Polite Society’s silliest fight was inspired by a grotesque horror film

Teenage aspiring stuntwoman Ria (Priya Kansara), the star of Polite Society, has a affordable response when her household arranges a marriage between her beloved older sister Lena (Ritu Arya) and a smarmy man: Ria desires to thwart the engagement and beat the shit out of the man.

That may look like a hyperbolic response to rising pains, with Ria turning her concern of dropping Lena into an excuse for Matrix-style fight. But Lena’s mysterious fiance Salim (Akshay Khanna) and his imposing mom Raheela (Nimra Bucha) do really appear to be as much as one thing nefarious, with Ria and her loyal buddies as the one individuals who can save Lena from her doom. Director Nida Manzoor weaves all this into an action-packed comedy that’s as a lot about kicking ass as it’s about grappling with massive life adjustments.

One of probably the most brutal fights in the entire film isn’t between Ria and her foes, however between Ria and her sister. The confrontation begins off as a easy sibling squabble, however finally escalates into the sisters smashing one another into partitions and fully via a door, which disintegrates underneath the affect. It’s chaotic, bloody, unapologetically brutal, and completely excessive. (Meanwhile, Ria and Lena’s dad and mom, hanging out downstairs, merely sigh and inform them to scrub up the rubble they create.)

Photo: Parisa Taghizadeh/Focus Features

“It was one of my favorite scenes to film,” Manzoor tells Polygon. “I found it incredibly cathartic to write everything with these two sisters.”

Random objects in Lena’s room grow to be sudden weapons within the fight, from a image body to a heated hair straightener. Lena’s childhood bed room is simply as a lot a a part of the motion of the scene as the 2 ladies, one thing Manzoor felt was particularly necessary.

“I was also inspired a lot by Jackie Chan movies,” says Manzoor. “And what he does is really use his environment in a fight. It locates and grounds a fight scene, because he uses bits and pieces from the set. That’s why I wanted to have the hair straightener involved. I wanted to have a picture frame with the two of them there [turned into a weapon], and use the door. It inspired me to ground the fight in its truth.”

For all of the fight in Polite Society, Manzoor appeared again at her favourite motion film sequences. One scene she saved coming again to was the fight between Morpheus and Neo in 1999’s The Matrix, a scene she says launched her to fight choreographer Woo Ping Yuen and the world of Hong Kong cinema. She additionally cites Daryl Hannah and Uma Thurman’s showdown in Kill Bill Vol. 2, the place they trash a caravan as they attempt to take one another out, and a scene in Haywire the place a fight between Gina Carano and Michael Fassbender rips a resort room to items.

“[Carano] has true physicality that oftentimes we don’t see when women are cast as action heroes. They don’t always feel like they have the physical strength to do the things that they do,” says Manzoor. “I was inspired by that. I wanted my actors to do as much of the stunts as they could themselves. I wanted them to fully embody those fight sequences and have it feel true to the performer. That was important to me.”

But the fight that actually sparked the sister-on-sister motion for Manzoor got here from Julia Ducournau’s cannibal horror drama Raw. Genre-wise, the body-horror film is starkly totally different from the coming-of-age comedy-action vibes of Polite Society, however each motion pictures are about a pair of sisters, and the brutality of in Raw’s sister fight actually resonated with Manzoor.

“There’s a brilliant sister fight,” she says. “It’s a kind of horror version of it, but they’re like biting each other — bleeding and biting pieces out of each other. And I remember being like, Wow, I feel really seen by this insanely violent fight. It made me feel empowered to go even further with my sister fight.”

Polite Society is in theaters now.