Say what you will about Mulan, but one thing is for sure, those who worked on it put a lot of effort into the production. Perhaps one of the most impressive aspects of it is the incredible fight scenes. With many of the characters performing supernatural feats and often fighting multiple characters at once, it looked like the choreography was complicated, including the final fight. But according to Mulan’s main antagonist Jason Scott Lee, there was one scene that was even more complicated to shoot.
Though I won’t spoil anything, the final fight scene in Mulan looked tough to pull off with a few interesting elements involved that made it quite a scene to behold. But as it so happens, Jason Scott Lee, who played villain Böri Khan, told Collider that he had trained for scenes that were ultimately cut and was actually the most complicated to pull off. Here’s what he said:
What’s interesting is that, when you get on a film of this size, you train for so many things and with so many combinations of choreography. And then, sometimes there’s a time crush or things shift around and the timing’s not right for it, so it gets deleted. You get worked up, memorizing many different fights. At the top of the movie, when Böri Khan shows up, there was supposed to be a more complicated fight scene, but the effort that was taking place was done off-screen. We have such a big library of things that maybe didn’t make it into the film, but the big effort was trying to get all of these different things to the fore. I think a lot of it was the opening, and then some of the horse riding stuff, which was complicated, just because of the nature of that.
Wow, he’s got me invested in what that opening fight scene with Böri Khan showing up would have looked like. While Böri Khan’s entrance in the movie included some stunning effects, it's not of this exact scale. It sounds like they had something bigger, but didn’t have the time to make it happen. FOMO alert.
Of course, things like this happen all the time in the movie industry. Scripts get rewritten during production, characters and scenes get added or removed, and later down the line, there’s typically reshoots that need to happen. Mulan was no different and underwent a number of changes while being made.
In the case of Jason Scott Lee, his villainous character underwent multiple changes before they went into production. Most of the original ideas, he admitted, were pretty outlandish, including long riding coats and a wolf’s head on his shoulder. Obviously, they scaled it down to what we see in the film.
It’s hard to say if we’ll get to see any of these deleted fight scenes Jason Scott Lee mentions or if they were all removed before production. If they did end up filming any of them, I, for one, would be eager to hear if they end up in bonus features on the Blu-Ray. Stay tuned for more movie news at CinemaBlend.
