Practicing Parkour - The Athletic Style Featured in District B13: “The spirit is really close to martial arts,” explained David Belle who plays Leito, a thug who helps Damien track down the bomb. “I started it in 1988. It’s an art that my father transmitted that I’ve been practicing for 18 years now. You have to start working on your physical condition and then let your instincts guide you.”
Parkour wasn’t meant to become a sport in and of itself. It just happened that Belle and his childhood friend Sebastien Foucan’s style caught on and spread. “I started doing it because I wasn’t brought up by my father and didn’t really like school. It was basically a way of connecting with my father, to watch him and be proud of him. A simple example, if you have seen Forrest Gump, at one point he takes his shoes and decides to run, looks behind him and he has plenty of people behind him following him. But at the beginning, he was just running for himself.”
“I don’t really have a martial arts background,” said Belle. “I’ve learned some of them for two or three months, never more. Mainly for physical training. Almost everything I know in martial arts and stuff is actually what Cyril taught me on this movie.”
Cyril Raffaelli’s Background: “I started martial arts when I was six-years-old. By 14, I did a circus school, a national one in France. In 1997 I was world champion of Kung Fu. Then I worked a lot in musicals and on stage. My first job was working in a circus, the main French circus. After that, I moved to the film industry, did about 60 movies, the biggest French action movies. I was either a stunt man or choreographer or both. Right now, I don’t want to put a kung fu move into an action scene for no reason, so I opened up to any martial arts disciplines that exist to make it as true as possible to the character. It’s always based on the character.”
Cyril Raffaelli on the Training Process: “Do animals need to life weights before they move into the trees? You have to be in good shape and then you become what you want to become through what you choose to. It can be hardcore.”
Raffaelli said the choreography of the sequences was nothing new to him. “First of all, I already choreographed a lot of movies before so I’m used to it. And before we started the movie, I had everything written down already. Everything was on paper.”
Breaking Down a Specific Scene: Cyril Raffaelli described how the ‘running through the apartment scene’ was created and filmed. “Basically David was free to do his own thing that he knows by heart from before. But then on top of it, I added a few elements like when he jumps through the window on top of the door. I added a few elements like this to make it better. David is physically ready and very skilled, but what I did was during the training, I brought up a door in the training gymnasium and put those elastic chords on top of it.”
Raffaelli continued. “[David] was brought up into his world doing stunts for movies. Like his methods, he had that door and the elastic things and they’d make it smaller and smaller - and I kind of lied for the last two days. I totally made it much smaller than the real one. And as soon as I saw that David wasn’t touching any of the elastic, I said, ‘You’re ready. And by the way, it’s bigger.’ I think we only did two shots of it and both of them were good.”
Cyril Raffaelli and David Belle’s Big Fight Scene: Raffaelli said, “That scene was very important to me because it’s that moment, they reach that moment where the two of us finally accept one another and actually become friends and like each other. And they are facing the fact that they will have to fight. Basically, when I choreographed that scene, I wanted to keep that aspect of a lot of tension. Even though you like the person in front of you, you have to stop them. I really worked on that aspect.”
Comparing David Belle’s Style to Jet Li: “I have tremendous respect for [Jet Li]," said Raffaelli. "I have as much pleasure shooting a scene with Jet Li as I did with David. But the thing is, David’s character is someone from the ghettos and everything. He adapted another style to him that would be much more closer to Thai boxing. But thanks to David’s physical ability, I was able to teach him things within a year that would take at least four or five years to teach anyone else.”
