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| Interview: Rob Cohen-Three X's to Zero G's |
by Peter Sobczynski
In his previous films, producer-director Rob Cohen has given us such outlandish sights as a dragon with the voice and attitude of Sean Connery (“Dragonheart”), an orgy of car-chase action that would have made Hal Needham green with envy (“The Fast and the Furious”) and the sight of Vin Diesel blowing things up right and left while wearing a man-fur (“XXX”). In his latest work, the military techno-thriller “Stealth,” Cohen gives us a slightly more down-to-Earth film about characters who are anything but. In it, a trio of hotshot Navy pilots (Josh Lucas, Jessica Biel and Jamie Foxx) are teamed up with an experimental pilotless fighter jet that can do anything a normal pilot can (and more) without risking the lives of any real people. Inevitably, things go wrong and the plane begins to act out test military scenarios on its own for real and the three must bring it down before it can trigger unimaginable destruction
Recently, Cohen (whose next project is rumored to be a Sinbad film starring Keanu Reeves (presumably as the adventurer and not the guy from “Houseguest”) sat down to discuss his career, the various twists and turns that”Stealth” took its way to the big screen and the challenges of releasing a military-themed film during wartime.
You have been working as a film director for over 25 years and for even longer as a producer. What is it that got you interested in directing and are those still the same concerns that drive you today?
My love of film came from going to see movies with my father when I was a kid. I came from a little town of about five thousand people and getting my first view of the outside world through “The Great Escape” or “Lawrence of Arabia” made me want to tell those kinds of stories and to try to find the excitement and imagination that those things had for me. I wanted to give that back and pursue it as my life’s work. I’ve been doing it for 34 years now and I am more jacked about it now than ever before. It just keeps going.
The first films that you directed–things such as “A Small Circle of Friends” and “Dragon”–were primarily small, character-driven pieces while the things you have been doing lately–“The Fast and the Furious,” “XXX” and “Stealth”–have all been large-scale, effects-heavy action extravaganzas. How did you come to go from one extreme to the other over the course of your career?
I’m fascinated with characters under pressure–whether it is historical pressure, like the characters in “A Small Circle of Friends” or war or, in the case of “The Fast and the Furious,” characters in the middle of a new urban subculture. I think that I really always wanted to get here to do this and there were many steps along the way. There are limitations in Hollywood in what people will let you do and it is very rare that you come out of the box and get to do one of these $100 million summer tentpole action films. I don’t think I was ready for that back then but we limit ourselves sometimes that our intellect tells us to do. I think that when you get rid of that and do what your heart and inner voice tells you to do, it leads you to a much more productive place. The movies that I have most loved making are often the ones where my back was to the wall and this was going to be the last possibility, career-wise. “Dragon,” “The Rat Pack, “ ”The Fast and the Furious”–these are films where you just give up listening to critics or the intellectual voices and you just feel the story and go for it 100%. You just have to live inside your story. Some people are born to do that, like Peter Jackson, but for me, it was a process and now I am there. I made the movie I wanted to make against a lot of odds and it has the effect that I wanted it to have.
In terms of the actual craft of filmmaking, how do you feel you have evolved as a filmmaker over that time?
I learned and absorbed and as a craftsman, there is a place where film has to come second nature to your storytelling ideas. You literally have to get to a place where they could drop you on any set and you could read the script in an hour and go out and somehow make it all come together. Otherwise, the machinery is so cumbersome that you will be swallowed by it, especially on a visual effects film where the machinery is magnified by this component of the fantasy and the measurements and the special equipment and the different layers of each shot that have to be recorded in order to marry everything up together. You have to be free of that or you will drown in it.
For me, after “Dragon,” where whatever fantasy elements there were done on-set, I moved to “Dragonheart,” which was a big jump in technical stuff for me in terms of trying to absorb the new world of CGI and to push a company like ILM, which wouldn’t seem like a company that would need pushing, in order to do a lip-synching dragon based on Sean Connery. They didn’t want to do it–they didn’t know how to do it–and they were talking about getting with Phil Tippet and designing it and getting around to it some day and make it work. Each step gives you more tools and more experience and more language and more access to expert people who can figure out new algorhythms or grind new lenses or build new cable systems to carry the camera in a new way. People like John Fraser, my on-set effects guy–without the relationship with a guy like him, I couldn’t have done the jump in “XXX” or the hanger explosion in “Stealth” or even the design of the gimbal itself to create the g-forces on the actors and to create the reality level that the actors needed for shots that wouldn’t be completed for another year. I think that all that growth comes in layers and when you get it, you build on it and that is what I love about filmmaking.
There is no end to it–you can never master it. In one of the most touching things I ever saw on the Academy Awards, my favorite director, Akira Kurosawa, won an award when he was 80 years old and a master and he said “I am just coming to know cinema.” I cried and that still chokes me up because that is how deep it is–a genius like Kurosawa, having made some of the greatest films ever made, feels as if he is just getting to know it and the knowledge that at 80, you may not get to know it any better and yet you are in mid-stream. Even if you are a master, you never get better than mid-stream. The other aspect I like is that we have a mortal life and while you get to choose things in your life, very few of these very intense and fully committed lives are anything more than a lifetime endeavor. As a movie director, I can go into street racing or martial arts or extreme sports and doors will open and I can study and look into it and talk and get into the heads of people who have done these things in their lives and in 1-3 years, you explored that life and reflected on it for an audience without having to commit to thirty years of that life in order to understand it.
