Fatal Encounter – An Interview With Director Patreck Farley

Hi, this is Barry, and welcome to my site. Fatal Encounter is an independent action movie-series written and directed by Patreck Farley. The series is planned to be a three-part series, and you can catch two of the films below. The third and concluding part is scheduled for a 2021 release. I recently got to chat with Patreck, so do check out the interview below to know the journey of the Fatal Encounter films.

Fatal Encounter:

Fatal Encounter: Rise And Fight

Interview With Patreck Farley

This is Barry: Hi Patreck, thanks for taking the time to do this interview. While a lot of indie filmmakers focus on abstract concepts, your focus is in the action genre. How did it all begin? How did you get into film production?

Patreck: Hey Barry, I appreciate the time you took to do this interview as well! It all began when I watched this film called Ip Man (2008) with Donnie Yen back in High School (2007 – 2011) for me. I saw the film many times and during my senior year there were two classes I decided to take, 1. Writing Through Film and 2. Digital Video Production. These classes went over the basics of film-making which at the time I knew little to nothing about. For both classes I asked my teachers if I could make an “Action Film” since I was heavily influenced by the genre and training in martial arts still. With permission I went on to make (corny title alert) “Battle Against Fate.” Making this short movie during my senior year (2011) opened my eyes that this was something I wanted to keep pursuing. But as you can imagine the support was very small. Not many people believed I could turn this into a potential career while staying in my home state.

This is Barry: Michael Barnes and Richard Hyer co-directed the film with you and did a fantastic job in their respective roles. How do you guys know each other? 

Patreck: Mick (aka Michael) and Blake (Richard) did an amazing job with their acting. Mine was a bit more on the wooden side this time around. Had too many things I was focusing on. This film was actually the first time they worked together believe it or not. I met Blake in martial arts back in 2012. He offered to help me as a News Reporter for my home movie “Final Confrontation.” Unfortunately he was sick that day but he expressed interest in helping out with future projects. So that’s how we began hanging out more and becoming friends. I met Mick on the set of a “Cryptic Darkness Edge of Humanity Part 1” film for my friend Clayton; another home movie. This was back in July 2017. We began showing each other our films and then decided to work together in moving forward. I think it’s really elevated our work, haha.

This is Barry: It appears you and your team are trained in martial arts. Would you like to talk about your personal journey and the fighting techniques you have learned?

Patreck: Oooh boy, I could write a book for this answer. Umm…I’ll start with myself and go down the line then. I started my martial arts journey in 2000 – 2001. I stopped when I wanted to try out basketball and soccer. Being 8 years old I was pretty indecisive on sports. It wasn’t until I was 13 I wanted to try out karate again. Fast forward to today I’ve been training for 14 years consistently now. From 2006 – 2020. I began training in mixed martial arts known as Goju Kenpo. I competed in tournaments from 2008 – 2012, judging my last one in 2013. At this time I began getting burned out and wanted to focus more on just being in the studio. I acquired my black belt in 2014 and have been training hard since to move up more in rank and perfect my skills and movement. I’ve learned and created a lot of “fighting techniques” over the years. Not any I could really type out that I think anyone could understand. It’d be better to show you through video or photos instead.

As for my crew I’ve been training Mick in Martial Arts since late 2017 on and off. Blake has had some martial arts training with me and former military experience. Steven has also had prior military experience. I can’t disclose any more information as to that though.

This is Barry: What many movie viewers don’t realize is that fight choreography is extremely difficult. It’s one of the most challenging things to shoot. What was your process to prepare and shoot the fight sequences?

Patreck: I do remember fight choreography being difficult at first. There have been many days where I was too exhausted to come up with anything interesting and my own writing for how the scene played out didn’t help. Well, this was back in 2015 though. I believe my first Fatal Encounter shows many flaws in how the action is told. I still enjoy the film but it’s like night and day in comparison to its sequel.

To prepare for fight scenes I now take the time to train any “untrained crew” or “crew that requires more training” to better prepare their movement and mind. This ranges from overall physical martial arts workout to even going over how their fight scenes will play out. In the scriptwriting process I write out word for word how the action sequences will play out. Once we get to the film set is where I change my mind, constantly. Sometimes I’ll be caught off by an actor’s (Steven for example) physical limitations. In the script (Fatal Encounter: Rise and Fight) I had his character throwing a lot of kicks. But Steven honestly couldn’t kick that high. So upon choreographing the fight scene we changed how the action flowed to better portray how he was physically.

