The Fight Scene of the Year Takes Place in a Romantic Comedy

Sometimes, what makes a fight scene special isn’t how intense and visceral it is but how awkward and surprising. In Michael Angelo Covino’s new romantic comedy, Splitsville, which follows the amorous entanglements of two couples, the film’s two male leads (played by Covino and his longtime writing and producing partner, Kyle Marvin) get into an unexpected knock-down-drag-out fight that lays waste to two floors of a very elegant house in the Hamptons. Through every stage of their dorkily hilarious combat, we can tell that it really is the two actors going at it.

Here’s what happens in the fight. (It happens fairly early in the film, so there are no broad spoilers here, aside from specific details of this scene.) Sensitive elementary-school gym teacher Carey (Marvin) has just informed real-estate developer Paul (Covino), his best and possibly only friend in the world, that he’s slept with Julie (Dakota Johnson), Paul’s wife. The night before, the couple had revealed to Carey, who’d just broken up with his own wife, Ashley (Adria Arjona), that their marriage was an open one; then, Julie and Carey wound up alone together and, well, one thing led to another. So now, after Carey informs the supposedly chill-about-his-wife-sleeping-with-other-people Paul that he and Julie had sex, Paul slaps him, hard. Then Paul apologizes, saying that it was just a reflexive move. Then he slaps Carey again, and all hell breaks loose.

First, they obliterate the dining room of Paul’s house, ruining a huge, fancy couch; destroying a sturdy, rustic dining table; smashing into the walls of the home he considers an “architectural masterpiece”; and doing bizarre wrestling moves on top of what we’ve been told is a $20,000 rug. These men are not athletes or fighters or hit men, so they’re ungainly and a little lumbering. But Paul knows some aikido, and Carey is a physical-education teacher, and both have probably watched some WWE, so neither is willing to back down. They punch and kick and choke and bite. They smash glasses and bottles and table legs into each other. At one point they pick up knives from the kitchen and suddenly exclaim, in unison, “No knives!” and put them down. (Cleverly, the film never lets us forget it’s a comedy.)

They pound more holes into the walls of the house as they make their way up the stairs, where they smash an enormous aquarium nearly the size of an entire wall (prompting them to take a brief respite from the fight as they race to save Paul’s son’s goldfish, all of whom are named after popes for some reason). Along the way, Paul takes a blowtorch to Carey’s face, burning off his eyebrows. It all ends with the two men falling through a huge upstairs window and landing in the pool, where they tussle some more.

Splitsville is a movie built around a series of surprising and stylized set pieces; the film also features a spectacular car crash and a fire, as well as multiple bravura long takes. Once upon a time, comedy was a genre that came with a lot of style, but over the years many filmmakers working in it have favored the functional over the cinematic. That’s just one reason why Covino and Marvin’s film works. (They also created 2019’s wonderful The Climb, only in that one, it was Covino who slept with Marvin’s girl.) “I find comedy to be a place where the visual medium can be used better than probably any other genre, because comedy is all about the unexpected,” Covino says. “What better way to surprise people and use the unexpected than through the way you capture it?”

“Can we break this? Can we break that? How much can we break that?”

The fight scene was one of Covino and Marvin’s earliest ideas, even before they’d written the script. “When it was revealed that Carey and Julie slept together, we wanted it to lead to uninhibited physical chaos,” says Covino. “And we didn’t want it to end where it would normally stop. We wanted to go at least three times longer than that.” The two continued to work on the details of the fight all throughout preproduction, hiring Montreal-based stunt coordinator Tyler Hall to help them execute the various moves as safely and effectively as possible. “First I wanted to see what their physical abilities were and start building from there,” Hall says. “I am not the type of stunt coordinator who says, ‘It has to be like this.’ This was a comedic fight, which was great.” Whenever he presented to Covino and Marvin the typical way to accomplish a certain stunt, the writer-performers would try to find new ways to execute it in order to keep the tone of the scene fresh and funny.

