[IMG:L]Visual effects technology has allowed George Lucas to do Star Wars his way, pull comic book characters out of the hand drawn pages, and actors to look like they did their own stunts. This has been both good and bad for the genre. Now anything is possible, but bigger is not always better.
Some people still appreciate a good, old fashioned gunfight. Writer/director Michael Davis has created the ultimate shoot ’em up, called appropriately Shoot ‘Em Up. Marksman Mr. Smith (Clive Owen) delivers a stranger’s baby in the middle of a bullet ballet. When the mother is fatally wounded, he continues taking out the bad guys while cradling the infant.
In addition to navigating childcare with heavy artillery for 90 minutes, the hero uses all sorts of creative trick shots to defeat an army of villains single-handedly. As Mr. Smith turns corpses into props and shoots off offensive hairstyles, Davis pays homage to his favorite type of action sequences.
“I didn’t want to have all these explosions and everything that we had seen, all these cars tumbling over the freeway,” said Davis. “I was more interested in what the hero was doing, like when I was a kid growing up, I was a huge James Bond fanatic. And the example of what sort of in my mind as a kid crystallized what action should be was that scene in Goldfinger when James Bond is fighting Odd Job. Odd Job throws the hat and Bond gets it, throws it back and misses, and the hat goes into the metal bars, and Odd Job’s going to get it and he’s going to snap Bond’s neck with the metal hat. And Bond sees the electrical cords on the ground, and he ends up diving and he grabs the electrical cords, puts them in the bars. And just as Odd Job grabs his metal hat, he gets electrified.”
That might have been the biggest stunt in 1964’s Goldfinger. In 2007, Davis can make a whole movie full of those moments. “I like that because there’s a moment when you see the light bulb go off in Bond’s head. He has an idea and he implements it, but it’s not static. He has to fly, he slides on his belly which is really acrobatic and fun and motion and all that. And so, in my head, that’s what I wanted to do with Clive Owen. When he has to get the gun, he can’t just have it there. He has to dive, he has to flip.”
One such sequence has Smith jump off an overpass, through the sunroof of a car and start driving. Later in the car chase, he shoots out the windshield, crashes into the bad guys’ van and launches himself into their vehicle, slaughtering the whole lot when he lands, on his feet of course.
“To me, I’d rather have the hero have some clever way to get out of something than gigantic explosions or whatever. I just like when the guy gets a light bulb that goes off in his head and he executes it and that there’s clarity to the story telling. Even at the very beginning of this car chase, Clive buckles his seat belt. I’ve had people say, ‘Why is he buckling his seat belt? They never do that when they jumped into the car.’ I needed him to buckle the seatbelt to help tell the story that he’s up to something. When he unbuckles the seatbelt, ‘Oh he’s going to go through the windshield.’ I just like the sort of setups and payoffs within an action scene that help tell the story and helps the audience understand what’s going to happen so it’s not just this blur of mayhem, but it’s very clear what the guy did.”
Having previously directed straight to video romantic comedies like Eight Days a Week and 100 Girls, Davis had to convince studio brass that he had a real artistic vision here. So Davis animated 15 minutes of action sequences and cut it down to a five minute demo reel that he showed to New Line executives. Take that, Project Greenlight.
“I would like to think that I can read through my mind’s eye, but I think with Shoot ‘Em Up, I really wanted to have this action dance, this action ballet, that it wasn’t just the cool action but it was the editorial flow and the motion. You can’t put that on paper. You can say a sentence that it’s a bullet ballet, but until they actually see Clive twirling and jumping and diving and tumbling in this choreographed mayhem, that they got, ‘Oh, this could be something.'”
Once New Line executive Bob Shaye and Toby Emmerich got behind the concept, they actually helped Davis hone his wild concept. The film now begins with even more acrobatics as it establishes the childbirth plot.
“The one thing I do think we did talk about at New Line was the movie originally opened with delivering the baby, start out really, ‘Come on, push, push,’ and he starts shooting everybody. And it was crazy, and everyone loved being thrown right into the action, but we felt it was important to say this is more John Woo-ian. People were cluing into the drama of the baby and the mom. They laughed, but they should have laughed louder initially at the pony-tail being blown off. So we ended up adding this acrobatic opening with the oil slide and going through the paint-glass windows, telling people before the birthing that this is not Children of Men, that this is an out and out Shoot ‘Em Up. And I actually think it helped the movie by adding this sort of action in front of the birthing scene.”
For all its crazy antics, Shoot ‘Em Up does offer some heartwarming drama. Smith bonds with the baby over his gun, and a prostitute specializing in lactation fetish (Monica Bellucci) becomes a surrogate mother. So really, it’s a family film.
“When people end up reading Shoot ‘Em Up, they go, ‘Oh, it could be really hardcore and really nasty.’ Ultimately, it’s got all that but somehow it’s really kind of sweet. Ultimately it’s about this guy who ends up making this makeshift family with Monica Bellucci and this baby and there’s a romantic side to it. They end up falling in love, it’s very sweet and somehow I write these things that seem really edgy and they have the edgy elements but they end up playing really sweet. The lactating thing is a fetish but actually it’s quite practical.”
As for the hardcore, nasty part, Davis injected much of his own personality into Smith. “I’ve become this angry guy because I had written all these scripts and tried to make all these little movies and felt like I could never break through. So I became this guy who would hate every little thing. I hate guys with pony-tails, people who drive badly on the road. This inner-anger of my lack of finding a way to break through, manifested itself into me being irritated with these little things in life, which then ended up being the Smith character throughout the movie. He’s always saying, ‘I hate guys with pony-tails.’ He hates guys who sip their coffee and then go ‘Aaaaahhhh’ at the end of it. And that actually is me. I don’t know if you drink your coffee that way. But he has a nasty remark about luxury car drivers. It was kind of a way to take my own personality and put it into writing into a genre piece, so there is some stuff personal to me in here. The little limerick that Giamatti says, my dad used to tell me that limerick, so I like the fact that my dad is in the movie.”
Perhaps it was that sort of split personality that delayed Davis‘s big break in Hollywood. Even after the very development of Shoot ‘Em Up landed him more meetings, the Ari Golds of the world couldn’t make sense of a mild mannered bearded teddy bear who writes violence and sex.
“After Shoot ‘Em Up sold, I had the great chance of meeting all of these agents in town. All the agents say, ‘Well, you can’t be Michael Davis. You don’t look like the guy who would write this. You look too nice.’ I think somehow the movies end up at the core, because I think I’m partially a sweet guy and partially a twisted guy, that the movie ends up reflecting who I am which is what I like in filmmaking.”
Shoot ‘Em Up opens September 7.
