January 29, 2013
On Monday, August 22, 2011 we were invited by Warner Bros. to the set of their new action pic “Bullet to the Head” in New Orleans, and even though this was a high-octane Sylvester Stallone vehicle the coolest aspect was to be there for the first movie Walter Hill has directed in a decade.
Walter Hill is the genius behind “The Warriors,” “48 Hours,” “Red Heat,” and other testosterone-heavy flicks, not to mention the producer and creative force behind the “Alien” franchise. In his seventies Hill shows no signs of pulling punches as he once again dives into the buddy action genre, and we got a first-hand taste of that when we arrived at the studio for a scene involving actor Jason Momoa‘s villainous Keegan taking out a whole room of guys with one (very loud) silencer.
As the crew prepared for the first of several takes, we are offered earplugs, which this author stupidly declined, only to find out that Momoa’s blanks produced a near-deafening BANG. Just six or seven of these shots makes us jump in our boots, but when you look at 71-year-old Walter Hill and think about how many bullet-riddled action sequences he’s orchestrated you have to marvel that the guy has any hearing left at all.
Momoa tells the last living person in the dingy apartment set to “Please open the safe,” which that person does only to wind up with a bullet to the head after they find the safe empty and the flash drive missing. Having just dispatched seven guys without batting an eye, Momoa whistles his way out of the room to the tune from “The Andy Griffith Show.”
“I’m playing a character named Keegan who is a mercenary, a gun for hire,” Momoa told us between takes. “I kill Stallone’s partner and Sung Kang’s partner and they’re trying to kill me. I just play this evil sadistic bastard who likes to shoot people in the head.”
“I thought it would be fun,” he adds “He loves it. It’s like, ‘Open the safe.’ Maybe I didn’t get it right. ‘Please, open the safe.’ Just wasted everyone in there. ‘Thank you.’ Then shoot his face off.”
One person we did not get to talk to during the course of the visit was Stallone, who plays a hitman named Jimmy Bobo whose partner is killed by Momoa and ultimately teams up with a cop named Taylor (played by Sung Kang) who also had his partner iced by Momoa’s character. Even with the 30-year age difference between them, these two guys on opposite sides of the law learn that “revenge never gets old.”
The team-up of two old-school guys like Stallone and Hill seems like something that should have happened a long time ago, and Hill will tell you the same thing.
“I’ve been trying to get him to do a movie for about 30-years,” Hill said of Stallone, “and never could make it work out. He and I bumped into each other over the years, we had several meetings trying to work things out, and he and I both have the same lawyer so would see each other at various social events.”
At this point Stallone had just come off his successful run of “Rocky Balboa,” “Rambo,” and “The Expendables,” all of which he wrote and directed, so working under Hill was a change of pace.
“I think everybody understands about him being a star, but I don’t think people totally appreciate how good an actor he is,” Hill said. “Actors often get judged by material as well as their abilities, and I think he’s giving a very good performance in this film. This one’s a little more character-driven than some of his other dramas, but that’s for you to judge, really.”
We catch our first glimpse of Sly on our way into a pool set that’s being rigged for an effects shot. He stands outside with his assistants wearing a towel before he heads back into the indoor pool.
“Hey guys, I’m not feelin’ this water… it’s kinda murky,” Stallone exclaims as he wades his way in.
The 2nd unit gets he and Sung Kang set up for the next take, which involves some filters and lights going off to simulate an explosion from underwater. Effects great Richard Edlund (“Star Wars”) is supervising the shot.
Kang cordially chatted with us outside the set, excited to swim with Stallone, and filled us in on the scene.
“It’s Jimmy Bobo’s house, his safe house, he lives on the bayou,” Kang said. “It’s his secret getaway house where he keeps all his guns and stuff. It gets blown up. So, he’s right on the water, so we end up swimming away. And once we get to shore, he actually has a remote control that blows up all the bad guys. So, this is post-blowing up and swimming to shore.”
The “Fast & Furious” star, who replaced Thomas Jane when producer Joel Silver signed onto the project, elaborated on the dynamic between his straight-laced lawman and Stallone’s criminal.
