"I Iove the opening of this movie." "I Iove the way the universal logo goes backwards, I think it's so subversive." "My name is paul Anderson and I wrote and directed Death Race, and I also produced it with paula Wagner and Mr Jeremy bolt, who is sitting beside me." "hello, my name is Jeremy bolt." "We actually have messed around with the studio logo once before when we did Event Horizon and something we really enjoy." "Messing with the corporate logo." "Yeah, not messing with the corporation, but messing with their logo." "We first became involved in Death Race" "14 years ago." "Roger Corman had seen our very first movie called Shopping, which was Jude Law's first film, it was the first time he was in front of a camera, which I'd written and directed and Jeremy had produced." "And Roger saw it at the Tokyo film festival, where he was one of the judges, he very much liked it." "And he bought it for release in America." "By which point I'd actually made another movie, which was my first American movie, Mortal Kombat." "And that came out, was a big hit, was number one." "And on Monday after our number one opening," "I went to go have lunch with Roger to talk about his plans for the release of Shopping." "And he said to me, "It's great, kid," ""you've got a number one movie." "What do you want to do next?"" "And I said, "well, Roger, I really wanna kind of remake," ""re-imagine one of your old movies, Death Race 2000."" "And he said. "That's great, kid, we'II make it your next movie. "" "And in typical hollywood development fashion, it then took us 14 years to get the film made." "We went through several different iterations of Death Race." "The first, this was about probably a decade ago, was a much more futuristic version of the movie, it was called Death Race 3000." "So it was set in the far future, and the cars, obviously, were much more futuristic." "We had hovering cars." "We had invisible cars." "We had transformer cars." "It was all very much like the pod race from Star Wars:" "Episode I," "but a whole movie of it." "It was also a race around the world, rather than a track on an island, in a prison in America." "And I think, you know, that movie, as well as everyone reading the script and thinking it was probably going to be the most expensive movie ever made, which was one reason why it didn't get made." "It also seemed to lack a certain intensity, and that's when we started thinking about having a more contained race." "Finished." "Give me the napalm!" "Nothing works!" "I started to imagine the movie more as a prequel to Roger Corman's Death Race 2000, rather than a sequel." "One of the things that fascinated me about Roger's movie was how was it that the Death Race had become the national sport of America." "'Cause clearly it had a much more kind of gritty, underground start to it, and it had kind of grown into this huge event." "So I became very fascinated with the idea of the genesis of the Death Race." "And that's really what we put onscreen here." "although, you know, the year 2000 has come and gone, obviously." "Roger's movie felt much more futuristic, so in my mind, the events of our movie take place probably 15 to 20 years before the events of Roger Corman's movie." "But obviously, you know, the Frankenstein character is still the crowd favourite." "The other thing is that the tremendous growth in reality television, which has only really happened in the Iast 10 years." "You know, you could actually see something like the Death Race happening within about five or six years." "And when we first started development, reality television hadn't taken off." "So it feels more grounded in reality, because of that." "also, we kind of changed the way we wanted to shoot the movie." "I think, you know, 10 years ago, we were all in love with CG, and we developed a very CG-heavy movie." "And you know more recently, we've become obsessed with trying to deliver things as practical as possible." "And that we saw as one of the big challenges of this movie, was to develop and film the most spectacular car stunts we could but do it all practical, have no CG cars in the movie." "Have everything as practical as possible." "Which is a great idea." "It's very, very difficult." "I mean, there were moments during the shoot when I thought," ""Wow, I wish we were doing CG." ""It would have made life a hell of a Iot easier. "" "And it's credit to our amazing stunt team, and our special effects team that we were able to pull it off." "It's very difficult to go back to The French Connection." "I mean, you really have so much respect for those old '70s movies, where they had to do it all for real." "But also the nature of those movies, the way they were covered, quite often you would have the cameras at the side of the roads, just panning with the action." "And I think audiences have become more used to being immersed in the action right now." "You need the camera in the middle of it, in the thick of it, and that required us to develop a Iot of very specialised rigs, so that we could get the camera in the middle of the action" "without killing the camera crew or the guy who is driving the car." "So there was a Iot of practical challenges on this film." "And it really meant that we spent a year in preproduction in montreal, where we shot the whole film, developing these rigs and developing the car races and all the stunts so that they could be executed, in a spectacular fashion but in a very safe fashion." "I just love this shot here, paul." "Jason, so iconic with the flames behind him." "He was actually so close, he really burnt his ass on that shot." "Yeah, this was all shot in a steel mill, just outside of montreal, and it was very difficult to shoot in." "You couldn't really move around very much, 'cause they're very, very dangerous places." "And we had to wait for the steel to pour, and it wouId only pour once every hour and a half." "And they could never really tell you exactly when the pour was going to happen." "So we just had to, basically, wait with Jason, and then we will be told, about two minutes beforehand, "It's gonna happen, "" "so we'd rush to get Jason into position." "And we had given him the perfect safe place to stand, we had discussed with all the guys who worked at the steelworks, so that the shot, no visual effect, he could actually be in the same shot with this super hot steel," "which, if you got just a speck of it on you," "I mean, it wouId burn its way straight through your skin." "And I think because they were excited that Jason was there, they gave us an extra large bucket of steel." "normally, it was just a small amount of slag that would pour out of this bucket, but on this occasion, as you can see in the film, it was like a whole lake of burning steel." "And it looked spectacular, but Jason, he definitely felt the heat." "That's for sure." "I Iove the steel mill sequence." "It again has an echo of a '70s movie." "A little bit of The Deer Hunter." "It's also not perhaps what you're going to expect when you come to see Death Race, and it grounds our character in a reality, in an America with an industrial heartland, but where people are losing their jobs, where the economy is in trouble." "Yeah, the movie is set in a kind of mythic city." "It's somewhere in the American Rust belt, but we never specify where exactly it is." "although we shot the movie in montreal, the inspiration, visually, was very much cities like Detroit and Pittsburgh." "You know, that classic American Rust belt." "Though interestingly, we found the best industrial decay that we could was in montreal." "You know, we looked at those cities, Detroit, Pittsburgh, we looked at New Jersey." "We even looked at Eastern Europe, 'cause I felt that there would be a Iot of big industrial decay there." "So we looked at poland." "But the best and biggest abandoned industry we could find was actually in montreal." "And one of the reasons for that, although montreal is a very beautiful city, it is actually like the Canadian city of culture, one of the reasons why they have all these crumbling industrial works, which you'II see later in the movie," "was that they had like a terrorist problem in the 1970s." "Some of the Quebecois were fighting for independence, and so they were taking hostages, people were being kidnapped." "And a Iot of big business just pulled out of Quebec, and pulled out of montreal and moved to Toronto." "So, you had all these abandoned industrial works that had been empty since the 1970s." "And that gave us the backdrop for what we needed." "He's just awesome, Jason, look at that anger." "I mean, paul, you love the industrial wastelands as well." "I mean, going back to Shopping, the opening of our first movie has a kind of Blade Runner-Iike industrial wasteland shot." "And that top shot we've just seen again has that echo." "I grew up in the north of england and in the midst of a Iot of big industrial decay." "So, it's a look I Iike a Iot." "And this movie does have a Iot of echoes of our first film." "You know, our first movie we made very cheaply in the UK, but it was a dystopian tale of young kids who stole cars and engaged in car chases with the police just for kicks, and then, would kind of loot department stores." "That's why it's called Shopping." "Because they would drive a car through a store window and go in and just kind of loot the store." "We did a Iot of what we felt were spectacular cars stunts back then, although we had to kind of shoot them in a couple of hours." "And it was very different for the British film industry at the time, 'cause the British film industry was just making a Iot of art movies, or a Iot of movies about sexuaIIy-repressed butIers in the 1930s." "So Shopping was a slick and sexy-Iooking film." "But we didn't quite have the budget to pull off what we wanted." "And it's interesting kind of viewing, watching the two movies back-to-back, Shopping and Death Race, because there are definitely some ideas we took from Shopping and put into this movie." "only this time, instead of having to shoot the stunt scenes in two hours, we would take an entire week to shoot some of them." "But certainly the backgrounds, you know, the abandoned industrial works, the flame, the smoke, the steam, it's very influenced by our earlier work." "She is a good actress, this girl." "I mean, it's very important to us when we make our films, that even the smaller parts we cast as well as we possibly can, given the budget restrictions." "There's nothing worse, I think, than watching a movie with big actors and big movie stars, and then suddenly, there's a small part and there's a bad actor." "It really just lets the whole film down." "And I was very pleased to find this girl in Canada." "She's an excellent actress." "That baby was a good actor, too." "Let's go crazy." "Something smells good." "Honey?" "Suzy?" "Stay on the ground!" "Stay on the ground." "AII of these flash cuts here and the vari