Special Report: Lexi Alexander on Absolute Dominion (2025)

at least in the nineties. When I arrived in the US, that was a big genre. You had on the track in Wilson, and you had twenty guys who were like The poor Man's Fandath and you remember, though, so all those movies. But as soon as I arrived in the US and wanted to get into that, it stucked. And then the show Brothers. Even then China stopped making movies, and so really was a dying genre and I didn't really think I would get the opportunity to do it.

And then I remember I got a call one day from the head of Netflix International, who happened to be the distributor of Green Street in the UK, and he said, hey, I just got this job and I'm reaching out to all the multicultural directors I know, do you have something you want to pitch? And I said, yeah, kept this movie that I've always wanted to do. And Netflix was the place that if there was any place where you could actually pitch the martial arts movie, it was Netflix.

And it's from the time I pitched this movie to the time it was finished, Netflix went through ten changes of executives and departments and future plans and manifestos. It's just one of those things where you started the company that does one thing with a person that knows you, and you end up with a company that wants the opposite,

and not with the person who hired you. Originally, this movie was bought as a three picture deal in a big futuristic world, probably one hundred and fifty million dollar kind of thing. Now I knew when I sold that teach with the three movies and this big world, that most likeliness will be reduced. I'm not an idiot. I thought, there's no way they're gonna let a woman who hasn't had a massive success in the studio world keep that kind of budget and that kind of project. And of

course I was correct. It became smaller, and it became one lobe, and it became a smaller budget, and at one point it was canceled completely and I basically beg to get it back, and I said, can you do it for very little money? So I said, yes, These are now unique problems to me. These are problems all filmmakers have, and so you just struggle your way to

a creen light and then you know, COVID happened. So you had to work through that because that at the time when I made that movie, it ate half of your budget because you had these massive crews that had to test. I couldn't have any extras because you couldn't have massive groups. But then also I didn't have the VSX to create the extras. But it was definitely a challenge, but I'm very glad that I ended up making it.

And then we got basically we walked as a film industry into this space where studios discovered that it would be smarter for them to shelve movies who are text writer right off, rather than to get behind them if they're not really standing behind them. And I had a great fear of watching the two directors from Bad Girl, and there was a bunch of others this happened to. Watching that happened, I was like, oh my god, this is happening. This is happening to me for sure, and

to my great surprise. And I feel like it may have slightly to do with the fact that I have a big mouth on the internet. They instead of shelving it, just gave me the movie and said here you take. And I feel very blessed because I feel this is my last Hollywood movie. I definitely think it's my last Hollywood movie. Whether I work in Ireland, where I live now, that might be the case, but I don't think Hollywood.

There's a future for me there. And so I'm glad I got this done and I'm plaid coming out now and it has a fantastic cast. I try not to think what it could have been in somebody would have actually given me the original budget. I tried to just think, Hey, we worked ourselves through an incredibly challenging situation and we ended up with a movie.

We have to create some kind of reality. My wife has been kidnapped and if I don't join this underground fighting thing, they're going to kill her and everybody and everything. Single martial arts movies like this, every single one. When people ask me, when are you going to make this martial arts movie? I resold, I'm never going to make one of those movies that has a silly plot like this guy's fighting to get his brother or the revenge his dead brother or something like that. So how am

I going to do that? And that's when I started coming up with this idea because the other passion and obsession I have is with everything in religion, all the world religions, and I think that comes a little bit from my family ground. I grew up with a Catholic mother and a Muslim father who had a little bit of a private battle about which religion I should join, and that kind of motivated me to find out more about religion to the point where I read a lot

and then even ended up studying theology. And what I didn't realize and only it was told once I was already studying theology, is that's the best way to become an agnostic or atheist. The more you learn about all the world religions, the more you realize there really can be one single true there is a mythology in all of them. But it fascinated me to this day how

it's religion is used and abused and changed. It is a great community tool and a great way for people to hold on to their culture, and at the same time it is a great tool to abuse people. Use them for you are politics and your own objective. It's a fascinating subject and most studios don't want to touch it at all. And I think essentially that's what happened here is there was a lot of fear of where I could flash come from, even though I was very careful.

