. And then we would then run the rehearsal, film it in a way where we would think that we would film it on the day, completing the day. Maybe we only have half a day to shoot this. Okay. Well, then we’ve got to combine shots or think about cool shots to minimize setup and stuff like that. So we do those dry runs probably two to three weeks or even a month prior to even going to location and have well rehearsed it with our cast and stunt crew.

And then Kevin and the DP would come in, and the camera team would come in. They would come in and just check it out and be like, “Okay. Yeah, we could try to put a techno over here. Let’s use a trinity here. Let’s use a drone here.” And then that way on the day, we could fight for it because again, shooting in LA is actually a little bit harder than most people think. The licensing and permitting and stuff like that. So we had definitely a lot of difficulties, but we had such a great team behind it.

Ayla Ruby: I know we’re starting to get close on time, but what was the most challenging thing or most really gratifying, as a professional, to make happen with this show?

Justin Yu: I don’t think there wasn’t really much. It was during the time of COVID. We did have the COVID challenges of testing and then getting people cleared because I think our first day of shooting somebody had gotten COVID, and we had to just… with their schedule. I remember, I was running back from COVID testing to try to get my guys into rehearsal and stuff like that. And they’re just like, “Okay, we’re starting to slow down.”

I’m like, “Well, we’re pushing everything two days.”

They we’re like, “Wait, that means we have to tell everybody-

Ayla Ruby: Oh, wow.

Justin Yu: … re-schedule then.” So those were the difficulties. But other than that, nothing much. We had such an amazing team. Working in LA, it has difficulties, but it’s LA. It’s Hollywood. It’s meant for us people. You have all the great talent out here. Everything you need is here and just outstanding people. Michelle [Yeoh] was such a big sister and such an amazing person to work with. She was so involved and loved every single bit of it. It was super cool.

Ayla Ruby: Oh, that’s awesome. I’m glad you mentioned her because I wanted to ask about her too. I guess too, is there anything you want people to know about the show, about the work on the show, or about anything you’re working on next?

Justin Yu: So I’m currently working on… It’s a featured film called Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice. It is a Vince Vaughn featured. BenDavid [Grabinski] is directing, and I previously was on a film called The Killer’s Game. J.J. Perry directed it, starring Dave Bautista and Sofia Boutella. It’s a fun little action film about an app of assassin, and they use the app to collect money. Dave Bautista gets misdiagnosed, and he falls in love with Sofia Boutella. There’s great action in there too. Very similar to Brothers Sun, but with more characters. But yeah, that’s currently what I’m working on. As for the show, I think it touches a lot of Asian-American story, and not only Asian-American, but just Los Angelenos is growing up and the environment we had to go through the whole entire making friends feeling awkward. It’s Hollywood being a comedian. I want to do improv. I want to do this, but my parents don’t accept me. Not just Asians.

I have different ethnicity friends that are like, “Dude, that portrayed us too, man. That was a part of us. I grew up like that. I had food that I couldn’t eat in school because people would make fun of me.” It was cool that people could relate to it, and I just wanted… I think everybody who worked on it wanted everybody to enjoy that culture that we grew up in and letting them feel what we felt.

Ayla Ruby: Awesome. Well, thank you. Thank you so much for talking. Again, the stunts and everything on the show was brilliant, so I am a big fan of it.

Justin Yu: Thank you so much. Thank you and for having me. If you ever need any more information or anything, please let me know. I’m always available.

Ayla Ruby: I might take you up on that. Thank you so much.