Sunny Leone picks up hybrid martial arts for her assassin act in Vikram Bhatt’s web series Anamika
Sunny Leone in Anamika
In an industry that relies on the traditional kicks, punches and blowing up of cars to build up the momentum in an action sequence, the director is excited to introduce Gun fu — a discipline that combines the stylish martial art Kung fu, complete with hand-to-hand combat and traditional hand-held weapons, with guns. Any martial arts movie-aficionado will tell you that the action style was introduced by filmmaker John Woo in A Better Tomorrow (1986). It has since gained prominence in Hollywood with The Matrix (1999), The Raid (2011) and John Wick (2014).
The director promises hyper-stylised combat techniques in his action thriller. “The training in Gun fu requires stretching and the ability to fall and kick, but it doesn’t require any cable work. The best thing about the web series is that the women are performing the stunts themselves,” explains Bhatt. In his first collaboration with Leone, he is impressed by how smoothly she has taken to action. “She is hard-working, sincere and has an incredible need to better herself in everything
she does.”