And also nobody's saying that one religion is going to win this termam so I thought we were extremely careful, but you know, a studio will always air on the inside of let's not take the risk.

any other blood form. But on the other hand, it is very you know, like fascists and racist is not even the proper word, because it's like abusive on a manner that the stuff that I'm reading on there is just horrific. Four Chan didn't have that kind of stuff. Agent didn't have the stuff like it really bad underground black Wall where you used to read the worst things, didn't have what Eggs has. Overly, you know, I think

I can live without that free speech. It's a shame that some of the good people have stuck there, although I do understand why that is.

but I didn't know much about him. I did know that he's never worked in either TV or film, so that was slightly surprising. But in come he immediately starts speaking in three languages flown German, French, English switches up like that, and I said, wow, he has a big mixed cultural right right, So I think he is German French. I know the Terman in in every language now except English. Ivory Ireland, Ivory from the Ivory coast, Yes, Ivory coast.

We are going to actually prepare for this tournament. But it's not going to be a short term negotiation about the regard. This will be years of negotiating. And so the basically croup of humanists who really wanted to avoid having one religion follow that who are really the group of scientists and academics who think they're better than anybody else because they are atheists that don't follow these superstitious things. They ended up genetically engineering this fighter because there is

no fighter usually in that group. And that is really true. If you think about who does martial.

really of the world. And I felt like he was. He did a perfect audition, much better than some of the hits I read were on big TV shows. That's a part that when you have a park for a young guy where the young I can fight, every young actor in town will come in on the sheep boy. I already had that experience with Green Street. It was a movie that everybody wanted to play, that Elijah Wood world, and it happened again here web agent calling like do

you I still see people? And it was interesting because for me to go with somebody who had never acted before. This is a very successful model. He is like an Arbery cost model. If you look at his Instagram, it's like you see him do these amazing shoots and he's very beautiful. But his acting is amazing, like he auditioned other than most people. And it probably also had to do with the fact that I really saw him as

the character, so that was incredibly lucky. And then I had to find I had to be very careful because the religions. It's set in the future, and the religions are fictitious. You should get a hint of what it is you know, but I'm not saying what it is. You probably understand it. In any case, I needed to find an Arab actor, which was challenging, much more challenging than I thought. I always thought there's a lot of Arab actors at that age groupment that needed work, a

lot of them. I think, first of all, it's not part of our culture, like we Arabs want to become doctors, lawyers or engineers. And for years I struggled with this and bought the family members that we should not ignore

the arts. It's good to have good artists an industry, and also the film industry influences a lot of the world, and it's a big mistake and has been for us a big mistake to not have any representation at all, because now the world basically knows Arabs only from twenty four and from the Libyans and back to the future, like we're always terrorists, never the doctors, even though every family has three doctors in the family. I thought it was a mistake, and I still think it's a mistake

that we nick collected this industry. But here I was trying to find the young Arab that couldly this part, and it was Walth And then thank god, I ended up actually doing bad research myself and really reaching out and asking everybody I know, and the suggestion that came in for this young guy named Jun Sauti, who is Moroccan American but has this all the really interesting backstory of first moving to Germany and living there and he a Racists in Germany burned their house and they almost

him and his siblings and his mother almost got killed. It was a big story in the paper there. I couldn't believe it. It was like you sit there with these people who basically have your own life story, which was somebody like me is very rare. I've never really seen anybody like me on the screen. And I also really don't meet people like me who grew up in one place but their culture is really from somewhere else

and now they're living in the US. That was very unique, and then I feeled obviously, I asked Patrin Oswald because he's a great friend and supporter and he's always up to help, which is always a great compliment. And Alex Wnda turned out to be I really reached out doing because I saw I this character I had in mind for the Leed's father is basically a very lettice Jewish academic who is against occupation, against abusing religion, against all

of that. And I said, who can I actually find to get play this and not get feedback or did that say help to this is?