One of the things that surprised me about “Stealth” is that while it has a fairly wild-sounding premise, it has been told in a relatively straightforward matter–especially considering the fact that it was directed by you, someone who has previously enjoyed depicting over-the-top action in your earlier films, and written by W.D. Richter, whose work as a director on “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai” and as the writer of “Big Trouble in Little China” and the Phil Kaufman version of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” is usually fairly off-beat as well.
It’s about the tone. As a director, your first and biggest assignment, which covers everything else you do, is to find the tone–the blend of photo-realistic CGI effects with the Naval Air Force that we all know. We know what a carrier looks like and what mountains look like–we aren’t in”Star Wars” here or a total fantasy universe. To find the tone of what the story should be, I felt we had to keep it grounded. Originally, and it was a simple decision that came out of this tonal decision, we had spent a lot of time designing the aircraft carrier of the future so that the planes and the carriers looked the way they might thirty years from now. We studied what was on the drawing boards with various defense contracting place until one day when I thought that it just wasn’t the right tone. This wasn’t science-fiction–this was about the future coming into the present–and it should be done on a real carrier. That was when I needed total Air Force cooperation but that is part of why the movie works. If you get all crazy, people will think that it is just a fun ride. I think that is why it didn’t lend itself to the extremities that I went to in “XXX” or “The Fast and the Furious.”
I will say that I did 36 drafts of the screenplay after Richter, with other writers and by myself. Richter’s script was more what you would have expected–it was more like “Buckaroo Banzai.” It was filled with wackiness and computers singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and guys running around with their hair mussed while acting crazy. It was a fascinating read, I will say, but it would have been a non-emotional movie and more of a satire and I didn’t think this was a satire subject because it is real and it is coming. The question is, how do you convey that? If you go into “Dr. Strangelove” territory, that is interesting after the public knows there is a nuclear bomb. Kubrick did it because we already had twenty years of nuclear awareness–if Kubrick had tried to make that film in 1943, no one would have gotten it. No one would have believed it.
I’m still struggling with that even with the straight-ahead approach. People are saying, “This isn’t real, is it?” and I tell them “Have you heard of the Predator? Have you read what the Navy has put out about having one-third of their pilots replaced by 2011?” These things really exist–one of them targeted terrorists in Yemen and blew them off the highway. That was a drone, as they say, but I think there is no reason to have a drone or a joystick–the technology exists for these things to do everything independently. We’ve had auto-pilot for years in case a pilot has a heart attack during a flight, why would it would be different in this case?
How difficult was it to get the participation of the military? Even though “Stealth” is a pro-military and pro-soldier film, you still have such elements as questionable bombing runs, pilots disobeying orders, a top-secret project running amok and a mad commander jeopardizing his men in order to cover up his mistakes.
It wasn’t easy–it was a process with them. With a lot of people, they go to the military and say, “Give us a carrier” and when they are told “No,” half of them disappear because they were just taking a shot. With the half that come back, they say “May we please have a carrier and this is why.” They tell the D.O.D and the Navy what they want to and then they are told “No” again. Half of those people go away–it is a process of elimination. Finally, they look at a project and see it–part of what we did was go out on a carrier and do research–and I think a vibe begins to spread. They realized that this was going to be a straight-ahead look at the situation while also being an action film with some fantastical elements that was going to be anchoring this real issue.
I think it was a way for the Navy to say to the government and the people that this is real and this is what is happening. Most pilots hate this idea–it invalidates everything they believe–and I put those views in the mouth of Josh Lucas–machines are immoral while human beings have a moral center that can make split-second decisions and assessments of a situation that a computer can’t It is John Henry–you compete against the steam drill because you want to keep machines in charge of the hammer. Those planes can do things that pilots can’t do and take g-forces that pilots can’t but it is such a change of tradition that they are resistant. That is why I think they cooperated–it dealt with a subject they were passionate about.
Currently, the United States is in the middle of a military conflict that has bitterly divided its citizens and has been growing increasingly unpopular as it drags out. Therefore, how much of a challenge is it to distribute and promote a film like “Stealth” at this time?
I didn’t take a rah-rah “America Uber Alles!” approach. To me, the film is not what I would call a “patriotic” movie–you don’t watch the dirty bombs hitting and foreign citizens suffering and panicking and dying if you are trying to say that America doesn’t make mistakes or do anything wrong. However, it still has the qualities that I found on those ships–the honor and the principles and the traditions of the men and women who are out there. Whether where they are being sent or the policies that are being signed are correct is another movie and another issue. I think marketing it today is going to be interesting because on the one hand, we are at war but on the other hand, we don’t see it or feel it in ordinary American life. They don’t let people film funerals or take pictures of body bags. It is off the front pages now–three die in Iraq and it is on page three. There is a slow erosion of our freedom of information–look at the whole thing with “Time” about protecting sources. You have to protect sources or no one would ever talk to a reporter if they could go to jail. Who is going to tell people if something is wrong from the inside? That is one of the traditions of journalism that is connected, in my opinion, to the First Amendment rights. I think that the movie does bring this to the foreground.
link directly to this feature at http://hollywoodbitchslap.com/feature.php?feature=1559
originally posted: 07/28/05 16:57:23
last updated: 08/03/05 17:55:28
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