speed, again this was all in camera." "I wanted to give the movie a kind of organic feel." "So although you can kind of have this kind of effect and do it in postproduction, I wanted to do everything in camera, so it had a slightly more kind of physical, organic feel to it." "although it is stylish, I didn't want it to feel too stylised." "And six months later, and Jase is off to prison." "And it's Christmas, just to add to the poignancy of the situation." "I Iove Christmas movies." "originally, we had a Christmas carol playing here." "That's why the radio was in the front of the bus." "So this bridge, it's the Ice Bridge." "It's a fantastic, narrow bridge that actually exists in montreal." "It is one of the reasons we wanted to go there." "Yeah, it's two km long, that's just over a mile." "A mile and a third, and it is across the St Lawrence, and the idea was it was built to block ice from coming down into the harbour in montreal." "But by the time the construction was finished, global warming had meant that they didn't have an ice problem any more." "It never iced over." "So it had become a bit of a white elephant." "And they were just using it basically as a bicycle path to cross the waterway." "So we closed it down for several nights and we did a whole series of kind of stunts." "Quite spectacular stunts there." "So it was a great location." "And in the distance, you can see the island, and that is one of the few visual effects shots, big visual effect shots in the movie, is the creation of this island, because obviously the island doesn't exist." "although the bridge exists and the locations on the island, the island itself is completely CG." "Yeah, where the bus arrived, that's actually a real prison." "Decommissioned now, but it's a real prison." "And they also shot a sequence from Catch Me lf You Can there." "Jason in awesome shape." "He worked so hard with our trainer..." "Logan Hood." "Logan Hood who was one of the guys who trained all the actors for 300, and Jason got in amazing shape for this movie." "He dropped to 6% body fat." "I think when he started with us, he was at about 18 to 20% body fat." "He'd just kind of shot a movie in London, and anyone who's been to england will know, you know, the diet over there is quite heavy on beer and pies." "So it's not conducive, as Jason would say, to a movie where you want to take your top off." "So he took three months to get in phenomenal shape, and very strict diet, very strict exercise regime." "And what Logan said, who's the 300 trainer, he said basically, the way the guys in 300 looked after they had worked out, then had all their abs painted on, and they had still done a bunch of visual effects on top of that," "that's the way Jason looked for real." "Yeah, his body is totally for real, no steroids, no visual effects." "The inspiration for this..." "And no special lighting, even." "No." "We've just very kind of flat lighting on him." "We weren't trying kind of to light his body in any special way." "We wanted a kind of lean Robert De Niro in Cape Fear look." "So you would believe this is a guy who's been in and out of prisons all his life." "The body and the tattoos." "Yeah, I mean, there was a line in the script that described Jason's character as McQueen cool and Bronson hard." "And I think Jason is one of the very few actors who are working in hollywood right now that really has that '70s tough guy anti-hero vibe." "This is a scene that we cut out of the theatrical release of the movie." "'Cause we felt it kind of pre-empted the confrontation with Pachenko in the mess hall a little bit." "although I Iove Jason's line here." "I think it is very funny." "I also felt it was undermining the Aryan Brotherhood, because, you know, he beats three of them up here, then he beats them up in the mess hall." "And I think that was all working against Pachenko being a really credible adversary." "'Cause I think in movies like this, your heroes can only be as good as the villains and the adversaries they have to fight." "talking of which, here's Joan alien." "Inspired by a real prison warden." "Yeah, well, when we were developing the movie," "I mean, I was aware that we were making kind of three movies in one." "We were making a car race movie, we were also making a prison movie, and we were kind of making a war movie because of all the machine guns." "And the prison movie aspect of it, you know, there have been so many great prison movies, and they always have great warders." "In movies like Escape from Alcatraz, Shawshank Redemption, Cool Hand Luke." "And I was wondering, you know, how can we get away from that?" "How can we avoid the comparisons to those characters?" "'Cause they were so well done." "And I thought one of the ways to do it which would be fresh and original is to have the warden as a woman." "'Cause, there are plenty of female wardens in reality." "It is just it's never been put on film before." "And also I thought how original to make the villain of the movie a woman, because that rarely happens as well." "Oh, yeah, I saw him race years ago." "He's good." "Did some time upstate." "Jason and I, when we were in preproduction, we went to Corcoran prison to do a little bit of research." "Corcoran is the toughest prison in california." "It's where they send the kind of the worst of the worst." "So in a way, this prison is styled upon Corcoran." "And that is where we came up with the idea for the "Warning" " No warning shots" sign, which I Iike very much." "That was just taken straight from Corcoran prison." "And they said that, you know, if a fight breaks out, they tell everyone to get down and then they just start shooting, because if you're still standing up at that point, you are up to no good." "It is a tough, tough prison." "Tough people in it, and they have tough measures to keep them in line." "It's a big gang prison as well." "We really tried to respect the separation of people by gang in prison as well." "Yeah, I mean, prison life is all about gangs." "It's which gang you belong to." "And even if you don't want to, you are forced to join a gang." "So you're the wife killer." "Takes a big man to kill a woman." "I suppose you rape kiddies, too." "You hear that, everyone?" "Guy kills women." "Rapes kiddies." "What do you think we ought to do about that?" "We wanted to keep the fighting in the movie very fast, very realistic, very brutal." "So the fight scenes are relatively short, and we staged them in a very realistic manner." "I was very aware that Jason was coming off a franchise like The Transporter, where he had done a Iot of martial arts." "And the first time I sat down with Jase, you know, I was very clear about the fact that we're not making a martial arts movie here." "I didn't want any of that kind of stuff in the movie." "The idea is that Jensen Ames is a tough guy, and he has some street skills, but it is very much a street fighting movie." "But right now, that's the least of your problems." "The warden does bad things to people that mix it up with the drivers." "Yeah, the actor who plays Pachenko, who we just saw, we cast him based on this audition tape he sent us, which is very, very unusual, when you cast a movie." "But he sent us a tape." "He was in poland, I think." "And the audition tape was so fantastic, which he had filmed himself, that we cast him off it." "And that's pretty amazing." "I think he has got a very big future, that guy." "But the men you've provoked..." "Well, let's just say, Mr Ames, that the life term you joined us for may be a lot shorter than you think." "I understand." "Tradition." "I Iove Hennessey's office." "It's very kind of Ayn Rand." "little model of the prison there on the right." "Camera right." "Yeah, sorry." "I think it's just great, paul, that we got Joan alien in this film." "I mean, she's such a great actress." "Yeah, Joan was our first choice for the role." "I thought we were going to have to, Iike, jump through a Iot of hoops to get her in the movie, because, obviously, she's, you know, three-time Oscar nominee, and she's won so many awards." "And she just really, really responded to the script, and really responded to the character, 'cause she felt it was a very grounded character." "And also, I think she wanted to play something completely different." "She had never played a villain like this, and 'cause as I said before, you know, that how many times is the villain in a big movie like this actually a woman." "So she was very excited about it." "I flew to New York, and I thought I was going to have to persuade her to be in the film." "AII we did was sit down, have a cup of tea, and by the time we'd finished the cup of tea, she was in." "His return to the track is highly anticipated, and therein lies my problem." "No one knows yet, but poor Frank died..." "I mean, having an actress on her level in your film, it makes everything that much more believable." "She grounds it, she has such gravitas." "Yeah, the idea behind terminal island, although it's not completely explained at the start of the film..." "It was in earlier drafts of the script, but we felt it was too much information to give away at the start of the film, it was too much text." "But we felt the way the Death Race had come about was that there had been a riot at terminal island," "like a prisoner revolt, and it had been broadcast live using not only helicopter press cameras and press cameras from outside the prison, but also using the cIosed-circuit camera system within the prison itself." "And what people had seen was like several inmates and the couple of prison guards being killed live on national television." "And this had led to massive, massive ratings, and also had made terminal island famous." "So the following year, the same network that had broadcast the riot then instituted a series of cage fights within the prison." "And then that pretty much leads into what was described at the start of the film." "I might surprise you." "really nice cinematography here." "Our director of photography, Scott Kevan, this was the first time I had worked with him." "We used him because we really liked a movie he had shot called Stomp the Yard." "And if you've seen that film, I mean, it's a dance film, but the dance scenes have such visceral impact." "I mean, they feel so brutal that I thought, wow, if this guy can kind of make dancing feel this exciting, and this potentially violent, imagine what he can start to do with fight scenes and with car scenes." "So we really wanted to, kind of, Iet him loose on an action movie." "But it's a magnificent achievement from Stomp the Yard to this." "I mean, this was a huge lighting challenge." "He was lighting some of the stretches of racetrack at night." "I mean, there was over a mile that he was having to light, which is a big challenge coming from, having come from a movie..." "I mean Stomp the Yard was probably the biggest movie he had done at that point." "Yeah, I think he also