“The worst thing you can do with any human being in any physical situation is take away their confidence,” Hall says. “In every sport, every situation we see, it’s all confidence.” In many ways, what allowed Marvin and Covino to perform all these stunts themselves was that they ultimately understood that they could. The actors would try out their ideas on Hall, who’d help them break down the different parts of the scene. “We’d be grinding through budgets and doing camera tests, and then we’d go to the basement of the house we were renting, throw down mats, have Tyler come over and just work through sweaty fight sequences and map it all out,” Marvin says. They also spent weeks going to a rock-climbing gym where they could find thick enough pads to throw themselves around and beat each other up. “We’d spend our nights fighting each other so that accidents would become interesting things,” Marvin says. “Then we’d weave those into the sequence.”

The fight was also a challenge for location scouting and production design. “We’d walk around people’s houses and go, ‘Could we go through this window?’” Marvin says. “Then, when we found our house, we had fun making adjustments to the space itself, working with our production designer and being like, ‘Can we break this? Can we break that? How much can we break that?’” They also had to budget money for damages and for patching up walls and other broken and disfigured parts of the very real and very nice house they were shooting in. (The film is set in an unnamed locale, but it was shot in and around Montreal.)

One key logistical location challenge came when Paul sends a bowling ball through the aquarium. “It was a lot of water,” Marvin says. “We realized that it was going to flood the entire room, that there would be water going up walls and stuff.” To protect the bedroom and the house, the art department and the special-effects team had to build a large waterproof lining inside the room, effectively turning the place into a hidden pool. “When the charge went off on the aquarium and the water poured out, it looked like it was landing in a regular bedroom, but it was actually all sealed, so it didn’t do any damage to the house,” says Hall. This also meant the shot could only be filmed once. “We must have rehearsed that scene, like 20 times before Mike really threw the ball,” Hall says.

“If you’re seven minutes into a fight, you’re not John Wick anymore.”

Marvin and Covino shot most of the fight scenes with a reduced crew before the start of principal photography. “We wanted to minimize everything else and really focus on the stunt and special-effects people,” Marvin says. Of course, he adds, most of the crew did show up to watch these scenes, because everyone wanted to witness the chaos. “They found out we were doing everything ourselves and they got really excited.”

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Much of the fight on the main floor was shot in long takes in which the two went through all their moves in a master shot. “It’s about four and a half minutes, and every time we did it, we did it in one continuous take, even though we wound up chopping it up in editing,” says Covino. “The aesthetic approach was very much to have it feel visceral and raw, almost like the viewer is right there with it.” This also allowed the actors to become genuinely tired, which added to the humor. “If you’re seven minutes into a fight, you’re not John Wick anymore,” Marvin says. “You’re just trying to hold on, and things get sloppy and rough.”

One of the more difficult stunts of the sequence involved Covino tumbling down a flight of stairs. “They wouldn’t insure me to do that, but I just did it,” he says. The final shot shows Paul going down the stairs and out of frame, where Hall stood ready with a pad to throw down for the actor to land on. They tested out various ways of accomplishing the stunt more safely (and in more insurable fashion) beforehand, including the idea of Paul knocking over a picture frame and then sledding down the stairs on it like a toboggan. (Hall says this actually looked pretty funny; Covino says it was “just ridiculous as a concept.”) They eventually decided to do it as a slide down the stairs, with small bounces along the way.

On the actual take, however, Covino tumbled instead. “I went end over end, because I wasn’t liking the way it was coming out,” he says. Hall notes that this immediately posed a new challenge: “What happens when you roll is that you carry more speed, and you wind up at the bottom with a lot more speed and force and energy,” he says. “He’s a big boy, and he came down like a freight train. I just got the mats in. Holy cow, that was close.” (There was one bit that Covino says he cut from the stair fall, which involved a shot of Paul’s body lying lifeless at the base of the steps for a few seconds. “You’re just looking at me, like, ‘Oh, he’s dead.’ But pacing wise, it changed the rhythm and pace of the fight and took a bit of steam out of the later section.”)

