Paul W.S Anderson
Paul W.S. Anderson shot to fame with his big screen adaptation of Resident Evil, that has so far stretched to three movies, before kicking off the Alien vs Predator movies.
He returns with Death Race, which stars Brit action man Jason Statham, and I caught up with him to talk about the sort of remake and the challenges he faced when filming the movie.
Death Race is about to be released on DVD can you tell me a little bit about the film?
It’s a loose prequel to Roger Corman’s 1975 classic Death Race 2000, so in my mind these events take place about ten years before Roger Corman’s original movie, where as in that film the Death Race is the national sport of America our film is very much the genesis of that sporting event.
How and why did you get involved in this project?
I love the original film and there were certain concepts that were contained in the original that I thought weren’t fully exploited by that film, for example the cars head machine guns that were mounted on the front but the guns never fired because it was quite a low budget movie and the guns were made out of wood.
Also the guys were supposed to hate each other and want to kill each other but they never crunched their cars together because they could only afford one to build one of each car. So there were a lot of things that I loved about the original film but felt because of their budgetary limitations they could quite do to the max so this movie was an opportunity to build these cars for real and really let them go to war with real machine guns rather than wooden ones.
The film is very different from the 1975 version why did you decide to move the plot from racing on the road to inside the walls of Terminal Island?
Well because I saw it more of a genesis story of the Death Race where it wasn’t a national sport so it wasn’t going to be a trans-American race. But my movie and Roger’s movie, tonally, are quite different his is more satire while mine has comedy in it but it’s not the obvious satirical comedy that Roger’s is.
I think that my version of Death Race works more as a intense straight to action movie and I thought that being on Terminal Island contained within this killer track, where the track itself is full of traps, just ups the intensity of the race.
And what sort of challenges did you face when shooting the races?
We decided to do as much practical as possible, so all of the car crashes you see in the movie the cars really crashed and spun in the air, so when the dreadnaought, that’s the big armoured truck, crashes that’s a real seventy five foot truck dead stopping at sixty five miles an hour so to do all that for real without killing anyone was the big technical challenge for the movie.
I was prepping the stunt work in the movie a year before we started shooting to get the camera very close to the action required a lot of specialised rigs that had to be built. So that was really the big technical challenge of the film.
The cars in many ways reflect the personalities of the drivers; Jason has an all American Mustang where Tyrese has more of a bully car so what did you think of first the cars or the drivers?
The characters came first and then the cars were like an extension of the characters; like you said Tyrese is the big bully of the movie so his truck had to be the biggest and the most heavily armoured with the biggest guns and Statham is a bit more sly and fast so his car was slightly less well armoured and more manageable, swifter and a bit more nimble. So yeah the cars were really chosen as an extension of the characters that were driving.
But I saw the movie just as much a war movie as a racing movie so I always knew that the audience was going to be plunged into some pretty extreme and fast cuts energetic war like sequences so I had to develop cars that were immediately identifiable so that you would know who was driving what and you didn’t get confused during the action.
So how did you go about putting all of the cars together?
That was part of the year that I spent prepping the movie once I had chosen the kind of car I wanted for each character we went out a bought about five or six of each, because obviously many of the cars got written off during the making of the movie, and then even if we bought something that you could by for two grand from a second hand car dealership we would start by basically taking all of the body work off, because we replaced it all with real metal armoured plating, then we replaced the suspension and give then a rally suspension because the surfaces that they were racing on were very uneven.
Then we had to put role bars and role cages inside for the protection of the stunt drivers and then we finished off by mounting real weaponry on the car, so all of the weaponry you see in the movie is real and fully functioning; machine guns and flame throwers and real oil sprayers, so by the time we had finished, plus all the extra weight meant that the engine had to be replaced with a bigger engine or tuned up, so by the time we had finished that car that had cost $2,000 dollars ended up costing $200,000 when they were done.
How involved were the cast in the driving of the cars, Jason Statham is renowned for doing his own stunts?
I have got to say if Statham ever gave up his acting career he really has a future as a racing driver as he truly is a great great driver, it’s such a shame that Top Gear was off the air when we were promoting the movie, you know they have the celebrity do the lap? He is by far the best celebrity driver I have ever seen he is very very good.
He ended up doing a lot of his own driving which, for a director, is both a very good thing because it adds to the reality of the movie, so a lot of the extreme stunts where you see him inside the car being thrown around by the G-Force and that is very hard to fake, but it probably took several years off my life I was so stressed that he would go and wrap a car a round a concrete post at seventy five miles an hour.
If you think about modern cars they are built to maximise the visibility to prevent you from having accidents but what we did with these cars is, because the armour plating is there to stop bullets, we reduced the visibility and quite often there were just these little slits for the drivers to look through which made it doubly dangerous because you couldn’t see the other cars on the road properly.
Plus this wasn’t a proper race track on a proper track if you lose control you spin out into a field but here if you lost control of the car you would hit a concrete wall, slam into a metal post or drive off into a river. I was very tense when we sent Jason off to do these amazing stunts where he was surrounded by cameras and lights shining in his eyes, it’s hard enough to drive these cars without all that, but he did a tremendous job and a lot of that is in the movie.
how did the casting process work were the likes of Jason Statham and Joan Allen always your first choice?
Yeah both of those roles they were the first actors that we went to I’m a big fan of Statham’s, in the script there is a line that refers to his character as McQueen cool and Bronson hard and I saw this movie as a throw back to the gritty movies of the 1970s, movies that Steve McQueen or Charles Bronson would have been in, and I think that Jason is one of the few actors that is working in Hollywood at the moment with that gritty, blue collared, seventies edge.
