Since first getting Corman's blessings in 1996 to create his own version of Death Race 2000, director Paul W.S. Anderson has been working on updating the film to make it more modern and relevant. The final result is not a straight remake of Death Race, but a reimagining. Instead of the cross-country race, this Death Race is set inside the walls of a prison, and the prize is not just fame and glory but freedom.
Headlining the death race this time is Jason Statham, in the role of Jensen Ames, a former race-car driver who finds himself in the prison when he's falsely accused of murdering his wife. At the urging of the prison's steely warden, played by Joan Allen, Jensen agrees to don the mask of the race's most famous driver, Frankenstein (a holdover from the Corman verson). If he can win just one more race, he'll earn a full pardon and release from prison. Helping him along is the leader of his pit crew, an old-timer named Coach (Ian McShane).
SCI FI Weekly sat down with Statham, McShane, Allen and Anderson at this year's San Diego Comic-Con, where they talked about their experiences making Death Race. The film opens Aug 22.
Jason Statham, what drew you to Death RaceStatham: I like a lot of the car stuff. Basically, it's a car movie. That's what it is. It's not The Godfather. I mean, some of the deaths are just like gory and hilarious. I like the fact that death can be gruesome and funny. I think it's important not to take it too seriously. This is entertainment. Everyone who sees it seems to get their money's worth.
Have you seen the original film?
Statham: No. I haven't seen the original Death Race. Paul asked me not to see it until after the movie. He just didn't want anything that would interfere with his sort of idea of the film. He said we're not going to do a remake, it's just like an homage. So he said, if you can, try not to see it.
What was it like shooting those racing scenes?
Statham: They had many stock cars. Any action movie that involves cars, they have multiple copies of the same car, so when they get mangled and bashed, they just slip in the next one. And yeah, one of the most difficult things was the fact that they don't have a lot of vision. The cars are covered in armor, and there's very little vision that you can really draw any confidence from. So it's quite nerve-wracking not to know where you are and who's coming up and who's not coming up. And the track's just full of dangerous pylons and steel girders. And one mistake and it's over. So it was a massive concern for the stunt coordinator, just because of the danger that those kinds of things present. So yeah, we just had to sort of go and do the best we could.
How fast are you going when you're racing in the cars?
Statham: It's hard to say. I mean, the track's sort of made up of bits and pieces. We shot in different locations and made it look like it was one big track, but there was different locations to make up the different areas. We're not really going as fast as you might imagine. But it's pretty fast. I mean, depends what you call fast.
How well could you see out of the mask?
Statham: Not very well. That presented a big problem, yeah. So I didn't drive in that thing. ... They made different ones, with bigger eyepieces and various ones. It was all to do with the aesthetics. They couldn't give a s--t whether I could see or not, really.
It looked like you really got in shape for the role.
Statham: Oh, yeah. A lot. I was the leanest I've ever been. Paul wanted me to sort of change and get prison sort of fit, if you like. And I just had an idea of me being really skinny and ripped. And it's sometimes good to give yourself a little challenge anyway, to give yourself some discipline.
What did you enjoy most about making the film Death Race?
Statham: I just liked working with the people, and kicking around with Ian McShane and Joan Allen is not too much of a bad thing, is it? I just like the whole atmosphere that Paul brings to the set. It's very relaxing. And it's just a pleasure to go in and do some work. And you know, we're running around in souped-up, tuned-up cars. And I have a big thing for cars and always have.
Ian McShane, the audience at the screening really seemed to get into the film.McShane: Well, that's what it's meant to do. I mean, the film is a boy's wet dream. Whatever. With girl navigators and stuff. Somebody was trying to say there's a moral reason behind it. I was like, "Give me a break." You just sit there and—if it's your kind of movie—you sit there and have a good time. And that's it. Death Race is that kind of a movie.
Are you into cars as well?
McShane: I like cars. I've never been obsessed. I mean, I remember my first car was a Mini Cooper. It was 1963, so it was a great motor car. Yeah, I've had a Lotus sports car and a Rolls Royce and various other ones, and Mustangs. But it's never been an obsession with me. What do you do? I don't go to tracks at weekends.
Death Race has been described as Road Warrior meets Shawshank Redemption. Would you agree with that?
McShane: You could do, I guess. I mean, I think it's a big, big, big boys' adventure movie—which girls will like as well.
Does that make you the Morgan Freeman character?
McShane: Oh, I think they should have given me a big philosophical speech at the end. I would have enjoyed that. Or maybe we'd meet in Zihuatanejo.
Did you get jealous that Joan Allen got all the profanity in the film?
McShane: [Laughs.] No, it was what it was, as we said. I think that's kind of funny that somebody coming to see Death Race will hear Joan Allen saying those words, and not me. But it's not the character.
Joan Allen, how did you feel about the profanity?Allen: I practiced. It was the line that my agent and my lawyer kept teasing me about. Every time we'd be on the phone it'd be like, "Have you said that line yet? We're going to make a reel and it's going to be the first thing on your reel, that line."
What made you want to do Death Race?