Strangely enough, one extremely dangerous-looking stunt turned out to be one of the safest and simplest. As they’re fighting upstairs, Paul pulls out a blowtorch and aims it right at Carey’s face, burning off his eyebrows. “There are no visual effects in that shot,” Covino says. Initially, however, they did intend to use special-effects plates in which he would spray the fire without Marvin there, and then do the shot again with Marvin in it, then merge the two in postproduction. They soon realized that they could just cheat the camera angle so that Covino could spray the blowtorch on the same plane as Marvin, just a few inches ahead of him in actual distance to the camera, so that it looked like the flames were overtaking Marvin’s face. “When they saw it happen in camera, there were audible gasps in video village,” Covino says. “They actually thought he got burnt!”

Photo: NEON

“Okay, shit, I guess we’re just going to go out a second-story window into a bunch of boxes, and that’s okay.”

The actors’ final crash out of the upstairs window required a lot of rehearsal, though they did the actual shot with the window itself only once. Often, the glass used in stunt and effects sequences is breakaway glass, which is actually a form of sugar, but that’s too fragile to be used for huge objects like windows. So the window had to be tempered glass, which easily shatters into tiny pieces instead of dangerous shards — but it’s still glass, which meant that the actors did wind up with tiny cuts all over their bodies when they landed.

Small explosive charges in the corners of the window would ensure the glass shattered right as the actors hit it. Well, hopefully: “The effects people were like, ‘Hey, sometimes the charges don’t go off, and if that happens you’re going to hit a pane of tempered glass at full speed with your heads,” Marvin says. Additionally, all around the window was a lip of about two feet, which they had to make sure they cleared as they went through. “In the world of stunts, having a lip like that is not a safe thing, so we had to plan how our bodies would travel from the lip, how we would clear the frame, and how we’d have to jump in order to do that,” Marvin says.

To practice the window scene, the duo got together with Hall and first started jumping from a two-foot-high rock retaining wall. That height gradually increased as they figured out exactly how to contort their bodies, since they also had to make sure they went through at the same time while trying to avoid landing on each other. (Fun fact: In the actual take, they did, in fact, wind up landing on each other.) Hall then built a box rig with mats on it in the parking lot of the house so they could continue to practice on set. Eventually, they rehearsed the jump from the same height and same position, just without a window. “We wanted them to have the exact movement nailed down before putting the window in place,” Hall says. (There were always stunt doubles prepared to do the scene if the actors couldn’t, with Hall ready to double for Marvin; they all rehearsed the jump and fall as well.)

Marvin says that the window jump was probably the scariest part of the sequence for him. “Everything else felt like it was in our control and we had rehearsed it a lot. But you can’t rehearse going through a glass pane. You just do it.” He was also surprised to discover that it’s generally considered a lot safer to land on a pile of cardboard boxes than on cushions. “I’m not a stuntman and I don’t come from the heritage of that thing, so I was just, like, ‘Okay, shit, I guess we’re just going to go out a second-story window into a bunch of boxes, and that’s okay.’”

“Comedy is really the secret sauce to a scene like this.”

The fight scene is an escalation of these characters’ behavior, but it’s grounded in something very relatable, which gives it a real sense of release. “It’s a fight scene built around a universally understood emotion, which is jealousy,” Covino says. “We know what’s driving the character, we know where it’s coming from, but then we’ve got the surprise of comedy throughout, which ignites and charges the whole scene up to something you could just enjoy watching all day. Comedy is really the secret sauce to a scene like this.”

And part of the comedy also comes from the realism of the fight scene. The fact that we can tell these are two actual actors grappling, with minimal trickery, adds to the delight and surprise. It allows us to enjoy the humor of the scene, but it also lends it almost a live component, which is enhanced by the unlikely ways the fight expands. Nothing onscreen feels predictable or fake, so as we’re watching it, it feels like someone might still get hurt. Besides, even though this sequence comes early in the film, it comes after another character has already died in somewhat spectacular fashion. Splitsville, the entire movie, is built on confounding our expectations. And the most unexpected thing about it may well be the fact that this unassuming little romantic comedy contains the beatdown of the year.