did Cabin Fever, but that was obviously a much lower budget." "He's a very gifted DP." "I mean look at the lighting there, it's just fantastic." "Now, we built this set in an abandoned railway factory in montreal, and this was really our principal location for the film." "And this railway factory was huge, it was about a mile long." "So we managed to find locations to build the auto shop, which is here." "The interior cell block, we built here as well." "And a Iot of the racetrack is here." "Either racing between the buildings or racing inside the buildings." "We also had our production office here." "And in fact, our production office is in a Iot of the shots." "You know, you can see where we can kind of prepped and planned the whole movie from." "Fred KoehIer, channelling a bit of the Rain Man there." "Ian McShane, which, being British, it was fantastic to have Ian in our film, because he is a huge actor in Britain, and recently, since really Sexy Beast, seems to have become a huge star in the States." "Again a brilliant actor." "This is Frank." "I'll show you around." "We have a fully functioning auto shop, just like you'd find in the outside world." "Each team has their own shop." "We don't help them." "They don't help us." "To the inmates, you're Jensen Ames, the new grease monkey." "Nobody will know you're Frank except us on the team and a handful of the guards." "Jacob Vargas on the right playing Gunner." "We saw him in this movie Bobby, and he was very, very good in that." "And again, we just tried to surround Jason with as many really strong, good actors as possible, even in the smaller parts." "We really worked hard on that in this film." "Casting took a Iong time." "That's a good question." "Just in general, preparation for the film was very long and very elaborate, because once we had found these locations, we then had to kind of tool all of the race scenes to the locations, so that the cars could really interact" "with these fantastic big warehouses that we had found, with pillars and, you know, with bridges and things like that." "So, you know, we changed a Iot of the script to fit the location, which put us back about six months." "But I think we got a much better movie out of it because of that." "...there's a 250 hp NOS unit." "Just in case." "Then we had some fun customising..." "Mustang, the Monster." "We wanted cars that were..." "people could relate to." "Yeah, I mean, I wanted people to drive down a freeway and recognise all of the cars from the movie." "So that you could really imagine, "Wow... " You drive past a Mustang, and you can really imagine how it could be fitted out with these machine guns and with the armour plating." "It's certainly one of my fantasies whenever somebody cuts me up on the freeway, it's like I always imagine, "God, wouldn't it be great" ""if I had a rocket launcher mounted to the front of my car. "" "There was an earlier draft where we had Ferraris and Lamborghinis." "But not only would that have been extremely expensive, we just felt that..." "It was just too exotic." "Yeah, exactly." "And we felt that people wouldn't be able to relate to them as much as you know, a Dodge Ram, a chrysler 300, the Mustang." "Even the slightly more exotic cars like the Porsche." "I mean, it's an old Porsche, you can pick up one of those for just a few grand." "And that was the thing is, we would buy some of these cars, really, for just a few thousand dollars." "But then, each of the cars, we'd spend probably $200,000 on doing the car up." "Pretty much we had to take away the entire bodywork, and replace it with real armour plating." "It is obviously very thin in the movie." "But it is all real metal." "None of the original bodywork is left." "The interior of the car, you can see here has roll cages been put in for protection of the stunt drivers." "The suspension had to be altered to make it a rally suspension, because the road surfaces were very uneven." "The axeIs quite often had to be beefed up because of all the extra weight that was added by the armour plating and the machine guns." "The engines had to be replaced or completely tuned up, again because of the weight." "We still wanted the cars to be high-performance, even while carrying all this extra stuff in them." "So it was a Iong process to manufacture the automobiles." "So again as Jeremy said earlier, this is a real prison yard." "AII the exterior shots in the prison are in a real prison, that was decommissioned about 10 years ago." "AII the interior shots, we would do in different locations, or we would have to build." "That's because they had a big asbestos problem inside the prison." "So we weren't actually allowed to go inside any of the buildings." "...and help with the running of the car." "I'd like to talk to her ahead of time, before the race." "Yeah. I'd like a big-tittie girl to lick peanut butter off my toes." "That ain't gonna happen." "It's still a prison, man." "She's a chick." "Jacob giving us some weII-earned humour." "Yeah, Machine Gun Joe is the only one that has a male navigator." "'Cause he's gay." "Actually, it's 'cause he goes through them so fast, the audience gets squeamish." "Yeah, he goes through them." "Through their ass." "He cuts each kill into his skin as a souvenir, right here." "What about the rest of the drivers?" "I think the interior of the cars have quite a unique look to them." "It was something we struggled with for ages." "And in the end, what we did was, we basically just took away a Iot of the kind of dashboard, a Iot of the kind of plastic that you see in a normal car." "We just took it away and what you're seeing inside the cars is a Iot of the wiring, and original lights and everything." "So that, kind of, if you deconstruct a car what you get is what you see inside these cars." "...the Hindu goddess of death, Kali," "and that he is her messenger." "Cuckoo." "Some of you might recognise Robin Shou, who plays 14K." "He starred in my very first American movie, Mortal Kombat." "And we worked with him, he had a small role, a cameo role in a movie we produced called DOA." "And we love Robin, and we always wanted to work with him again, and I pretty much wrote this role for him." "Used to race for NASCAR." "Yeah, he was good, too." "And also the thing about Robin is, he just doesn't age." "He looks exactly the same now as he did 15 years ago, when I first worked with him." "And he had pretty much the same hair for the Iast 15 years as well." "He has this very long, Iuxuriant, kind of, rather 1980s hair," "I always think." "So, although I wrote the role for him," "I also wrote the role so that he had to shave his hair off, which he did willingly." "But I think it gives him a pretty unique look." "You hear a lot." "Who's the new fish?" "Tyrese is great." "We really enjoyed working with Tyrese." "He's got a great attitude." "He is very funny." "He's a very good person to have around on set." "...the ugliest motherfucker in this prison, yo." "Funny, huh?" "You tell Frank when you see him." "This race is between me and him." "This time won't be no infirmary." "It'll be the morgue." "Tyrese and his whole crew." "There are a Iot of gangs in the movie." "So Tyrese has his own gang, Pachenko has his own gang, 14K has his own gang." "And to kind of get that gang feeling going, what I would do is I would keep the groups separate, and rather than giving any of the actors who are with a particular gang boss direction," "I would always allow the actors who are in charge of that gang to direct their own gang." "And so that they would appear much more like the leader." "And I kind of encouraged that all the way through the shoot." "So what you got was, you got Pachenko's gang, they all would just hang out with him." "Even when we weren't shooting they would be hanging out with him during lunch for example." "They'd go out together at night, and I think it really helped enhance the, kind of, slightly..." "The edgy gang feel." "So when some of these gangs kind of brush up against one another, you know, they really don't get on, 'cause they kind of kept themselves to themselves." "That was very smart of you, paul, to do that." "I didn't even know you were doing that." "Yes, I did that." "remarkable method." "Method direction." "Yeah." "Another good CG." "Saved me having to give them any direction." "And of course..." "Tricks of the trade." "What we realise is..." "Most actors do want to direct anyway, so Max Ryan who played Pachenko, and Tyrese, I mean, they just rose to the occasion magnificently." "I think it ended up costing us quite a bit of money though, because Tyrese never wanted to do anything without his gang." "He so much liked having them around him, so we would end up having to have his gang in every single scene he was in." "Now you tell me." "Jason CIarke, excellent as Joan alien's sidekick." "Jason CIarke's in a TVshow Brotherhood, with a very good friend of ours Jason Isaacs." "So it was kind of fun to work with him on this." "This is my favourite shot in the film, paul, it's just so iconic." "We worked very hard on that mask." "To make it something different." "You know, different from the original movie." "But also, you know, once you start putting masks on people's faces," "I mean, there's a danger it, kind of, becomes a bit too comic booky superhero." "So we didn't want him to look like Daredevil or Batman." "But then equally, he's got a tough look." "But you don't want him to look like Jason Voorhees either." "So, that kind of organic look to the mask is something that resulted from," "I think we probably developed 20 or 30 different looks for the mask and eventually ended up on this one." "And the idea is that it is a rusted, beaten, piece of metal that's been actually beaten out in one of the auto shops." "So it has kind of a creepy feel to it, but also a very organic and real feel." "He's all yours." "Don't talk to the other drivers." "Frank never did." "The racing stripe on the side of the costume was very much inspired by Steve McQueen in Le Mans." "Yeah, in Le Mans, McQueen wears a white outfit with a stripe." "So we basically took the same design for the costume, but changed all the colours." "You see at the end of the raceway there, there are lots of containers, shipping containers, they are hiding beautiful montreal." "And we found that a very cost-effective way to create our racetrack." "So we would just rent a Iot of shipping containers, paint those Chevron's on them, and they would block out bits of the city that we didn't want to see." "I Iove that guy standing there with his tongue." "His tongue, yeah." "Just fantastic." "natalie Martinez." "beautiful girl." "I was a little worried we weren't going to get this shot of natalie, because..." "This shot?" "Yeah, because when we were shooting it," "I Iooked up and much to my horror, I discovered that the camera operator who was in the perfect position to get the shot of natalie's bum was actually a