How Secret Level brought the propulsive Sifu — and a killer hallway fight — back to life (exclusive)

Repetition is fundamental to the gaming experience. You fight, you die, you respawn, you learn, you try again. It’s also core to the narrative of Sifu, the popular beat-’em-up game published by Sloclap in 2022. The main character, the only child of a sifu (master) at a martial arts school, sets out for revenge against those who killed his father. Every time he dies along his quest, he’s resurrected by the magic from a mystical talisman, though he always returns a few years older in age. 

“That’s the montage of every kung fu movie: the doing it over and over until you get good and can go face the bad guy,” says JT Petty, an executive producer and writer on Amazon’s Secret Level, the animated anthology series that adapts 15 video games with each episode, including one propulsive eight-minute short for Sifu. “They just built that into their mythology.” 

“Of course, that was essential [to adapting Sifu],” series creator Tim Miller chimes in during an exclusive interview with Entertainment Weekly, “but then there was also Dave” — supervising director and EP Dave Wilson — “coming in pretty early and going, ‘I want to do a big fight with a glass floor.’ So then the whole story gets warped around Dave’s desire to do a fight.”

“Because no one will let me shoot it in live-action!” Wilson jokes. “The thing that I like about Sifu is it’s not just about repetition. It’s about the price of repetition," he adds on a more serious note. "He’s trading knowledge for years. That’s straight from the game.” True Detective also became an unexpected reference. In developing the episode, Petty pointed to one of Matthew McConaughey’s poignant lines from season 1 of the HBO crime drama: “Life's barely long enough to get good at one thing, so be careful what you get good at.” 

“I was like, ‘Well, f---ing yes!’” Wilson exclaims. “The repetition was definitely a core part of it, but it was, ‘What do you spend your life dedicating that repetition to?’ that I love.”

Sign up for Entertainment Weekly's free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.

“Sifu: It Takes a Life,” the title of this particular Secret Level episode, begins with a moment of peace before the carnage. A man, MC (Parry Shen), sits at a dumpling stand, waiting to enjoy the elderly owner’s coveted family recipe perfected over ages. He can't yet enjoy the meal, however, when a group of thugs cross his path along the street. He sees their tattoos, the same ones belonging to the men who killed his father and scarred MC as a child. He follows the men into a neon-lit club and his labored, violent trudge towards retribution begins as the talisman throws him back and forth between the realms of the dead and the living. Ping Wu steps in to voice MC as he becomes older and older with each loss until he faces the final boss as an elderly man.

As with the other installments of Secret Level’s first season, the creative team compiled exhaustive pitch decks for each video game to serve as their encyclopedias, which were then used to brainstorm story ideas. Rich Larson, the author of such books as Ymir (2022) and Annex (2018), wrote a novelized short story for the Sifu episode before working with Petty to develop the teleplay. According to Wilson, Sloclap wanted the martial arts and cultural touchstones to feel authentic, but everything else narratively was left up to them. Hence, Wilson's desire-made-real for a fight sequence to play out on top of a glass floor, an idea he's wanted to pull off for 30 years, ever since watching the 1985 movie The Last Dragon, which includes a training scene on top of glass panes.

"The irony is no stunt man will shoot on a glass floor," Wilson says. "The reason it's dangerous in live-action, obviously, is with the sweat and the blood and the glass, you can't put pads down, they'll just slip and kill themselves. And there's nowhere to hide the wires, you can't rig up. I asked multiple times and the answer was always no."

Not so much a problem with animation, though. "I came in and pitched it to Wayne Dalglish" — Emmy nominated for stunt coordination on HBO's Peacemaker, Wilson continues. "They were in the stages over at Amazon and they'd bought two-inch thick Perspex [a brand of plexiglass] and laid it down. They prevised it up. Their fight is three times longer. I told them, 'Wayne! I got two minutes.' The first fight was like six minutes and there were eyeballs popping out of heads."

Clearly, he has something in common with the central character of Sifu: there's benefits to trying something over and over.

Secret Level premieres on Amazon's Prime Video streaming platform Dec. 10.