Exclusive: Director Paul W.S. Anderson on 'Death Race'

Exclusive: Director Paul W.S. Anderson on 'Death Race'
Premiere talks to Anderson about remaking the twisted Roger Corman classic, Jason Statham's blue-collar appeal, and the most stressful scene in the movie.

By Karl Rozemeyer

It's 2012. The US economy has collapsed, and a militant government is cracking down with brutal force to keep law and order. No longer satisfied with Sunday night football, television audiences have tuned in by the millions to a new form of escapist entertainment – the Death Race. Prisoners are forced to battle for their lives on Terminal Island's enclosed race circuit, and most lose to the masked man known as Frankenstein. When Frankenstein is killed, ace racer Jensen Ames (Jason Statham) is forced by the icy cruel Warden Hennessey (Joan Allen) to take his place or risk losing his freedom forever.

Dropping the campy overtones and subplot in the 1975 Death Race 2000, director Paul W. S. Anderson (Resident Evil, AVP: Alien vs. Predator) injects a little sociopolitical commentary in his twisted remake. Premiere talked to the director about the sagging U.S. economy, video games, and David Carradine's uncredited cameo.

I heard that the idea to make an updated version of Death Race first came about when you were making Event Horizon in 1997 for Paramount, after you met Paula Wagner and Tom Cruise who had just formed CW Productions.
It actually started well before that. My first movie was a film called Shopping with Jude Law and Sadie Frost, which is all about kids driving cars recklessly. It is very funny because it has some sequences that are startlingly familiar. But I had to shoot them in half a night on Shopping, and I got to shoot [the action sequences] for, like, three weeks on this movie. I finally got to make the [action] sequence I wanted.

Anyway, Roger Corman bought [Shopping] for release in North America, and he released it right after my first North American movie got released, Mortal Kombat. Mortal Kombat opened and it was the number one movie in America, and on Monday [after the opening weekend] I had lunch with Roger to talk about the release of Shopping. And he said, "You've got the number one movie. That's great. What do you want to do next?" And I said, "Well, actually Roger, I want to remake one of your movies. I want to remake Death Race 2000." And he said, "Well, that's great, kid! We'll make it your next movie." And so in typical Hollywood development story fashion, cut to 14 years later, we finally make the film. That was kind of the genesis of it, although I guess the genesis was me and my friends watching it on video in Newcastle and just loving it.

Was there ever a question of Tom Cruise being in it?
I got the rights from Roger, and we then took it to Cruise/Wagner for two reasons. One was Jeremy [Bolt], my producing partner, and myself were inexperienced in Hollywood at that time, and we felt that it was going to be a big movie and we needed to partner up with somebody who was really experienced. We really admired Tom, and we felt that he had the made the kind of movies that we liked, the Top Guns and the Days of Thunder. He clearly liked the kind of movie that this was going to be, and also there was the thought that if we developed it with him, then maybe he would be in it. But that was the thinking of 14 years ago, and when we actually got to the point when we were ready to make the movie, Jason Stratham was the man first and foremost in my mind to play this role, more so than Tom because the script had turned into was, I felt, a throwback to gritty 1970s movies. There is a line in the script which describes Jensen Ames, the lead character, as McQueen cool and Bronson hard, and I felt that there was really only one man in Hollywood that lives up to that description, and that is Jason Stratham. So he was the first man we went after.

Paul W.S. Anderson and Jason Statham on the set of Death Race

But wasn't there some risk in picking Jason Statham just simply because he is very much a British working class anti-hero, and, given America's obsession with NASCAR and muscle cars and violent sports, this movie seems very much an American tale?
Well, you've nailed it. He's blue collar. He's gritty. He's working class. He does have this kind of '70s vibe, and people in America love it. We saw it at Comic-Con: the crowds love him because he is real. He is not a Hollywood pretty boy pretending to be hard, pretending to be an action hero. The fact is that Jason Stratham could knock your lights out if you got into a fight with him. He's a tough guy. And he can drive a car probably better than most NASCAR drivers. He is obsessed with cars. He did a lot of his own driving for the movie. I aged about ten years making this movie because I was so fucking stressed when Jason would drive off. We'd load the car up with cameras, and he'd drive off at like 70 miles an hour and do like 180 [degree turns], and we'd be like, "Oh my God, please just don't crash into anything!"