woman." "And I thought, oh no, now, I'm going to have to go over there and be very sexist and tell her, "Remember to pan down and get natalie's ass. "" "But fortunately she did it magnificently." "A good camera operator knows what to do." "Don't sweat it. I know." "I drove with Frank. I'll watch your back." "That scar on natalie's face, I Iove." "We actually lit..." "We changed the lighting slightly to, kind of, bring it out." "It's not really as prominent as it appears, but that's a real scar." "And she got it when she was a little kid, and I think it was her uncle who had all these cocks, and she went into the backyard and one of them just came at her." "And she was very lucky not to lose an eye, but she ended up with that very distinct scar on her face, which I think is fantastic." "I think it gives her so much character." "How the hell did he drive in that thing?" "What?" "You're better looking than the last Frank." "A few crashes should change that." "Joan alien's high-tech control room." "I wanted like a high-tech cocoon within all the crumbling industrial decay." "One of the fun things about this location is that everything was really in place." "You know, that control room we built, it really looks over the auto shop in the back." "And through the windows at the front, you really see the starting grid." "So, again it kind of saved us." "traditionally, you would build that as a set, and then you would have to do visual effects for the shots through the window." "I'm so glad we did it practically." "Access to over 100 live camera feeds." "This whole thing is very much inspired by real pay-per-view events that you can see." "Like HBO boxing and things like that." "We just kind of wanted to take it to the next level." "...featuring four-time winner Frankenstein." "Three-time winner Machine Gun Joe." "Pachenko." "Travis Colt." "Audience favourite Frankenstein resumes his bitter grudge match with Machine Gun Joe." "Frankenstein returns to the track after a six-month absence." "They've missed him." "He's the man that just won't die." "Twelve million hits on his angle alone." "He hasn't even started the engine." "We'll do 45 million viewers today." "So, what are you in for?" "They say I killed a cop." "Did you do it?" "Yeah." "I Iove the wreck-tech feel of the interior of these cars." "You know, the seats they are sitting in are real ejector seats that we took from an old fighter jet." "Frank, Case, you read me?" "The triggers that are on the steering wheel for the guns are actually..." "They're drills." "So, it just triggers from electric drills." "It's got a real and rough ready feel to it." "I Iike the bundles of metal cords..." "well, we found those in scrap metal yards." "Yeah." "A Iot of the movie, our production designer, paul Austerberry, did a fantastic job of just basically combing scrap metal yards, and finding interesting items that we could buy for next to nothing to kind of use." "And those steel bundles were very important, obviously, to kind of protect the actors and also the stuntmen from one another." "You know, when those cars are driving by at high speed, you know, they really did provide a fantastic crash barrier just in case one of the cars would spin out of control." "So glad we left the chrysler with some orange on it." "really stands out." "I've always seen this movie as much a kind of war movie as a race movie, and I always knew that we would have some very frenetic action scenes and some very fast cutting." "I wanted the audience to be able to identify which car was which and who was in which car very, very quickly." "So we had to make nine cars, and each one had to have its own separate identity and its own separate profile." "And I think we pulled that off." "It wasn't the easiest thing, though." "One of the things was..." "The chrysler, for example, is one of the few cars that has a splash of colour." "That's right, there's the red on the front of the Monster, and the orange on the chrysler." "And Pachenko's car has a light colour to it." "So all the racing stuff you're seeing here is totally practical." "Some of the driving is being done by Jason for real, some of the interior stuff that you're seeing." "Some of it is on a stage with green screen behind them." "We did that because it's very, very difficult to mount cameras on a car and get a real performance out of somebody when there's dialogue involved." "It's better if it can be a slightly more controlled environment." "But then, what we would do is, for a Iot of the racing stuff where the cars are just bashing into one another we would actually, physically, have Jason in the car and let him drive down the track and let stunt cars bash into him." "Because there was no dialogue involved." "Except when it was..." "I mean Jason would have done every stunt possible, but there were some things that were so dangerous," "I just couldn't let him do it." "Wakey-wakey!" "So everything up until this point in the race was in AIstom, which was the train factory we found." "At this point, now, we transfer to our second major location, which was an abandoned silo in the harbour of montreal." "What was great about this was it was really a two-kiIometre run, so we could really get the cars up to speed." "There was water on one side, which allowed me to get a helicopter down nice and Iow and track with the cars." "I know what the hell I'm doing." "What you gonna do?" "You can't go head-to-head with Joe like this." "He'll tear you apart." "You read me?" "Even when we were doing some of the green screen stuff inside the cars, the cars would all be mounted on hydraulic platforms, so that we'd really be shaking the cars around a Iot." "It was very, very violent in there." "So, for example, where we had to have a scene where the Monster gets rammed by Joe's car, we would really shake the car hugely." "It was very uncomfortable for the actors and very uncomfortable for the camera crew, 'cause they were strapped to the exterior of the car and they were being shaken around a Iot." "The camera crew would..." "I've never seen a camera crew wear so many hard hats and so much protective clothing as they did on this movie." "It was a tough shoot." "I know. I've seen this race before." "These cars are really travelling at speed, as well." "I mean, they're not, as is so often the case, travelling slow, and then we, through the magic of cinema make it look fast." "I mean, they were going at 50, 60, 70 miles an hour." "Yeah, 60 is the kind of magic number that you try and hit, because 60 looks really fast." "And interestingly, the difference between 60 miles an hour and 100 miles an hour when you film it, it's not much." "You can't really tell that much of a difference, but you can sure tell a Iot of difference between 50 miles an hour and 60 miles an hour." "So we tried to get the cars up to 60 wherever we could." "Of course what was very dangerous about this movie was just the locations we were shooting in, the environment." "You know, this wasn't a real racetrack, there were huge big, metal pillars," "Iumps of concrete, bits of rebar, it was very dangerous for the stunt drivers." "This is so nasty, paul." "Thank you." "I mean, this guy is just being totally crushed." "I do like constructing action scenes where it has several levels to it." "You think something's really cool and then something else happens, and then again something else happens." "And that's what I thought about, the spikes," "I think it's so great they come out of the ground and the car hits them." "I mean, it's really satisfying, but what's even more satisfying than that is when the spikes sink down and kind of chop the car up." "We wanted to make each section of the race have its particular character." "We were worried that if it was just driving, it wouId become repetitive, so we introduced these obstacles." "It also, I suppose, gives the whole experience a bit of a game feel." "Yeah, the idea of the symbols on the ground were definitely to make the race more interactive." "So it wasn't just going around a track, there's strategy involved." "Sometimes, in this race, the worst place to be is up in front because you're in somebody's gun sights." "But you have to be up in front if you're going to grab the symbols first." "So it added a whole layer of strategy to the race, which I felt was important." "And these were, obviously, inspired by power-ups from numerous video games." "Again, this is all real machine gun fire." "Those are real caItrops dropping out of the back of that car." "This is Grimm's car, this is all practical." "AII real." "There's no CG here at all." "AII real." "That was actually a mistake." "That car originally was supposed to spin about five feet into the air and hit the bottom of the sign." "But when you do things practical, unexpected things happen." "And the car ended up going about 30 feet in the air and hitting the top of the sign." "Made no sense whatsoever, because the car originally was supposed to just spin out of control and crash." "But we ended up with all this fantastic footage of it being 30 or 40 feet in the air, and then we, kind of, backtracked and I came up with the idea that it should be hit by a missile to motivate it flying up in the air like that." "So that was kind of a happy accident, bit of film that went wrong and then we ended up with something much more spectacular because of that." "We're streaming to 46 million viewers, ma'am." "Grimm getting splattered there, of course, is a visual effect." "Life is not so cheap in Canada that we could do that for real." "Offensive weapons are up." "It's on." "Now, this is a scene that, again, was cut out of the theatrical version." "It's a scene I Iike very much, we spent a Iot of time shooting it," "natalie was a real sport." "She would really lean out of the car, as you can see." "There's no green screen here." "I mean, she's really leaning out of that car, smashing away, trying to free up the jammed shell in the machine guns." "But when we cut the whole movie together, we felt a couple of things." "One, the race was very long." "This first race was about 12 minutes long in the movie." "With this scene in it, it was about 15 minutes and just seemed to go on a little too long." "Too much good stuff which can be seIf-defeating after a while." "And also there was an element which I just didn't really believe." "I just felt there's no way she could have been hanging out of that car for so long without getting her head blown off." "So painful though it was, we took it out of the movie." "And I don't think you miss it in the finished film, but I'm very glad to see it back here." "Thank you." "My pleasure." "Shield up ahead!" "That son of a bitch!" "He just stole a shield from Colt!" "Defence weapons are on." "Those guns on the side of Tyrese, Machine Gun Joe's Dodge Ram are actually from a helicopter." "Yeah, they're called VuIcan cannons." "They're usually mounted on black Hawk helicopter gunships." "And