Allen: It's so fun. I mean, as an actor you really hope that you can get a big variety, and it's hard. It's a money-driven business. It's more secure to hire actors that you know they can deliver this and they can deliver that. It's harder to take chances, understandably. And so I was in my beach cottage last summer and I got sent this script, and I was like, "OK." But I was sitting on the beach and I was just like, "Oh, I want to know what happens. Oh, I care about his guy." And the story just, I found myself saying, "Oh, this is a good story." I'm turning the page, I'm turning the page. ... And I love that it's a completely different genre. I love that I'm playing arguably the most evil woman on the planet. And I had a hoot every day at work. It was just fun.
Is it hard to find motivation for a character who is so all-out evil?
Allen: Not really. You just kind of think they live in just such a [different world]. Their reality is so different, the place where they're coming from. As Death Race sort of explains, prisons have turned into these corporations that are privately owned, and they're geared to make money, and she's a very high-powered sort of CEO in a lot of ways, I think of this person. And she's interested in the bottom line only, and so it's actually very fun to play somebody who's just completely evil.
Were you looking to do something outside of the usual roles you get offered?
Allen: What I tend to get sent are like the long-suffering mother, the dutiful wife with the husband that's left. I get a lot of those. And I've done a fair amount of those in really great movies, really good parts. But I feel that doesn't really interest me anymore. So my agent kind of knows, if I can say it's the mother or the wife, then chances are he doesn't even need to send me the script. I don't even need to read it. So when you get sent something that's a big action movie and it's actually good and the character's fun, you're pretty thrilled, actually. You're pretty happy to get it.
Do you have any favourite movies from this genre?
Allen: From this genre? Ooh, gosh. Road Warrior. I definitely remember Road Warrior. That made a big impact on me. And that, actually, when I read the script, it was like, if Death Race succeeds and is like Road Warrior, I will be beyond happier than I already am to be part of it.
Do you ever feel like you're getting lost in a movie like this, where it's so focused on cars and action and that sort of thing?
Allen: No. Never felt lost. I mean, really, it was like two movies being shot simultaneously, because the whole time we were shooting the acting parts, there was a whole second unit shooting the action sequences. So it was like two full-time movies going on simultaneously. Paul would go to [both], as much as he could. Like, sometimes we'd shoot acting scenes all day and then they'd be shooting car sequences all night. And he would go most of the night. So I don't know how he was able to withstand that. But he did. Because I knew from Paul, the way he talked about it, if you don't care about the characters and the relationships, if those don't really work, then the action stuff doesn't really pay off as much.
Paul W.S. Anderson, is it hard to find a fresh way to do the car scenes?Anderson: The pressure to come up with something original with cars is kind of immense. And also, we made the decision very early on to make a movie that was entirely practical. I didn't want any CG cars, I didn't want any CG environments. I wanted to kind of go back to the old school way of making car chases, which is, you build cars, they go really fast, you get the best stuntmen in the world at the wheel, you mash them together, and when the hit concrete blocks they hit concrete blocks and they spin through the air. So that's a much more difficult way to make a movie. I think it's a much more satisfying way, because it's much more visceral. What I'm trying to do is give the audience the kind of visceral thrill I had when I came out of The Road Warrior, because it was all real. When you saw the car mashed underneath that big truck, it was really getting mashed. And for me, that's much more satisfying than seeing two CG objects kind of crunch together. But it's a more difficult and time-consuming way to make a movie and requires a lot more planning.
What have been some of the challenges of filming those action scenes?
Anderson: It's difficult and it's dangerous. And it really is. You drive the cars at 60, 70 miles an hour, and you crash them into one another. It's unpredictable. I mean, we've ruined dozens and dozens of cars. Written them off. It's even more difficult because they're covered in heavy armor plating. So we've created real tanks, and when you drive tanks into one another at 70 miles an hour, it's even more dangerous than driving normal cars into one another. And you mix that with real machine-gun fire and it's like, it's not a race movie. It's kind of more a war movie, I would say.
Can you talk about the changes you made to the original?
Anderson: It's a reimagining of the original Death Race. It's not a straight remake. It keeps a lot of the original concepts intact. The masked racer is called Frankenstein, who appears to be indestructible but is not who he appears to be underneath the mask. Yeah, it's still got Machine Gun Joe. It's still a death race, you know, it's a race to the death where the drivers are allowed to kill one another and are encouraged to do so. And just like the original movie had a political message in the 1970s, this has, it's not a massively overt politically message, but it's about kind of reality television and the Internet run rampant.
Was Roger Corman involved in this, beyond giving you the rights?
Anderson: No, Roger's been very hands-off. We sent him the script for Death Race, he's always liked the drafts that we send him. But he hasn't been actively been involved in the development of the film.
Video games have always been a big influence on you, and that seems to continue in Death Race.
Anderson: Definitely, it has been influenced by that. But I think it's also an influence from Corman's original movie. The whole point system, for example, is that very video-game idea as well. So I guess it is a bit video-gamey, but I grew up with video games, so it's not surprising that's kind of had a big influence on me. Oliver Stone had Vietnam, I had PlayStation.
