“Hi, I’m Cathy Yan, the director of ‘Birds of Prey.’ So we’re near the end of the movie. And this is the culminating, the final fight scene between the women and the gangs that Roman Sionis, played by Ewan McGregor, sends in to the funhouse, which is called the Booby Trap. Well, originally, it wasn’t a funhouse, actually. I believe, originally, it was a hotel. And they were supposed to fight their way down. But then, when I got together with our amazing production designer, KK Barrett, and our DP, Matthew Libatique, we kind of thought, wouldn’t it be more interesting to convey a location that felt like Harley Quinn’s mind on acid? Our actresses, they’re actually doing the majority of the stunts themselves. That was four to five months of brutal training. When we were in prep, the actors were training pretty much every day with our stunt team.” “Come on!” “Margot learned to roller skate for this movie because she ends up roller skating in a good portion of the movie. She learned to roller skate on a bank track for the derby scene. And then, obviously, she’s roller skating here. And for this moment, she is actually just roller skating. And she was so— she became so good that she was able to stop herself, which is actually the most difficult thing to do, while on a rotating carousel, which is infinitely harder than when you’re not on a rotating carousel. What was another big challenge that we only sort of realized on the day, too, was that because the background was so different, for continuity, whenever we started a take, we had to make sure that we started and ended at the same point. So the carousel became a sort of clock. And we had a number for each of the hands. And then each hand had to directly correlate with a point outside in the funhouse so that we were able to actually match up the backgrounds. If we didn’t do that, then it would have been a complete nightmare.” [MUSIC PLAYING] ”[SHOUTS] Ah. Wait.”
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