we had to get a special export licence for these two guns from the American military, because, obviously, they don't like the guns travelling out of the United States." "So it was a big deal to get those guns into Canada." "They shoot 6,000 rounds per minute." "Huge firepower." "And that just gives you a little indication, that shot there with all those shells tumbling." "Coach!" "The tombstone won't take much more of this." "Frank, Case, those 50 calibre shells will be through the tombstone in a matter of seconds." "My advice, either lose him or kill him." "Travis colt in his racing green Jaguar XJS." "My favourite car." "classic '80s car." "My father had one." "Without the machine guns, obviously." "Get on my lap." "What?" "Get on my lap." "One of the fun things about this sequence is, originally it was conceived to be done outside, because it was a car on fire, being T-boned, spinning 30 feet into the air." "There was no way that we could conceive that this could be done as an interior." "And then when we found this location, this train factory in montreal," "I reconceived the race sequence to be inside, 'cause I thought, again, these are some spectacular stunts that have never really been attempted in an interior space." "And I think they become even more spectacular when you see them inside." "well, it's more dangerous, I mean, you're closer to walls and girders and roofs." "That was all done for real." "Yeah, I mean, if you think about it..." "Yeah, that was all real." "If that was outside, you lose control of one of the cars, it's fine, you just kind of spin out." "You lose control of one of the cars in this kind of environment, you can hit one of those metal posts at 60 miles an hour, and that is not a happy result." "And again, just those cars coming through those doorways, they are travelling at speed, so again, the..." "really fantastic work from the stunt drivers here." "Where's he going?" "A shortcut." "Punch it." "We can beat him." "I Iove Pachenko's car." "I think it's one of my favourites in the movie." "It's a 1966 Riviera, and I had the idea to give it a chop roof, to lower the roof, which completely alters the lines of the car and gives it that very, kind of, menacing almost tank-Iike feel." "Grimm, Colt and Siad are gone." "Six remaining drivers alive." "Subscribe to Stage 2 now!" "I Iove the condition this car's in, it just had the hell kicked out of it." "But it's one of the interesting challenges of the movie is when you do a normal car movie, the car pretty much..." "Like a NASCAR movie like Days of Thunder or something like that, or The Fast and the Furious, the car looks the same throughout the race sequence." "What was interesting about this film, and I say interesting, but what I really mean is a huge amount of work, is every time a machine gun shot at one of these cars, it wouId do damage," "which meant continuity-wise the damage had to be reflected in the film." "And, of course, when you make a movie you shoot things out of continuity." "So some days you would be shooting a scene where the car had to be clean, then, in the next shot, because that was from a different scene, the car had to have so many bullet holes" "in the back, some in the front, some in the side." "Then you could do another shot where the damage had to be even greater, then you do a fourth shot and the damage had to be gone completely." "So it meant when we were designing the cars, we had to make each of these panels very modular." "So that we could lift off, for example, a back tombstone and put a new tombstone on." "Because at the start of a shooting day, we might want it clean and then by the end, we might want bullet holes all over the place." "And that was a huge challenge." "I mean, just to keep track of what the cars should be looking like, and to constantly take these panels off and on." "What can I do for you, Mr Ames?" "You sure are lucky a driver like me just happened to turn up..." "That scene between UIrich and Statham again is a scene that we took out for the original theatrical version of the movie." "I Iike it." "I think it's a good little character moment between them, but Jason was giving UIrich so much attitude," "I kind of felt that it undermined UIrich as a villain and as a credible threat to him." "So ultimately we took that out." "One of the challenges of the film is there are essentially three villains, actually four," "Joan alien's character, UIrich," "Pachenko, and also the Machine Gun Joe character is not a..." "initially anyway, he's not a heroic, good character." "And managing and maintaining the balance between them all was quite difficult." "Yeah, 'cause in a traditional movie structure, you have kind of like..." "You have the ultimate villain who tends to be the brains of the operation," "like alan Rickman in Die Hard." "And then you have the muscle, who's kind of like the enforcer character." "But to have like four viIIainous roles in a movie," "like Jeremy said, it was a bit of a struggle to make them all work." "And all be a credible threat to Jason 'cause Jason is such a strong actor as well and such a strong physical presence." "And we found with UIrich in particular, the head guard, sometimes less was more." "You know, he was a very..." "He looked very cool." "I really liked his look a Iot, and sometimes if he said too much, it undermined his threat." "So he ended up..." "I think he's a very good force in the movie, but he's a little more silent in the movie than was originally intended." "I wonder what he'll say when I ask him why he did it." "Why don't you look in a mirror?" "Ask him." "Poor Piper. lt must be hard growing up with that knowledge." "That your father killed your mother." "That's great, gun pointed right at his groin." "You wanted a monster." "Well, you've got one." "The American flag again." "Sort of reminds me of Shawshank, some of this imagery." "well, the prison probably dates from roughly the same period as that prison." "although, that was a red brick prison," "I think they were constructed at roughly the same time." "Yeah." "It's the interesting thing about prisons is really, they perfected locking men away about 200 years ago, and the technology really hasn't changed at all." "And there are plenty of old prisons like this that are still in use." "The simple fact is, the world's changed since I've been in here." "Don't know it." "Don't much want to." "But this?" "This I know." "The movie has a very de-saturated feel to it, and that's partly in the digital grade that we did in postproduction." "But mainly it's something that was kind of suggested to me just by the locations." "We were shooting in a Iot of locations that had been kind of abandoned, and the paint work had been fading for a Iong time." "So it was a very muted colour palette that we were working with in the principal photography." "And then I just took that a little bit further in postproduction." "So really the only colourful things in the movie are, you know, the end of the movie, obviously, in Mexico, which is a completely different feel." "But also in the body of the movie, it tends to just be like the red splash of the blood, the red stripe on the Monster, on Jason's outfit, and that was a very deliberate choice" "was to keep those primary colours to a minimum, and really only have punchy colour every so often." "Her name was Suzy." "Which feeds into your general idea of keeping the film as real as possible, and underlining that wherever you could." "She didn't." "Yeah, I didn't want to impose a kind of a stylised look on the film." "That's what I said to all the heads of department is," "I want the movie to look stylish but I don't want it to look styIised." "I don't want it to look like we're trying too hard, and I don't want the filmmaking to get in the way of the audience experience." "Sometimes you watch a movie, it's like the filmmaker is being right in your face." "It's like, "Look at me, I'm clever, look at this clever camera move." ""Look at how stylish this is. "" "And, you know, I obviously like styIish-Iooking movies, but I wanted it to be stylish without being styIised, without the filmmaking being too obvious." "This is one of our few visual effects, 'cause obviously, Tyrese didn't slice into his own cheek." "Much though he is a committed actor." "There is a limit." "Yes, exactly." "understandably so." ""Thou shalt not..."" "I got this idea of him scarring himself from looking at Iot of keloid scars that are very popular amongst certain African warrior tribes, where the keloid scarring is deliberately done to show your position within the tribe and how great a warrior you are." "And, you know, I felt that, that was kind of a good look for Tyrese." "You know, originally, he marked the kills on the side of his car," "like a First world War fighter pilot or a Second world War fighter pilot." "And then I thought, how much cooler if he actually marks them on his own flesh." "Maybe you're right." "I will take that break after all." "Good call." "It was freezing cold this night, as you can probably tell from the breath coming out of everyone's mouths." "And this was a fantastic location, the auto shop, but because of all the glass, we really had to..." "normally a scene like this, which is all set at night, you'd shoot in the middle of the day and you'd just black out the windows." "There were so many windows here that wasn't possible." "So we ended up having to shoot this fight scene all the way through the night." "So, a Iot of this..." "This is tough physical stuff." "Jason's having to do it at 3.:00, 4.:00 in the morning." "Looking for me?" "And again, he wanted reality, as I did." "So that's a real chain wrapped around his neck." "His neck by the end of this scene, it took us two nights to film this fight," "Jason's neck just looked like hamburger." "It was really red raw, 'cause that chain had been dragged around his neck so much." "We really wanted to make the fight as real as possible, particularly as Jason has done the more martial arts-based fights in Transporter." "And for me this, more than any other scene, has that charles Bronson" "feel, that streetfighter sense to it." "Yeah, absolutely." "well, I mean..." "Jason's perfect for a remake of Hard Times." "That's nice because that's an unexpected beat." "I mean, I think you sense there's gonna be a fight, you don't expect the Lists character to come in and help save Jason in that way." "Wow." "You know what?" "That..." "The head in the vise, I Iove that." "To give away a few filmmaking secrets," "I mean, a Iot of this set is just made out of rubber." "Those shelves that just went down is very, very thin metal." "The vise was rubber, that metal box is rubber, as are all the metal pipes inside of it." "Again, very kind of thin metallic shelves that he smashed into here." "The giant spanner that" "Pachenko holds is rubber." "Yeah, the big wrench." "And that's not to say..." "I mean, if someone swings