He's a very accomplished guy. He's the real deal. The guy can drive. The guy can fight. The guy is blue collar. He is serious. And that is what the role required. And in a way... he harks back to those actors from the '70s and early '80s like young Eastwood, Bronson, Steve McQueen, young Sean Connery — these were hard men who just happened to be movie stars. That is why, for me, Jason was the first and only choice to play the role. And I didn't think it was a risk because I felt he embodied the role. I don't think that American audiences see him as British; they see the British as effete tea-drinking people who make period movies and ride horses around while wearing strange britches. That is what they like from Britain. Those are the movies that do really well here. They don't come to Britain for hard action movies. We don't make them in Britain. That is why Jason and I both live in LA, because those are the movies we love and we had to come to America to make those kinds of films.

Joan Allen's character as a buttoned-down, pious bitch from hell in a Chanel suit and stilettos was great. How much of that was in the script?
It was all in the script, and that is why Joan did the movie. She loved it. It's Death Race, right? And Joan Allen, three-time Oscar nominee, The Notebook, The Upside of Anger: she is always seen as the moral center of films. Well, I think that is how people perceive her. She plays moral the center even in the Bourne movies. She's the one in the corrupt government organization that you can rely on. And I thought how interesting to take someone who is usually the moral center of movies and make her the exact opposite. But I knew that if I am going to get Joan Allen in the movie I am going to have to write a fucking good role, because she is stepping outside of her comfort zone a little bit and doing something she has never done before. So I did a ton of research on prisons, prison governors, women in prison, and then we sent her the script. She really liked the script. I went and had a cup of tea with her in New York, and by the time we had finished having our cup of tea, she had signed on to do the movie. And it was because she fascinated about playing this character.

The thing is, she is an evil bitch in the movie but she is real. And that is what Joan Allen brings. She is not a cartoon villain at all. I think she really grounds Hennessey, and she makes her totally believable. But even down to the little diamond ear studs that she wears and the suits and the pearl necklaces — that was all in the script.

The film differs markedly from the 1975 version. Can you talk about scaling the film down from a transcontinental road race to within the walls of Terminal Island, and also to axe the whole subplot?
I really loved Roger's movie, and the thing that really fascinated me about it was I was always intrigued by how the Death Race began. The President of America didn't wake up one morning and suddenly decide, "I know! We are going to make the national sport a transcontinental road race where you run people down for points, and we are going to call it the Death Race." I mean, clearly he took something that was an existing form of entertainment and developed it and embraced it. It was obviously very popular before it became something that was endorsed by the President. So I was always fascinated about what was the genesis of the Death Race. I wanted to make my movie about a credible beginning for what Roger had portrayed in his film. So that is the movie that we made. So it has all the elements that Roger's movie has: the mythology of Frankenstein, the fact that Frankenstein is not who he appears to be, his rival Machine Gun Joe, the kind of critique of American society and American media as well. It is very explicit in Roger's movie. It is more implicit in our film, but it is still there.

Roger was satirizing the American media at the time, and in a way we do. We are not overtly satirical, but certainly we are commenting on where I feel reality television is taking us. I totally believe that what is portrayed in the film can happen. How long before somebody gets killed in Ultimate Fighting, for example? It is gonna happen, and when it does the ratings are going to be huge. And then someone is going to come up with the idea of cage fighting or pit fighting to the death, for real, no holds barred. Maybe it won't be in America. Maybe it will be somewhere off American soil, but it will be on the Internet. I really feel that this is where society is going.

Death Race was filmed on location in the Alstom train yards and St. Vincent de Paul prison in Montreal, which really contribute to the design and gritty palette of the film. When you found these locations did they alter your storyboarding, and did you look to other films like Mad Max: The Road Warrior or Blade Runner for visual inspiration?
I always wanted a wrecked, down-and-dirty aesthetic for the movie. I always described to my production designer and to the costume designer the color palette of the movie should be dirt and sweat and rust and blood. And really the only color I want to see vividly is blood. That is it. Everything else should be kind of muted. So we started looking for locations that would enhance that, and then when I found the locations in Montreal, I completely re-imagined the action sequences to fit those locations and completely re-storyboarded the movie to fit them. When you make a movie like Speed Racer, you can imagine whatever you want to imagine. Because I was determined to make a totally practical movie, we were very much led by real locations [and] we had to design action scenes to fit within these locations and make the most of them.

