Jake Gyllenhaal came up with some of Road House's gnarliest fight ...

The following article contains major spoilers for Road House.

The first thing you'll notice about Road House — Prime Video's gritty remake of the schlocky 1989 B-movie in which Patrick Swayze punches his way through small town Missouri — is that Jake Gyllenhaal contains an endless supply of facial expressions. He is a man of many smirks, of many frowns, of many sneers. His eyes are like a pair of fizzing champagne corks, getting bigger and bigger with every second shot. He is doing the absolute most here, as is his opposite man, a hot young thing on the acting scene by the name of Conor McGregor, for whose performance the word “ham” is woefully inadequate.

The second thing you'll notice amid all the henchmen having their limbs broken — if you're a background character in Road House, the likelihood is that Gyllenhaal's Elwood Dalton is going to crumple you up like a used beer receipt — is that the fight scenes rock.

Take one set piece that arises at the movie's midpoint: a huge brawl in which the titular Road House is all but destroyed and fists fly with abandon. Presumably half of the movie's budget was spent on all the smashed bottles. “What good is a bar fight if you're not going to break bottles,” action director and stunt coordinator Garrett Warren tells GQ, estimating that they got through “24 cases of 24 [of them].” That's a lot of spilled liquor.

In the aforementioned scene, McGregor's Knox — a volatile scrapper who loves a good 'ol punch up — enters the Road House looking for a fight and, well, chaos inevitably ensues. The brawl quickly bleeds out across the bar, and everyone gets involved. Chairs are weaponised, as are bar stools and pool cues. There's none of the dance-like grace you'd expect in a kung fu movie, say. “[With that], you're just doing basically a tango,” Warren says.

So, how did they make it work? Well, it's essentially a work of finely-tuned choreography. “This is one is more brutal… we have to basically have a very fluid idea, when it comes to what the final outcome [of the look of the fight] will be,” says Warren. “I just know that we have to guide it in the same place: this person has to win here, this person has to lose here; we change the momentum here.” Like a very rehearsed wrestling match, basically.

Garrett Warren and Conor McGregor.

Warren estimates that there were around 25 stunt actors in the background of the scene, at some points including himself. “The background actors, we pretty much told them to just be trying to run, or move, or be afraid, or throwing stuff; we put stuff out there that was stunt person friendly,” he says. “So if they got hit in the head with a bottle, it was a rubber or a plastic bottle; things that wouldn't hurt someone if they got hit in the head.”

Each of the background actors had three changes of clothing, and three fights prepped, which they rehearsed for “about a week” prior to the shoot. They'd do one background fight, change into a different set of clothes — becoming a different bar patron — and shoot their next fight in a different part of the set. “And that's how we make the chaos,” Warren says.

Inspiration for said chaos comes from the prior research Warren and the stunt team do in advance, which is more intensive — and varied — than you might think. One move in an earlier scene, wherein JD Pardo's Dell has his head punched into the asphalt of a car park by Dalton, was taken straight from a YouTube video Warren had seen of Russian bare-knuckle fighting. “These Russians would fight with just jeans on, no shirt… and this guy got taken to the ground, and he got beaten into the ground, and his head was bouncing off the concrete,” Warren recalls. “I thought to myself: this movie has to have that. It's my favourite thing.”

Gyllenhaal didn't just give it everything with his performance — according to Warren, he even conceived some of the fight scenes himself. Take the final fight between Dalton and Knox, for example, in which the former stabs the latter to death with thick shards of wood (gnarly). “That was Jake. Jake made that up.” The same was true of an early scene in which Dalton asserts his dominance over a coterie of brawling bikers by slapping them about.

“Jake was the one that wanted to do that," Warren says. “He goes, 'I don't wanna just punch people, here. I wanna slap the shit out of everyone.' Jake was instrumental on so much of the fight work.”

Road House is available to stream now on Prime Video.