without him, this movie would not exist now. So another great again, coincidence is not the right word, but I feel like the universe had my on this movie, definitely with Alex and then I have two fantastic transactors, one non binary actor, and that was part of it. Was like, I'm definitely going to be the most inclusive movie. It was part of a future world that I think should

exist that way. And there was also a little bit of a challenge I had because I didn't want to do a mixed tournament, and that comes from me being a fighter myself. I barely managed to once in a while I won against the super flight and the national team. When I was in the German national team, we had to fight each other and if I fought the super flight weight, I was even and it's once ale I won. But the truth is, if I fight a fighter who

is a middleweight, dude, I'm not gonna wait. That's just this and I don't think it really has as much to do with gender. The fact that it's hard to get somebody the super flight weight also is not going to win against the heavyweight. I wasn't going to just for some kind of inclusive or diversity purpose make a mixed tournament to feature women fighters who, if they win, I myself would look at this and go, yeah, she wouldn't have won. Yeah, I know, I know what it

takes to kick a guy in the head. Do you not moving somebody who's twenty pounds heavier than you? I tried. This is just physics. Does that mean in an emergency situation, if somebody attacks me, I couldn't get away from somebody if I'm smart, if I smash an am straight in his face, if by pigive me in the box, I have to do one thing that takes him out for a couple of seconds and then get the bug out there. I'm not challenging somebody who's heavier and bigger than me.

I'm not certainly not going to go into a twelve round bite. And that's just I had to be honest with myself because there are TV shows who do this thing where this little girl kicks five guys in the head and they all fall, and I'm like, that is actually not possible, it's not realistic, and people tune out because it's silly, and so I didn't want that, and

I thought, what am I going to do? Am I'm really gonna do this thing where all the dudes are fighting because they're the only one we're interested in fighting, And so I really had to create this. Look at this is, how do I create this world? And I said, okay,

what if this is really happening in real life? And I came up with this world where everybody who identifies as men can participate in the tournament, and everybody who a woman can work in any law enforcement and have weapons, while the men from that point on cannot be allowed to have weapons, which, if you think about it, in

a three picture deal, that of course had consequences. And essentially, if I would have made those three movies, it would have turned out that the women were quite smart, because if you're the ones with the finger on the button and if you're the ones carrying the weapons, it doesn't matter how And I think the guys in the yeah, we're going to be the ones who's going to do the fighting miss set and I was always looking forward to that conclusion. So now people get to say, see

this one firm. They don't really know why this world is like that, but what they will see is that all the bodyguards of the famous fighters are women. Everybody who has any kind of machine gun anytime is it all women? And then I have to think about, okay, this is still me thinking very binary. And but there's also something to be said about casting treans actors and

not making a big deal about them being trends. They are activists for their cause and obviously now the Trump that has become a bigger issue, so they are talking about it. So I don't necessarily don't want to say who they are. But in the movie that doesn't matter is one is a fighter and one is a guard, and we don't ever mention it, because the truth is, when somebody transitions, you don't have to mention what they

were before, right, you just go over there. But then we also have a world where people don't necessarily fit in to those two genders that we make up. By the way that historically there was a much more open world, even in Islamic nations, there was a bigger world for multi genders. There's actually an entire in Indonesia, there's an entire sect where kind of there's these multi gender priests, right, and they're very famous and very honored, and it's we've

almost eradicated them as well. There's still some less but if you go back and history, notice that gender, really

we made it important. The more progressive, the more Westerns it became the more it became all viewer men and you this, and then we had to fight for gay rights, and now we have to fight for trans rights, and it's just something we're making up because it was like that in the old dayst So again, I had just now figured out this whole the man of fighting the women at this if you identify as either, you go

sign up. But then there's a world of non binary people, and I thought, okay, let's just say that in forty fifty years, we're still not a perfect society, so there's probably still something to be blessed with. Let's say we're at the place where we we like them and we

hire them and we accept them. We're very well aware that they don't fit in either world, so we're making them the artists and the top show hosts and the and so I was likely to meet Aluke bait Man, who is a very big personality online and almost a young sage who speaks about the history of being non binary, and just always I always felt like I had dawn set when they were around. I'm not necessarily saying that's how the world should because that's and we talked about it.