The cars in some ways reflect the personalities of the drivers. Tyrese has the big bully car, and Jason has the all-American Mustang. The question is, which came first? Did you think about the cars that were going to be in the movie or the driver? How did you decide which vehicles to use?
We cast the cars in the movie like we cast the actors. I see the cars in the film almost like an ensemble movie where you are kind of looking for actors that feel good together in an ensemble. And that is what we did with the cars. I was designing the cars for a year before we started principal photography. But the cars are an extension of the characters in the script. So first we designed the cars, and then we looked for the right people to fit within those cars. That is why we went with Jason, for all the reasons we talked about. It is the reason we went for Tyrese. He didn't grow up in Beverley Hills. He is a real street kid. This is a tough sport. It is hard sport for a hard age, and I needed hard men to play that sport. This was a tough bunch of guys driving the cars in this movie, from Jason to Tyrese to Robert LaSardo, who plays Grimm, to Robin Shou who is like a Wu Shu champion who plays 14k. None of these men you'd want to get into a fight with, that is for sure...

When a lot of the weaponry is introduced (the swords, the shields, the deathheads) in stage two, the race takes on a real-life video game quality. Did you work with gamers or video game designers on this aspect of the film in developing how that would look?
No. I think that just came out of me having played a lot of video games, and also thinking if this were a real sport, how would it be played? How would you raise the stakes? There are three stages. Each stage can't be the same. You need to up the ante. So that is what we tried to do, and that is where the swords, the shields, the Dreadnought came from. Each stage had to have something bigger and better. If you look at a lot of race car movies, they can be quite boring because they are just going round and round the same track. That is something that we completely avoided... We put a lot of effort into avoiding that trap, so that each action sequence in the movie is a progression on the next one, and you are seeing something fresh and interesting.

Of all the action sequences that you shot, was there a particularly day that stands out in your memory as really fun or complicated?
The one we were all stressed about, and I think looks spectacular and gets a huge response in screenings, is the death of the Dreadnought. I think that is worthy of a cheer because the fact is there were no special effects there. We drove a 75-foot armor plated truck at 60 miles an hour into dead stop and filmed the result. That was something that everyone was very worried about. Even all my practical effects guys who were so excited to be doing everything practical in the movie were going, "You know Paul, maybe you should do this as a miniature..." They were just scared by the size of it and the complexity of it. And also, to make something that big fly through the air — this is not an exact science. And there is not that many times that you can do it, because each time that you test it, you are wrecking a huge truck. So they were a little scared of it. And every time we tested it, the truck did something different. We did two tests before we committed it to film, but once we got all the cameras in, we shot it once and that is what is in the movie. And everyone was very excited when it happened because we weren't quite sure if it was going to work or not... You do it in a computer and you know exactly what you are going to get. And if you don't like it, you can alter it but it never looks real.

And for us, we wanted to [capture] everything that is real, but the danger and the excitement in that is you are never quite sure what you are going to get. Sometimes it wasn't the spectacular stuff we thought we were going to get. Sometimes the cars did different things, but we had very good cameras, so when the car spun through the air in a different way, they managed to stay with it. So the movie has a very visceral, rugged almost documentary feel to it; the cameramen were never quite sure what was going to happen.

I heard that you developed special rigging that enabled you to get up really close up to the action.
Yeah, one of my favorites is we developed this rig which is basically a camera surrounded by basketballs with a little hole for the lens to poke through. And we would stick it in the middle of the road and it meant that we could drive the cars right into this huge ball and it would bounce off the cars. But it meant that right up to the point where the car impacted, you had on film a car sliding right up to the lens. So if there were a continuation to the shot, it would be really funny because it would be the camera rolling away and bouncing around.

Were there any discussions about David Carradine and Sly Stallone (who were in the original Death Race 2000) doing cameos? Have they seen the film?
Sly has not seen the film and is not in it. David Carradine has seen the film, and he is the voice of the original Frankenstein. He is uncredited because we thought that would be a nice secret tribute to the original movie. But he is the original Frankenstein who dies at the start of the movie.