at you with a rubber wrench and hits you in the head, it's gonna hurt, but it's not gonna send you to hospital." "Ulrich too." "Again, this is something that was taken away in the theatrical cut." "It's kind of interesting to see it back here, but I felt it was kind of gliding the lily a little bit too much." "I thought kind of Pachenko's admission was enough." "And thus having a flashback like this took you out of the movie, and took you out of the intensity of Jason wanting to kill this man." "But we thought, what the hey, you've probably seen the movie already in the theatres, give you the option to see the stuff we took out as well." "Let's save that for the track, huh?" "Again, one of the few visual effects shots in the movie." "The island didn't exist." "The prison section, though, this is all real." "So what we did was, we did a helicopter shot over the prison so you can see the prison courtyard, the star shape of the prison buildings." "But in the original photography, all you see are green fields around and some cows grazing." "And then, as the visual effect, what we did was took away all the green fields, replaced it with digital water, and then the rest of the island as well is digital." "And those shots..." "I always knew those shots would be a challenge because so much of the movie is practical." "I think if you're watching a movie and there's a Iot of CG in it, you just get used to it, you take it for granted because it's part of the visual language of the film." "If, however, everything is practical and then suddenly 30 minutes in, you see a big CG shot, it tends to stick out like a sore thumb." "So those island shots we really worked hard to make them as photo real as possible." "So the visual effects company, Mr X, who's run by a very good friend of ours, Dennis Berardi, they were working on those island shots even before we started principle photography." "So those are very much the product of like a year's worth of work." "I just got to comment on those back puII-ups Jason just did, anybody who works out will know they're phenomenally difficult and painful." "And he really did that, and paul must have done seven or eight takes." "Yes." "So he probably did 80, 90" "back puII-ups in that one session." "Yeah." "AII for real." "Yeah, I mean, Jason was so disciplined during this film." "I mean, it's very much his movie." "He's in virtually every scene." "So, he would be on set every single day." "You know, when you are an actor, the crew call is usually like 7.:00 in the morning, but the actors have to be there at 5.:30 or 6.:00," "so they can go into makeup beforehand." "But with him, he'd want to work out for an hour." "So he wasn't turning up at the set at 5.:30, he was turning up at the gym at 4.:30 or even 4.:00." "So the guy worked phenomenally hard." "Very disciplined, very disciplined in what he ate as well, so he could stay in shape." "And towards the end of the movie, he came up to me and said, "paul, I just can't wait to eat cake and drink beer. "" "And I'm sure he has done that since then." "He earned it." "also, the tattoos that you see on Jason, we were very careful in our research to get real prison tattoos." "And Jason really paid attention to that." "And that took a Iot of time to put them on." "Yeah, every time you see him with his top off, all those tattoos are really the product of two-and-a half, three hours in the makeup chair." "Did you kill the old Frank?" "What?" "Tunnel comes up fast." "Remember what happened to the napalm canister?" "This is where she remembers what happened to the napalm." "actually, these interior spaces are a real blessing to an action film maker as well, because when you shoot a car chase sequence, one of the hard things that you're trying to convey is the sense of speed." "And if you're in the outdoors, and you have no terms of reference, it's hard to convey speed." "It's like when you're driving in the desert, if you don't have buildings rushing past you, you're just out in the desert, you could easily be driving at 90, 100 miles an hour," "and not realise it." "You know, you think you're doing 50 or 60." "What was great about all of these interior spaces, and some of the exterior spaces as well, was all the uprights, all the steel girders that I couId have the..." "The action vehicle on one side of the steel girders and the tracking vehicle on another, so that the foreground has the steel girders going past, and they did a Iot to enhance the sense of speed." "Yeah, I mean..." "But I can't praise our stunt team enough." "Jack gill, Andy gill who is the stunt coordinator, very brave guys." "Yeah, and Jack gill, who was driving the hero car most of the time." "I mean, in a way, this movie is a throwback to the 1970s, and movies that we loved, Iike Bullitt and The French Connection." "You know, movies from the '80s like waiter hills' The Driver." "You know, back in those days when there was no CG, if you wanted a spectacular action sequence, it was up to a stunt man strapping himself into a car and doing something spectacularly dangerous, and that's what we asked of these guys and they really, really delivered." "You know, we would have..." "For exampIe we built five Mustangs and regularly, at the end of a shooting day, four of the Mustangs, and sometimes all five of them, would be in the auto shop being worked on all night," "because we would have destroyed or haIf-destroyed five cars." "Yeah, something like that, where you just slam a car into metal girders." "You know, it's very unpredictable, you can burst tyres the cars can go out of control." "There was actually a Iot of spectacular stuff that happened that never made it into the movie, because continuity-wise, it didn't make sense." "But quite often, we'd be shooting a stunt like that and the Mustang would just spin out of control and smash into something." "So there was a Iot of spectacular stuff left on the cutting room floor." "Again, this is all real machine gun fire." "We went through a phenomenal amount of ammunition." "I think the good folks in montreal thought the Third world War had broken out a Iot of times when we started shooting these battle scenes." "He's too heavily armoured!" "If anyone's interested to go back and look at our first movie, distributed by Roger Corman, it's called Shopping, available on DVD." "You'II see this same action sequence, but done very, very cheaply." "We did it with a van full of policemen and an old BMW, and we shot it in about three hours." "It's nowhere near as spectacular as this, obviously, but it's kind of the beginnings of the thought process that led up to..." "That sequence." "Yeah, to this sequence." "There's also a similar scene where we had natalie standing up in the car and throwing the cigarette lighter out that ignited the napalm in the race before this." "We did a similar kind of thing, where Sadie Frost stood up in the back of the BMW and started throwing cassette tapes at some pursuing police cars." "You know, kind of similar framing, similar ideas, but executed with a Iot more vigour in this movie." "I Iove the sound effects in this scene when his hands are crunching on that glass." "Yeah." "If you look closely though, you can see it's all plastic and rubber." "Very tough montreal stunt guy there." "I was in discussion with our stunt coordinator, Andy gill, about how to achieve that." "You know, to be able to hit a man with a car door, with a speeding car door." "'Cause I was imagining we'd have to have some rigs, maybe we'd have to do some visual effect." "And he said, "No, paul, it's quite simple." "We'II just hit someone with a car door. "" "And that's what he did." "We did pad the car door with rubber, just to make it a little less impactful." "But basically that's just a man getting slammed by a car door and spinning through the air as a result." "He had to do it about five or six times." "Okay. I see him. I need guns." "Yes." "Sword coming up in 50 yards." "What happened?" "l don't know." "Somebody must have grabbed it." "Roger Corman's movie was a very funny movie." "I mean, it was a very overt satire, which we're not, obviously, but we wanted to maintain as much humour as possible." "'Cause although this can be quite a brutal film, it's also a fun film." "And that was particularly fun." "Yes." "And the way that was achieved was, that was a dummy that was kicked out of the car and hit the metal post, and then it had a small amount of CG enhancement." "The spray of blood, a little bit of movement on the face." "What's great is, immediately, the new navigator does not want to be in the car." "He'd rather be anywhere else than in that car." "Yeah, that usually gets a very good laugh." "Release the Dreadnought." "And here she is, the Dreadnought." "Coach?" "A big inspiration for this was clearly The Road Warrior, and the final scene where you have the oil tanker." "And we wanted to take that to the next level." "And The Road Warrior was a big influence for us, but I think that's only fair because" "George miller, who directed The Road Warrior, has frequently admitted that Death Race was a big influence for him." "So in many ways, everything's come full circle." "Everything goes back to Roger Corman." "It does." "So Dreadnought, what does that actually mean, paul?" "Dreadnought was originally a term for an ironclad warship." "Back in days when all warships were made of wood, when they started having ironcIads, they were called Dreadnoughts, because they were assumed to be indestructible." "And that was the kind of feeling that I wanted for this." "It's kind of like a huge, big warship but moves on the land." "We also just, again, wanted this section of the race to have something new and unexpected." "And it underlines the extent of Joan alien's villainy." "I mean, this is not a race with fair rules at all." "No, it's a race that's manipulated for ratings." "You sure about that?" "Which is why seeing Machine Gun Joe and Jensen outsmart her is fantastic." "I really like her grey suits, it's very hillary clinton." "Where the hell is that thing going?" "This is so bad, what we're about to do, paul." "This is like Ben-Hur, this is uber Ben-Hur." "The wheels..." "Yeah, well this is..." "You know, that was another big influence to us, was Ben-Hur, and the whole idea of the Circus Maximus as well." "You know, the Circus Maximus was the colosseum, but a bit large, where they would have all the chariot races in ancient Rome." "And there's a great scene in Ben-Hur where they have these spikes on the wheels of the chariots, and that was a big influence for this." "Again, there's no model work there, that shot you saw of the Porsche being dragged behind the Dreadnought, that's all done full scale, for real." "Fuck me." "This reminds me of what we did to colin salmon in the glass corridor" "in Resident Evil I, that moment..." "Yes." "...when he goes, "Shit, " just before he gets diced." "Lists." "Receiving." "I want you to patch