“We hate each other!” Kang exclaimed. “We’re so different in every way, we’re different generations, ethnic background. Everything that comes out of his mouth is like old-school racial slur. You know, Charlie Chan this, samurai this, and everything out of my mouth is like ‘Hey, at least I speak English, you sound like you have marbles in your mouth.’ You know, ‘Kumbayya, yabba dabba do.’ ‘You’re a criminal, you’re a greaseball! I’m a cop! I have integrity! I have morals, what are you? You’re a petty crook and a killer.'”
During the course of the film Kang’s Taylor gets wounded, and Stallone takes him to the one person he can trust to patch him up: his daughter Lisa, played by Sarah Shahi of USA’s “Fairly Legal.” We caught up with Shahi on the tattoo parlor set, before she had her elaborate sleeves applied.
“Because my character is a tattoo artist, I wanted to really have the mannerisms down,” said Shahi. “For the last week I’ve been kind of an apprentice at a tattoo parlor down here. That’s been very cool. I have to tell you, I’m not bad. I practiced on a grapefruit. That’s apparently what you start out on. Then you move up to a pig. A dead one. I had a great big pig that I was practicing on. The boys were impressed.”
“He [Stallone’s character] was very in and out of my life as a child,” Shahi continued. “He comes to me and needs some help. Taylor, Sung’s character, gets shot and I did a year of med school. I’m a very talented girl. What haven’t I done? So he comes to me for some help and this isn’t the first time this has happened. The kind of relationship we have, he only comes to me when he wants something. I’m not too happy when I see him because I know what this is about. I kind of get pulled along into the storyline from that point on. Taylor and Lisa sort of have an attraction that daddy’s not too happy about. Nothing’s really written about the attraction other than him going, ‘Rawr! You looked at my daughter too long the other day!’ We’ve been trying to create as much as a love relationship between us as we can. Then f**king Jason Momoa comes into the picture. He’s the bad guy. He wants to kidnap me and he kidnaps me. Then big daddy comes in and saves the day.”
“At the very end there’s a big axe fight,” Momoa elaborated. “In a dilapidated building after I kill everyone. [Stallone] is looking around, I’ve kidnapped his daughter, and I have all these guns and stuff. And I say, ‘Ready for another round?’ And I throw the bags of guns away, and there’s this plaque — ‘the people who tried to save this building’ — and there are two fire axes. So I basically smash that thing open and grab the axes. He shot me a couple of times by surprise. I had a Kevlar vest. I throw him the axe, ‘What are we, Vikings?’ and we star going like a Cuisinart.”
Kang insists the body count on the movie is at least 70, and from what we’ve seen so far it’s definitely a throwback to Hill’s earlier pictures like “48 Hours,” especially with one returning character: the city of New Orleans (referred to in the movie as “Crescent City” to avoid depictions of NOLA as being “corrupt”). Hill has shot her on his first movie, the bare-knuckle boxing movie “Hard Times,” then again on “Southern Comfort” and “Johnny Handsome.”
“One of the things I like about New Orleans is it feels like you’re in a western with the architecture,” said Hill, who’s made his fair share of westerns as well. “All the balconies, the old buildings, it feels like you’re in the 1880s. Some of it spills into the movie. I don’t know how much of it creeps into the edges and helps you or how much of it is just by design.”
We get a true sense of the city later in the evening when we hit the streets of the French Quarter for a location shoot as Stallone exits a hotel bar and gets into a new Ferrari. He talks on a phone for a minute, and then drives off into the bright lights of the city. A crowd has gathered to watch the superstar, a tribute to his enduring popularity after over 40-years in the biz.
You could say the same thing about Walter Hill.
“You can tell by how many people show up to the wrap party, because we’re all going to miss each other,” Kang said of his director. “This was one of the good ones. And I feel blessed, because I don’t know how many movies Walter has left – to be with the guy who wrote for Peckinpah, who wrote ‘Aliens,’ ‘Warriors.’ Remember ‘Crossroads’? Yeah, as a kid I watched that film, and getting to work with the guy, you go ‘This is why he’s at that level as a director.'”
“I consider myself to still be here,” Hill says. “I’m still doing my best. I don’t know, I read in the paper that I’m an action director. They always say that, ‘Action director Walter Hill,’ if they bother writing about me at all. I think that’s fine. I’m happy to do the work. Most fellas, the race is already run by now and I’m lucky enough that I’m here, I’m working and I’m having a pretty good time doing it.”
“Bullet to the Head” hits theaters everywhere February 1st.
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