Lessons from the school of hardest knocks

Maurice Nero is taking a beating. First came the punches and kicks, not at full force but still enough to send him staggering against a concrete wall. Then a series of headlocks and grapplings, before ending up on the floor now as Dominiquie Vandenberg sits across his chest and calmly demonstrates the art of head-butting, the same brutal act Daniel Day-Lewis delivers to Leonardo DiCaprio in “Gangs of New York.”

They exchange casual words in French between twists and jabs. Nero is a two-time world champion of knock-down karate and a jujitsu expert, but today he is in a Hollywood garage-gym as the sparring partner of Vandenberg, who worked as the technical fight consultant for Martin Scorsese’s epic of 1860s gang warfare in lower Manhattan.

“These are the kinds of things I showed Leo, but old-style,” Vandenberg says from the mat. In the months leading up to the 2000 production of “Gangs” in Rome, Vandenberg trained the actor in a variety of violent techniques, re-creating such vintage styles as French “old-style Savate,” Irish bare-knuckle boxing and “catch-as-catch-can,” a “dirty” but effective form of modern wrestling.

“It’s very basic,” he says, as his partner again urgently taps the floor to signal pain, “but it works.”

Vandenberg brought a rich history of real-life experience to the job. The Belgium-born martial artist is a five-year veteran of the Special Forces unit of the French Foreign Legion, and saw action in Central Africa and other war zones in the early ‘90s. The scars that DiCaprio’s character reveals in “Gangs of New York” were based on Polaroids of Vandenberg’s own torso and the remnants of gunshots, stabbings and other wounds.

A European tabloid recently declared that Scorsese had hired a “professional killer” to train DiCaprio, while England’s Arena magazine labeled him a “mercenary.” Vandenberg shrugs off these descriptions, but they were partly true. After his years with the legion, he was a warrior for hire in Burma and Bosnia before turning his energies to Thai kick-boxing and other martial arts competitions.

“When I look back on it, and when I look at the pictures and look at my face, it’s like, ‘Is that me?’ Living here and working in the movies now, it seems like it was a bad dream. But then a lot of the stuff that I did made me who I am today. Each time you face death, your perception -- everything in your life -- is so different. I don’t regret my background. I’m not going to hide it.

“I’ve done bad things, but never to people who were not bad people,” he adds, referring to what he says was his final assignment as a “merc,” hunting death squads on both sides of the conflict in Sarajevo and for a client he won’t identify. “The people that we were dealing with were people who were killing kids and women and just doing horrible things.”

By 1995, he had stepped away from all that to bring his experiences to Hollywood, and has worked with the likes of Tim Burton and Steven Seagal.

Vandenberg, 33, has written a book of his experiences, as yet unpublished. An aspiring actor and screenwriter, he also has a pair of scripts in circulation. During the long “Gangs” shoot, he says, he had to turn away opportunities to work on such films as “Planet of the Apes” and “Spider-Man.”

He now lives in a rented house, once the home of writer-director and frequent Scorsese collaborator Paul Schrader, in the Franklin Hills east of Hollywood. In preparation for the film, Vandenberg drove to DiCaprio’s house in the Hollywood Hills at least three times a week for training, as the actor put on 20 pounds of muscle weightlifting between fighting sessions.

“He would bring his buddies up as dummies,” Vandenberg says with a laugh. “He had three or four of his good buddies from high school, and he would just toss them around and beat them up. He was really into it. It was a joy working with the guy.”

A chance to act

After he was enlisted as the film’s fight coordinator, Vandenberg was recruited for several on-screen appearances, notably beside DiCaprio as the Dead Rabbits gang marches toward a final confrontation with the Nativists gang led by Bill the Butcher (Day-Lewis).

He was even given a few lines of dialogue, but those were among the hours of footage cut by Scorsese in the final edit. He quickly earned a reputation on the set as the production’s only veteran of actual knife fights and war zones, and as an ex-soldier who once snacked on bats and insects in French Guyana.

“For the first two months, people kind of avoided me,” he says. “They would sometimes come by the set when we were doing stuff, and they were like, ‘This guy is a psychopath!’ I would be showing Leo how to cut a guy’s veins and stuff like that.”

Not that the director of “GoodFellas” and “Taxi Driver” seemed particularly disturbed. “I think it takes a lot to get Marty’s hair standing up,” says Vandenberg.

More realism was the director’s goal. In a typical Scorsese film, violence can be intense but always has consequences, says “Gangs” stunt coordinator George Aguilar, who also worked with the filmmaker on 1999’s “Bringing Out the Dead.” Vandenberg’s role was central for his “vast knowledge of certain styles of fighting, especially old-time, 1860s techniques,” Aguilar says, “the stances, the tactics, and some of the weapons.”

Fight scenes were rehearsed extensively before shooting, aiming for the kind of naked aggression epitomized by the film’s opening battle, says Aguilar. “It was a little disturbing, but fun at times because you see 300 people fighting and then people get up and shake hands and the dirt out of their clothes and you do it again.”

Before filming, Vandenberg choreographed several knife fights and hand-to-hand combat on videotape, and Scorsese drew some of the film’s violent encounters directly from those tapes. The techniques Vandenberg brought to the film were based on historical research and his own experiences as a soldier and martial artist. He knew that a typical street fighter wasn’t about to employ flying karate kicks in 19th century New York.

“It was fairly easy for me because I saw a lot of violence,” Vandenberg says. “I know what it looks like and what it smells like. The sweat smells different on someone who thinks he’s going to die. A real fight is not beautiful to look at. So you want to give it [room] so the acting can come in, to make it cinematicIn real life, if you’re hammering someone, you’re not going to say a line. You hammer a guy until it’s done.”

His house is sparsely decorated, just scattered Asian accents amid weightlifting equipment and framed pictures of Steve McQueen, James Dean and Bruce Lee. In his bookcase are volumes on Stanley Kubrick and Samurai warriors, and boxing, as well as the title “Black Hawk Down.” Samurai iron miniatures decorate another shelf.

An old military cap lies crumpled on a table as he pages through an album filled with snapshots of him in action: jumping out of airplanes, taking prisoners in Rwanda, firing automatic weapons, and, more recently, arm in arm with Scorsese, DiCaprio and Day-Lewis.

“When I show people these pictures, they go, ‘Oh, what movie is that from?’ That’s not a movie,” Vandenberg says, beaming. “That’s my real life.”