me through to another car." "On it." "We really tried to kind of keep the stuff in the pits as kinetic as possible, in the way that we shot them." "So that the interior of the car, and the action sequences, and the pits would kind of seamlessly fit together." "So even when we're shooting in the pits, we have handheld camera." "Quite often it's got a very skinny shutter, even though it's just dialogue, we're trying to keep it as exciting as possible." "And this stunt coming up is truly spectacular." "We only built one Dreadnought, so this was very much a one-shot deal." "You know, we could only shoot it the once." "And thank goodness it turned out to be as spectacular as it was." "Now, this whole thing is for real." "well, it's all for real, apart from the little men flying off the top." "They're a digital effect, for obvious reasons." "Now that you can see this on DVD," "I recommend going back and pausing on that shot where the Dreadnought hits the ground, and that guy in the tank turret gets squished." "'Cause you can see a big spray of blood going straight up from the underside of the turret." "We had lots of discussions about that stunt, whether we should build a miniature, we actually thought of doing it fully CG, but I'm so glad we did it for real." "Damn it!" "Yeah, there's so much detail in that shot that it wouId have been very hard to create that as a visual effect." "specially in daylight." "Yeah, in broad daylight where, you know, the CG tends not to hold up so well." "Is this one of these scenes, paul, which you'd say sort of echoes Rollerball?" "When he's walking down there." "The, "Jonathan!" "Jonathan!"" "Yeah, the original Rollerball." ""Frankenstein!" "Frankenstein!"" "well, I might say that the original Rollerball perhaps echoed the original Death Race." "You might be right." "It's a scene, I mean, that chanting of Frankenstein is taken from the original movie." "You look lost, pal." "Not this time." "I got this feeling that you and Frank are close." "Real close." "That weird accent." "You even kind of sound alike." "AII the costumes here are all prison issue gear." "In terms of the money we spent on the costumes for this movie, it's probably the cheapest aspect of the film." "Cheapest costume budget of any movie we've made because we just ordered it all from a prison supplier." "And, of course, as you can imagine, prison wear is not that expensive." "And also the race gear that all of the drivers wear, although they are allowed to, kind of, wear different stuff for the race, the day of the race, they don't have to wear standard prison issue stuff," "we said to our costume designer, Gregory Mah, you have to make these costumes, the race costumes, from prison wear 'cause that's all they're gonna be given access to." "So they can dye it, they can cut it up." "They can sew bits and pieces together, but everything has to be made from something that's standard prison issue." "And I think that adds to the believability of it all as well." "You want me to kill Frankenstein?" "Don't be stupid." "Frankenstein can't die." "After all, he's just a mask." "This is a sequence that I call paul's commercial for building a bomb." "The instructional video." "Yeah." "I couldn't believe how long we were spending on shooting this," "I mean, I now see why." "It still feels a bit like a commercial." "This is the Caesar moment." "Joan alien addressing her inmates." "I mean, it's very much a Roman-Greek gladiator feel to this film." "well, she is kind of like the evil Caesar." "Yeah." "Of course, I mean, the whole idea of prisoners fighting for their freedom does go back to Roman times, and goes back to the gladiators." "...and were too dangerous to live with the rest of us." "What is this shit, man?" "And the idea also of a society that's in collapse focusing upon these kind of bloody confrontations." "In our version, everyone's watching it on the Internet while the American economy collapses." "In Rome, everyone was going to the Circus Maximus, which would hold a third of the population of Rome at any one time." "So literally, a third of the population could be in the Circus Maximus watching chariot races while the Roman economy collapsed." "And the empire declined and fell." "And the people in the races were slaves or prisoners, 'cause it's okay to see them kill each other." "Same idea here." "And it draws inspiration from your courage." "No one is ever gonna win five races." "So race well..." "Nobody is ever getting out of here." "This was a tough day, paul." "You remember all that rain?" "Yeah, all these cIose-ups on Statham and McShane, they are very intense but also very necessary." "It was raining so hard we had to erect like a big tent over the top of them." "But the whole place was flooding," "Jason was wearing rubber boots, 'cause he was standing in a huge lake of water." "It was a very, very tough day." "You can burn me." "You can shoot me." "But you can't motherfucking..." "There." "Nice bit of set dressing, paul, the little dancing girl on the top of the monitor." "well, I put that there because I thought it was important, when you come back and you see the frozen screen a little later, so you see what they were looking at." "So you understand where the idea of escaping through that billboard came from." "That you kind of recognise..." "You immediately recall this moment." "So I thought the more distinct I can make that video recorder and television, the better." "So that's where all those things..." "That was right before we shot it, I just grabbed a bunch of stuff from the prop department, and stuck them on that." "Oh, this is not good." "As much as possible, all of these prison guards that you see standing around were actual real prison guards." "So they would have the real kind of attitude and swagger of the real people and add to the reality of the situation." "And it also gave the actors someone to talk to, as well, you know." "The more they could be immersed in the reality of being in a prison environment, the more people they could talk to, who really worked in prisons, the better." "I've already won three races." "I Iove that word terminal." "I just think it's so graphic." "I Iove it on the back of all of the jackets." "And terminal island was actually inspired by the real terminal island, which is off the coast of california, it's off Long Beach Harbour." "And it actually, terminal island actually has a prison on it and it used to be also a naval Air Force base." "And when that was decommissioned, they used to do drag races on the abandoned runway." "And that was where I really got the idea of a prison and a racetrack on an island from." "Hey." "Thinking you and Frank should have a little talk." "It's very..." "almost like Turner, that shot." "Like an oil painting." "Seven men dead." "Siad..." "well, I think, you know, what I Iike about kind of big industrial decay like this, is it does have a beauty to it." "At least I think so." "But then, you did grow up in the northeast of england." "Yeah." "If you didn't find beauty in industrial decay, there'd be no beauty." "Good point." "It's mano y mano, and there will be no mercy." "Here I Iove these roadways, 'cause again there's no CG set extensions." "It's all just, we found a big location and we shot it for real." "You know, this long roadway was really something we created." "When Jeremy and I scouted this location to start with, this was just a gap between two of the big train buildings." "And there was a little bit of a roadway but then there were also a Iot of small metal huts." "There was a Iot of grass." "There was some big heaps of kind of earth and everything." "So we kind of had it all flattened." "We had all the huts knocked down." "We had the earth flattened out." "We put a Iot of gravel and lot of blacktop down to create our roadway." "There were definitely times while making this movie that I felt more like an industrial engineer than a film director." "Because in between having to create all the roadways and create all the cars, and everything be for real, we also had to build a Iot of the rigs that would kind of spin and twist the cars in the way we wanted them," "to make sure they would spin through the air in the right way." "So I spent a Iot of time talking about weight ratios and Ioad-bearing structures." "But if you do win, I want you to think about staying here." "As Frankenstein." "With me." "It's a great scene, this, I mean, she actually believes that he might consider what she is proposing, to stay with him, to stay with her." "Pretty evil." "Yeah." "She's kind of like Lady Macbeth, almost." "The thing is, are you really the best future she could possibly have?" "Are you really daddy material?" "Or deep down, are you something else?" "If you decided that out there on that track is where you belong, it would be the most unselfish act of love I've ever seen." "There's almost a slight erotic tension between them." "I mean, was that something you even thought about particularly before?" "Yeah, definitely." "I mean, if you make a prison movie," "I think it's always charged with that sexual tension, especially when you put a woman in that environment." "Right." "And then, also, you know, there's the whole undercurrent of kind of homo-eroticism, as well," "that kind of comes with prison movies." "Yeah." "There's definitely eroticism around natalie." "well, that's not typical of prison films, I guess." "unless it's Caged Heat." "Another Roger Corman classic." "Perhaps we should consider remaking that." "What's this?" "Small modification." "So Hennessey tells me if you're going to win, I'm supposed to stop you." "Oh, yeah?" "Yeah." "Sounds like the odds are stacked against us." "Then do what you do best." "Drive." "Gentlemen, this should be interesting." "It's nice editing from Niven Howie here, who has cut a couple of films for us." "recently, Resident Evil 3." "Yeah, we did Resident Evil:" "Extinction together, and then Niven came straight on to this." "I think on average, and this is not to boast but just on average," "I think there is an edit every second in this film." "That does sound quite boastfuI, though." "It's not, listen, I didn't cut it, Niven, it's all down to him." "Damn it!" "Shit." "Lit shield up ahead!" "Damn it!" "What happened?" "Hennessey must have deactivated it." "Bitch!" "She's so pleased with herself." "It's all about to change." "Light me up." "What is with you and cigarettes, paul?" "I mean, cigarettes in this movie, even in Event Horizon, we had cigarettes in space." "I mean, you don't even smoke." "well, you can't make a prison movie and not have cigarettes," "I mean, they're such a part of the fabric of kind of prison life." "That's the currency, I guess." "Coach, we gotta get the firepower." "Nothing lit for a half lap." "We won't last that long!" "So pleased with himself." "This was a tough location, because at night we had to stop filming at midnight, because of the sound, the local