Normally about 30% are pre-planning the fight scene through the script and preparing the actor (if they are local) ahead of time for the scene. The other 70% will be planning on the day of shooting. This might sound chaotic but my creative mind flows the best on the day of; and as long as you keep your crew focused and having fun they contribute their ideas into the film as well when it comes to their action scenes. Then you work back and forth until you have it just right. The most takes we had for one-shot was seven. It’s never taken more than that to get the shot we needed for the action segment.

This is Barry: I just love the idea of one bad guy taking on two good guys. Two-on-one fights are amazing to watch, as it was in the case of you and Richard taking on Steven Hirsch. Did you guys need to take a hit often to make the fight feel real? 

Patreck: That was one of my favorite fight scenes to ever film. Ever since the first movie I’ve always wanted to include Rich and Fenneck teaming up to fight a higher elite antagonist. Early on it’s established Seth is 2nd of Command of a much larger organization. So it makes sense that the heroes can’t beat them by themselves. 

I planned for the fight scene for many months before filming began. Once we got to the film set (in my garage cause we lost our filming location) we began playing out the choreography was going to work. I specifically wanted it to start as a 1 Vs 1 then work it’s way into the 2 Vs 1 while giving the audience a moment to catch their breath in between. We began filming that fight scene from 2pm and ended around 8:30pm. We took a lot of water breaks as well as it was physically tiring. I myself probably had the most energy just due to being used to all the martial arts over the years. But the crew was certainly getting more and more tired after each take. Blake, Mick and I noticed that to our advantage. We used us being tired to make the characters equally as tired as the fight went on. 

How do you fight someone who is twice as strong as you? You team up of course. We did actually take some falls, but not hits. The crew had AMAZING control of hitting one another and making it seem like it actually hurt when in reality it did not. Music and sound effects help hide that. There was a take where Steven was throwing Blake and I had to jump over Blake to get the jump on Steven’s character. We did that take exactly seven times and every time Blake got more and more hurt. Even with the mats in place since the throw was so intense. Thankfully we were able to capture that one shot like we wanted.

In the end, we only walked away with cuts and bruises over the muscles and bones. But we all agree that it was worth it.

This is Barry: It’s a pretty great idea to play multiple characters in the film. It’s intelligently done, if I hadn’t gone through the credits, I wouldn’t have realized it was you guys behind the masks of the bio-humans. Your body language as the bad guys was significantly different. How did you conceive and execute this?

Patreck: Thank you! I was beginning to think the back of my head gave away I played quite a bit of my own bio-humans in the film. My physique is quite easy to spot. All the cast and crew agreed to help fill the roles of the extras. It was only one day in particular that we needed 11 people on set to get the job done. We saved a lot of money by re-using whom we already had and the crew had a great time wearing multiple hats in production.

I don’t remember how we executed playing the bad guys in terms of body language since I didn’t tell anyone specifically to be different in how they move. I do believe we just knew we had to be opposite of our own characters in order to sell the scene. So a shift in movement was essential.

This is Barry: Apart from the roles, what aspects of the filmmaking did you take up?

Patreck: I ended up playing the Director, Camera Operator (or Director of Photography for like 1 scene), Grip, Visual Effects artist (cause believe it or not High Motion Visuals, our effects company were unable to finish the effects for the film. So I personally had to finish and touch up the last shots myself.), and editor.

This is Barry: Given the visual dynamics in the film, what kind of gear did you film with?

Patreck: We ended up using the Canon XC15 for our main camera, the Rode NTG2 for our condenser microphone, Magnus VT-4000 for our tripod, and some Studio Pro Photography lights and green screen.

This is Barry: With Fatal Encounter: Rise and Fight, the story is heating up. There are higher, and perhaps more powerful, layers of the enemy. How many films are you planning to make in this series? What does the roadmap look like?

Patreck: Haha, a very good question to ask. Not sure if the answer you’re looking for is as simple as it seems though. If you were to take a look at our timeline “Fatal Encounter: Rise and Fight” is the 2nd film in the series. So far the initial idea is for 3 films for a trilogy. Fatal Encounter > Fatal Encounter: Rise and Fight > Fatal Encounter: Emergence of Talents. Emergence of Talents is our series finale. What everything has been leading up to this point. It’ll wrap up the series nicely where not everything goes quite as planned. We are planning on crowdfunding on Kickstarter in March and begin filming in June 2021 for the majority of the film.

The ending for this upcoming film however…might seem open-ended. Which in fact could lead to a sequel or…end where it’s at. I guess it depends on how the perception of the film goes and where our crew is at 3 – 5 years from now after filming Fatal Encounter: Emergence of Talents. The only way to truly find out is to stay tuned and follow us on social media when the movies come out. 

Thanks for having us on your site. We appreciate you taking the time to interview us! Till next time!