Cobra Kai stunt coordinator Ken Barefield takes us inside that Chozen-Silver showdown
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Every season, Cobra Kai fans know it's coming — the epic finale fight scene. From the brutal brawl between Cobra Kai and Miyagi-Do students in the halls of West Valley High School, to the showdown between Sam (Mary Mouser) and Tory (Peyton List) at the All Valley Tournament, Netflix's Cobra Kai delivers season after season.
For the most recent finale, season 5's "Head of the Snake," Cobra Kai creators Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz, and Hayden Schlossberg decided it was time to add a new element to the martial arts mix: weapons. The climactic clash between wealthy villain/Cobra Kai dojo owner Terry Silver (Thomas Ian Griffith) and Miyagi-Do dojo defender Chozen (Yuji Okumoto) escalated from karate to armed combat when Silver plucked a katana from his weapons room, prompting Chozen to pull a pair of sai, a type of Okinawan dagger, from his jacket pockets. From there, the battle to the (almost) death was on.
"The Big Three came to us early on in for season 5, and they were talking to me and Don Lee, my fight coordinator," Cobra Kai stunt coordinator Ken Barefield tells EW's The Awardist of his conversation with Heald, Hurwitz, and Schlossberg. "They said, 'We're going to do this big sword fight at the end of the season between Chozen and Silver.' At that moment Don was like, 'If we're going to stick being true to Chozen's character, he would use a sai and not a sword. With the Okinawan style, they used sais over swords; it's a defensive weapon. A true Okinawa martial artist would use a sai.' The Big Three loved it!"
Shot over six hours in the backyard of a private mansion in Atlanta, the Chozen-Silver matchup ended in bloodshed — though fears about Chozen's demise proved to be unfounded. The Awardist spoke with Barefield about the challenges of putting Cobra Kai's first weapons-based sequence together.
Netflix Thomas Ian Griffith and Yuji Okumoto in 'Cobra Kai'
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: At what point during the season did you start training the actors for this sword vs. sai showdown between Silver and Chozen?
KEN BAREFIELD: Basically from the first week we were in prep all the way up until that night of the fight, we put a pair of sai in Yuji's hands and he would be drilling 'em every day on set, every day on set with Don and Yuji. He would come in for his choreography, when he was learning some of his fights in episode 1 and 3 and so on, we would finish out the day with five minutes of sai. Don Lee, he's a master in the sai. He was a part of the fight team that came up with Jennifer Garner's look on the Daredevil movie, with the sai.
Thomas Ian Griffith told EW in a previous interview that he had some training with swords — what was the process like getting him ready for this sword battle?
[Laughs] Yeah, he's going to be modest and say he has "some training." That man has such a good base when it comes to swords. His background was either fencing or stage combat with swords. So, he already had a great base and we just had to kind of tweak it to what his style would be, which is traditional katana.
And Thomas was ferocious with wanting to train all the time. Just like what we did with Yuji, we did with Thomas. He would come in, and then we'd finish his training with about five to 10 minutes of sword work. I basically had to kick Yuji and Thomas out of the dojo just to make sure that they weren't trying to run themselves ragged. They knew this great fight was coming down, and they wanted to make sure that it was great. It's so incredible to work with guys that want to work like that.
What experience, if any, did you have working with these types of weapons?
That would be my first, to be so specific with sword work versus sai work. I don't know when you've ever seen that. I've done some sword work and then I've done some work with other traditional weapons. But for me and Don, this was such a unique opportunity to marry those two [weapons] together and showcase what the sai can do versus what a sword can do. When you get a couple of guys in a room where expertise is a weapon, there is a kind of back-and-forth. Like, "Well, if you did this, I would do that." And, "If you did that, I would do this." We had to think about Yuji's character and Thomas's character and what they would do, and all the buildup from episode 1 of season 5.
We had to make sure that we weren't just swinging swords around and swinging sai around just to do it. There was a strategic element from both of them. Chozen walks in with the sai [in his jacket] knowing that Silver has weapons in his house, and he knows that Silver was going to feel threatened, so he wasn't going to come in there empty-handed.
You've talked before about how you and Don always work to tell the story behind the choreography when you map out a fight. What was the story you were trying to tell here?
I would say this story would be vengeance, from Chozen's side of it. Because in episode 1, when they have that fight in the dojo, with Silver trying to take him out, Chozen is telling him, "Leave them alone. Now you're not just messing with Daniel, you've got to go through me." The accumulation of everything that happens in the whole season leads to Chozen coming to Silver, like, "I told you that this is what would happen, and so this is what has to happen."
Netflix Thomas Ian Griffith on the set of 'Cobra Kai'
Thomas also said he and Yuji trained with real weapons, sword and sai, whenever possible. How do you decide when to train with real versus prop weapons?
When it's just one-on-one, meaning when we just have Thomas or Yuji in front of the mirror and Don's next to them going through their lines, we would give them a real weighted sword or a real weighted sai. They had no [sharp edges], they were always blunt, but it was the correct weight. We wanted these guys to feel the actual weight of [the weapons] these true martial arts masters would use back in the day. We didn't want it to feel flimsy, we didn't want it to feel faster or lighter.
When we would have them walk the choreography together, then we would have rubber weapons, so it would be rubber to rubber. Or we would have wood with a steel piece in the middle of it so that if the wood broke, the sword would still be together. I would say we probably had 30, 35 prop swords just for that fight. We probably had five or six sets of the sai, which are sturdier.