residents." "although it was a rundown industrial silo, there are actually very expensive condos around." "well, also you're right by the water and sound travels across the water." "I mean, we would..." "You would be able to hear these gun battles from like 10 miles away, in montreal." "The other side of montreal could hear when we started shooting these machine guns, and also, these machine guns, they are very loud." "You know, the concussive force of these things are phenomenal when you stand very close to them." "Yeah, charlie taylor, our armourer, who again we used on a number of films, brilliant gun guy from Toronto, just did an awesome job getting this hardware together." "He did Resident Evil 2 and 3 for us." "Shit." "Lit shield in quarter lap." "Do you hear that?" "Lit shield in the quarter lap." "He's coming up fast." "Let them get the shield." "Keep the viewers interested." "Son of a bitch!" "He got the shield!" "Arm the explosive." "I Iove the production design inside Hennessey's control room." "AII the peeling paint work coming off the walls and the ceilings." "I mean, that's all real, I mean, that's very hard to art direct." "You know, that kind of crumbling paint work feel, I mean it's..." "Even if you pay a fortune for it, you can never really get it to look right." "And that was what was so great about these locations is having that kind of depth and texture already existing." "Yeah, paul Austerberry was very good at building on what was already there." "Yeah, although we did build some sets for this movie," "I mean, primarily it is a 90% location picture." "'Cause even when we did build things, Iike the control room, we were building on location." "And that was kind of refreshing for us, cause a Iot of our movies tend to be very set-heavy, you know like the Resident Evil films or Event Horizon, which is all shot on set." "They're headed for the bridge." "Their weapons." "Hit the kill switches." "This has to be one of my favourite filming moments ever, was hearing Joan alien swear like this." "And then especially in the scene coming up." "The "Okay, cocksucker, fuck with me and we'II see who shits on the sidewalk. "" "The very first take of that was completely unusable." "And not anything to do with Joan alien, because her performance as always is fantastic from take one onwards, but the camera crew were so shocked, to hear her swear, 'cause she is a very weII-spoken woman in real life," "that you could see the shots all going out of focus." "'Cause the focus puller stopped paying attention." "They were just so stunned that these words were coming out of her mouth with such conviction." "Somebody's mad right now." "Nobody fucks with my car." "When Joan started working with us, her agent sent her a Iarge basket of flowers, which agents normally do when actors start working on a movie." "And normally they send a little card that says "Good luck with the film, Joan. "" "You know, "Love, your agents. "" "She got the usual basket of flowers but when she opened the card it said," ""Okay, cocksucker, fuck with me and we'II see who shits on the sidewalk. "" "Yeah, her agent really..." "I think that was the main reason he wanted her to do the film." "Was to hear her say that." "Just want to know who I'm riding with." "Jensen Ames." "Like..." "Like the car." "Like the car." "Well, Jensen Ames, I hope you got a plan, 'cause it's not like we're going to get very far." "You're right." "We won't." "And that was a Iot of dialogue there that was deleted from the theatrical version of the movie." "You know, we thought it was a nice moment, but ultimately, you know, when you're building towards the climax of a film, it felt like that extra 25 seconds of dialogue was a little redundant," "and kind of took away from the dramatic build, that the movie, and the head of steam that the movie was establishing." "So for the theatrical version, we took that out." "Very nice modification." "AII that car crashing on the bridge, for real." "In fact, that shot where the gas tank tumbIes towards the police cars, again that was a real gas tank and that, I think, was the Iast shot I shot on the movie." "And you can kind of see the sky was starting to get quite blue in the background, dawn was coming up, and we were racing against the sun." "Choppers have a visual, ma'am." "Great helicopter pilot, Fred North, going closer than he probably should, which we really appreciate." "Yeah, when you do those kinds of aerial shots, you know, the helicopter pilot is very much..." "He is like the camera man, you know, cause the helicopter is..." "The helicopter and the camera have to move in unison to get you the shot you want." "So Fred, that's why we were so insistent on getting him, 'cause I think he is probably the best guy working in the industry right now." "And he would get the helicopter real low to the ground, I mean it was phenomenal." "You know, he would literally be skimming the ground very low." "You know, he was originally from montreal, Fred, although he lives in L.A." "And his wife would run the situation on the ground." "Very strong team." "Very expensive as well." "Worth every penny." "Of course." "Or every cent." "So now they've escaped back to the mainland and they're in kind of an industrial area, which you probably, hopefully you can't see it, but this is actually exactly the same place where we started the movie." "This is the steelworks where" "Jason is kind of queuing up..." "Right, was to get his money and the riot is all in that area right there that the helicopters have just flown over." "We were going to shoot it in a different location, but ultimately I saw this one at night and I thought, "You know what," ""this is a better location" ""and no one's ever going to realise that it's the same place. "" "Fantastic wall of flame there." "This is really iconic." "They've stopped him, ma'am." "This was so difficult, this poor stunt woman." "When I was shooting this, the downdraught from the helicopters was so great, she was in constant danger of being blown off the top of that car." "Keep your hands where we can see them." "You are under arrest!" "I repeat, keep your hands where we can see them!" "You are under arrest!" "Hey, Igor." "Merry Christmas." "You can see in that shot she's struggling to kind of stay on the top of the car, there." "I Iove that steaming river of effluent or whatever it was." "It was really unpIeasant-Iooking," "I was very happy to see it when I turned up on location that night." "'Cause during the day, that steaming didn't occur." "It was only kind of in the middle of the night when the temperature dropped, that you saw all that steam." "Nice." "The fact you have duds like these might make someone question your..." "My taste?" "Yeah." "So to speak." "I don't know about you, but I'm headed to Miami." "This interior was shot on a..." "Back at the..." "Back at AIstom where we shot everything else, just a little set there, train interior." "It's a shame I didn't get to take care of that bitch Hennessey." "Yeah." "That is a shame." "We darkened the sky down considerably here cause it was actually dawn to get that shot." "Frankenstein has been retrieved." "And, ma'am, ratings are off the charts." "Gifts and congratulations are already coming in." "You win again." "Mr Ulrich, I always win." "Damn." "I love this game." "And that's originally where the movie ended, with that satellite dish tumbling towards the camera and..." "You know, there was, in an earlier version of the script, there was another ending where you'd show, kind of, Jason reunited with his child." "And after we finished shooting the movie, and we tested the film, the movie played great and we got huge applause at the end." "But the one thing that I think the audience were missing was a sense of resolution for Jason, and for Tyrese, and also for natalie's character." "So we kind of, we came up with this." "I mean it wasn't too dissimilar to what had been written in an earlier draft of the screenplay." "By this point, we were out of montreal, and we were editing the movie down in Los angeles." "So what we did was we shot all of this in The valley." "And it's all in a junkyard in The valley." "We dumped four tons of sand down, 'cause this all bIacktop in the original junkyard." "So we put the sand down to make it seem a little more kind of Mexican, a bit more dusty." "And then, small factoid, that car that natalie just drove up in is actually Vin diesel's car, from Fast and Furious, which will be out this coming summer, I believe." "I'm not sure that Vin knows that, actually, paul..." "well, he does now." "Yeah, we..." "We gave it a different paintjob there so it doesn't look quite the same." "We had the same picture car coordinator that does the Fast and Furious films, Dennis McCarthy, who is a brilliant car guy." "What took you so long?" "Had trouble getting my release papers approved." "natalie looking very happy, although, actually, on the day, she wasn't so happy because she was actually on holiday in Hawaii and we had to bring her back, to come shoot in a scrap metal yard." "She has beautiful eyes." "They're her mother's." "Jason's little baby." "As always, when you shoot these kind of scenes, that little girl is actually an identical twin." "'Cause you can only really have a child..." "You can only work a child for an hour." "So to kind of double the time you have, you have identical twins so you get two hours' worth of work out of the two kids." "And you tend to just put whichever one in camera, in front of the camera is kind of behaving the most." "But when you work with children, everything revolves around them, really." "And when it's nap time, it's nap time." "When you have a child, isn't that the case, paul, as you've just had one?" "Yes, yes, everything revolves around your child." "really, your biggest production is going on at home." "My greatest production." "Yeah." "certainly my best." "This is..." "This disclaimer is something we legally had to put at the end, but I Iove it, I think it's so funny." "Just think..." "Makes me laugh every time." "Just the thought that someone maybe will go and strap a heavy machine gun to the front of their car and start shooting away on the freeway." "Now, of course, follows the endless end credits, which none of you are going to watch on DVD or BIu-ray." "But I would recommend fast forwarding to the end, because there's a special little surprise there." "My favourite line of dialogue from the movie repeated one last time." "So Jeremy and I are no different to the rest of you, we're not going to sit and watch the credits either." "It's been a pleasure talking about Death Race, it's a movie that took 14 years to make." "It's a real labour of love for us." "We couldn't be more happy and more proud of the film, and I hope you really enjoyed it." "So that's Jeremy signing off." "And paul." "Goodbye." "Okay, cocksucker, fuck with me, and we'll see who shits on the sidewalk."