That was part of the world that we still hasn't figured it quite out, because they also shouldn't have any limits, and making them the hosts and artists is not quite right because then we're just saying, okay, they can only be the basically the dark and ponent showed that art is the clown. We're not taking them seriously. But it was okay, and we spoke about this, and I obviously

get a lot of inputs. We talked about the fact that we are allowed to show a world that has still not managed that may have progressed, but it still hasn't managed to get it right perfectly.

be in our world. We know who he is, and I met his father and so I hired them, and then they reached out and hired all the martial artists, and yeah, that was fun because I think I was probably I didn't know how I would react and how I would be directing martial arts for the first time in a big boby. I know that. For example, Supergirl was a show that hired me specifically because for an episode where she had a big fight and they wanted to establish a fighting star, and they thought it'd be

cool to hire me for that particular episode. And it's nice to come in somewhere and establish somebody's silence. So I am slightly I would say, probably a little bit more controlling of that department than anything else. I don't boss around my custom designer or my production design that as much as I'm very in about the martial arts, and I'm not sure that always it's rough because you have a head of the department and you really want

to trust them and let them do it. But I changed a lot and I hoped that they got over it. But it was just an important part of the movie.

be six foot eight or stuff. They're obviously very many ethical debates about this because should we really do that? But it's happening, and our lead was just a version

from that. It was basically an engineering that involved finding somebody who has a high shue and was athletic on the mother's side, and then finding the kind of same version from the father's side, and also looking at That's why he was such a perfect choice, because you have this really tall, young black man who wasn't necessarily muscular, but you could see that he's athletic, but he has more of a dance kind of figure, and you instantly realize that he has a photogenic memory. He has a

high cue. At some point there, it's a scene where the bodyguart makes it clear that I know that you can remember everything in the minute you look at it, and so becomes very clear that he is He's not of this world. It's just the way to create him was there was a little bit of silent in hire. So the stile I wanted to have for him was had a lot to do with the last style that I trained in, which was a stema. It was an interesting It was an interesting situation because the stemma is

my favorite martial arts I've ever done. I think it is the smartest martial art, and I think that if I would find myself in a situation where I have to fight for life and that I would definitely try to use that. It's the smartest thing anybody ever teaching, and I practiced all of them. Isn't the martial arts that I haven't tried at some point. The problem with

SYSTEMA is that it's very Russian. And when this movie first get creen its people were at the moment in time where they what is that drink that is called Russian Russian something?

are obsessed with martial arts. There's no spy anywhere. Originally the best fighters in this that is true, and I think that's where the suspicion comes from. Where in the KGB and it's further on and whatever the security services that took over from the KGP. It's incredibly effective martial arts. It's not surprising, but it's also thousands of years old and actually really relates to a religion, the Orthodox Christians in Russia. So it wasn't even like a communist kind

of thing. There wasn't any way I could and I was very clearly told I couldn't say anything about SYSTEMA. You have to figure out something. So I came up with I can't even remember, I should look this up what I called it. I gave it some fictitious name. But I wanted the style be that intelligence style, which is very much you know about. I would say, I kdo has a little bit of that, where you take somebody's energy and convert it. SYSTEMA goes a little bit

further because it's also about your own body. One of the greatest exercises is there would be people stabbing you. You would fight multiple people and people stabbing you with these plastic knives, but they were not the soft on step back. It actually hurt you, you know. And the idea behind was is how can you make your body move your body in a way that the blade basically

hits the least, gets the least. Instead of standing flat forward, you just like a like a jelly, like an octopus, like moving with it so that the other person has a tough time getting anything to actually make contact with. And so you're constantly moving things out of the way, and it looks when you look it up online. People always make fun of this when they want you to videos or system of it because it looks stupid. It looks like these people are idiots. But it is one

of the most effective martial arts ever done. It because it makes complete sense. It comes. It's a rock ticker martial arts you constantly. It has a lot to do with breath, and I wanted him to be that kind of smart fighter, so I mixed ichto the fictitious name and that's what we did, and I think it turned out really good.