When we shot the fight, if we were shooting Yuji over the Silver double's shoulder, the Silver double would have the prop sword in his hand, but we would give Yuji the real ones that he's trained with all season. They're blunt, but they're heavy. Since he was shooting with a stunt guy [in those shots], he knew that he was perfectly safe. He's run this line with this same stunt guy for the past three months. It all goes back to sense memory, and he can act now instead of having to worry about his choreography. And we'd do the same thing with Thomas.
Okay, so just to clarify, are they ever holding actual sharp weapons?
No, we would never have the sharp weapon on set. Kudos to the prop team for making those weapons look so realistic and good. We had real weighted weapons, but they were all blunted so there was no sharp edge.
What is the primary challenge of keeping actors and stunt performers safe when you're crafting a fight with weapons like this?
You can still absolutely get hurt. If someone forgets a piece of choreography and then they're swinging [the weapon] over them and they accidentally hit their head, that's not going to feel great at all. There is always that risk of when you do put weapons in a scene — whether it's a bo staff or nunchucks or a katana or sai or even boxing gloves — that element of injury goes up exponentially. But everything that we do in the stunt world, it is all so calculated, it's 99.9 percent foolproof. There's always that .1 percent that something could happen, and that's just out of our hands. But before we even go to camera, we have so much time to make sure that these guys are dialed in with the weapons.
When we do the hand-to-hand fights, that's going to change on the day a little bit. That's when the stunt doubles come in handy and we just get our shots that we need of the actor's face, and we pop in our stunt doubles because they're professional. But when you start throwing in the weapons, we have to tell everybody — the director, the writers, everyone — this can't change [on shoot day]. This has to be exactly what we need it to be.
Netflix Yuji Okumoto and Thomas Ian Griffith on the set of 'Cobra Kai'
They do give us a good amount of time to learn the weapons side of it, but when two guys are going at it, just on flat ground alone, you can catch a finger, you can hit a shoulder. No one wants to hurt anybody, and when it does happen, we're like, "Oh, you good?" "Yeah, yeah, I'm good. Let's keep going." I love seeing actors who are wanting to perfect their craft.
With that fight, it's outside, and it was dead cold outside. It's late November, early December — it's really cold outside, like 30 or 35 degrees. And then you want to put them in water. The water element alone, now you just amp everything up another 10 times. So, it's really a testament to how much preparation Yuji and Thomas did for that scene. We let our doubles go at it, but there's a good amount of that fight that is Thomas and Yuji going at it one-on-one with weighted prop weapons. A prop weapon can hurt really bad if someone doesn't know what they're doing.
I didn't realize how cold it was when you shot that. And the poor actors are in the water!
We have to make sure that when we put them in the water, the clock started. With anybody that gets in the water, whether it's a heated tank or not, your body can only last in there so long. Both of those actors and the doubles, they all had wetsuits on from the hips down just to keep them warm as well. But when you start putting a wetsuit on, now that's another added layer of, "I can't move." You're seeing Yuji hit his poses with one of his legs up in a block — he's doing that with a wetsuit on. And we sized their shoes down, so they weren't sliding in the water and all that stuff. There are a bunch of elements to it.
Once you get in the water in those temperatures, you've got about a minute and a half, two minutes before they start getting cold. We gotta pull 'em out, warm 'em back up, and then get 'em back in. We had to be really strategic with how they worked.
How long did it take then to shoot that sequence in the pool?
That whole pool sequence took us about six hours. Putting them in the heating trailer, warming them up, letting them eat a snack, staying loose, staying warm. There's a lot that goes into it. It's a fast sequence, but it takes a village when it comes to that world.
Netflix Thomas Ian Griffith on the set of 'Cobra Kai'
Were you able to rehearse it there at the location prior to the shoot day or just on that day?
We got one day to go walk it there [before shooting]. We like to let the actors walk it in the space. Because it was the end of the season and it was already cold outside, even though they were just walking it, they could still pull something. I don't want them to really rehearse it outside in that space. I just wanted them to walk it very briskly in that spot because then once it's lights, cameras, action, Yuji and Thomas go fully at it — and I wanted to make sure that we kept that for the camera.
The whole time Chozen and Silver are facing off with their weapons, Johnny (William Zabka) is inside Silver's house having a knock-down, drag-out brawl with a bunch of Silver's men. The two fights come together when Chozen hears Johnny yell inside and he's distracted just long enough for Silver to slice him across the back with his sword. Was it always the plan to have those fights overlap like that?
That was definitely always the plan. The Big Three already had that in their head and they were feeding that information to us early on in prep: "There's going to be this big fight with Chozen and Silver. We don't necessarily know how we're going to get it there yet, but Johnny's not going to be able to help." That was the other thing that we had to think about when we were building that fight: How can we feel the tension in both fights, put Chozen in danger and put Johnny in danger as well, and not have it be repetitive?
Netflix Yuji Okumoto in 'Cobra Kai'
When we were putting it all together, we were calling it the "Billy badass moment." That was Johnny's "Billy badass moment." The room they were in, the weapons room in Silver's house, we got to rebuild that [on set] because we knew we were going to destroy it. So underneath that carpet, we put in our dojo floor puzzle mats, our soft mats, so that when our stunt guys and Billy are fighting in there, it's got a squishy ground so we could really wreck hard.
As Yuji had to fight in the water — really hard, really cold — Billy is just beating the crap out of my stunt guys basically in a dojo. He's earned it, though. Billy's earned it.
While I'm sure you can't say anything about season 6, are you already thinking about how you're going to top this sword-sai matchup?
Exactly. I've been asking the Big Three that, and they just keep saying, "Don't worry. We'll one-up it." I don't know how they're going to, but I honestly can't wait.
All seasons of Cobra Kai are streaming now on Netflix.
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