Hollywood is filled with pretty boys pretending to be action heroes and Jason is a throwback to the seventies when the guys that were action heroes were real tough guys who just happened to be movie stars and I do see Jason as being in an image of an early Eastwood, McQueen. You would be a fool to pick a fight with him as he will knock you on your ass.
The movie was shot in Alstrom train yards and St Vincent de Paul prison in Montreal, which really does add to the gritty look of the film, when you found these locations did they change your storyboards or is that the look that you always wanted?
No no I re-wrote the movie to fit the locations when we found them because they were so big and so impressive I wanted to take full advantage of having these locations for real. The train yard gave us the opportunity to film a lot of the car races indoors, which is quite unique, a lot of big explosions as well. So I really did try to integrate the story into the environment that we had found so yea we did tailor the whole movie to those locations. The film is primarily a locations movie we built very very few sets we shot in real warehouse and we really constructed that race track by racing between derelict buildings.
Why do we never see the audience that’s watching the Death Race?
It was a deliberate to keep the intensity of the movie, I felt that the intensity if the movie would be increased if we stayed on the island and kept the claustrophobia of staying in the island. Also I think the movie is set in, we are not specific about when the movie is set, but it feels like it’s ten years or so in the future and nothing dates faster than those movies that are set in the near future where you try and portray what the world is, what fashion is going to be in ten years time, video phones on their wrists and you get ten years in the future and none of that has happened everyone is just dressing like it’s the 1970s again. So I think it’s a truism that nothing dates faster than science fiction but nothing dates faster in science fiction than these movies that are set just a heart beat into the future.
So in an attempt to avoid that I stayed with locations and looks that I felt that were quite timeless, the technology of locking people up n prison was perfected about a hundred and fifty years ago and it hasn’t changed since so we used a tern of the century prison, the one we used was derelict but there was an identical one beside it that was still being used. Jason works in a steel works and they look exactly the same now as they did fifty years ago so by staying within these big industrial or prison locations and not showing what the outside world has become I think we, hopefully, gave this movie a timeless feel.
Finally what is next for you?
I am working on Resident Evil 4, a continuation of the franchise, so I’m very excited about that there are very few franchises that get to go to four movies. I’m also working on a remake of The Long Good Friday, the Bob Hoskins movie.
Death Race is released on DVD 9th February.
FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw
Paul W.S. Anderson shot to fame with his big screen adaptation of Resident Evil, that has so far stretched to three movies, before kicking off the Alien vs Predator movies.
He returns with Death Race, which stars Brit action man Jason Statham, and I caught up with him to talk about the sort of remake and the challenges he faced when filming the movie.
Death Race is about to be released on DVD can you tell me a little bit about the film?
It’s a loose prequel to Roger Corman’s 1975 classic Death Race 2000, so in my mind these events take place about ten years before Roger Corman’s original movie, where as in that film the Death Race is the national sport of America our film is very much the genesis of that sporting event.
How and why did you get involved in this project?
I love the original film and there were certain concepts that were contained in the original that I thought weren’t fully exploited by that film, for example the cars head machine guns that were mounted on the front but the guns never fired because it was quite a low budget movie and the guns were made out of wood.
Also the guys were supposed to hate each other and want to kill each other but they never crunched their cars together because they could only afford one to build one of each car. So there were a lot of things that I loved about the original film but felt because of their budgetary limitations they could quite do to the max so this movie was an opportunity to build these cars for real and really let them go to war with real machine guns rather than wooden ones.
The film is very different from the 1975 version why did you decide to move the plot from racing on the road to inside the walls of Terminal Island?
Well because I saw it more of a genesis story of the Death Race where it wasn’t a national sport so it wasn’t going to be a trans-American race. But my movie and Roger’s movie, tonally, are quite different his is more satire while mine has comedy in it but it’s not the obvious satirical comedy that Roger’s is.
I think that my version of Death Race works more as a intense straight to action movie and I thought that being on Terminal Island contained within this killer track, where the track itself is full of traps, just ups the intensity of the race.
And what sort of challenges did you face when shooting the races?
We decided to do as much practical as possible, so all of the car crashes you see in the movie the cars really crashed and spun in the air, so when the dreadnaought, that’s the big armoured truck, crashes that’s a real seventy five foot truck dead stopping at sixty five miles an hour so to do all that for real without killing anyone was the big technical challenge for the movie.
I was prepping the stunt work in the movie a year before we started shooting to get the camera very close to the action required a lot of specialised rigs that had to be built. So that was really the big technical challenge of the film.
The cars in many ways reflect the personalities of the drivers; Jason has an all American Mustang where Tyrese has more of a bully car so what did you think of first the cars or the drivers?
The characters came first and then the cars were like an extension of the characters; like you said Tyrese is the big bully of the movie so his truck had to be the biggest and the most heavily armoured with the biggest guns and Statham is a bit more sly and fast so his car was slightly less well armoured and more manageable, swifter and a bit more nimble. So yeah the cars were really chosen as an extension of the characters that were driving.
But I saw the movie just as much a war movie as a racing movie so I always knew that the audience was going to be plunged into some pretty extreme and fast cuts energetic war like sequences so I had to develop cars that were immediately identifiable so that you would know who was driving what and you didn’t get confused during the action.
Tagged in Paul W.S. Anderson