Over the years, I’ve had many wonderful opportunities to talk with several actors and filmmakers involved in the “Star Wars” saga, from the likes of Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Peter Mayhew, Anthony Daniels and Lawrence Kasdan from the classic trilogy, to Natalie Portman and Hayden Christensen from the prequel trilogy.
In a new piece for D23.com, I unearthed some of my favorite quotes from them regarding their experiences making the “Star Wars” films. Please check it out, and may The Force Be With You.
Acclaimed filmmaker Christopher McQuarrie has officially worked on four projects with actor-filmmaker Tom Cruise, from writing “Valkyrie” and “Edge of Tomorrow,” to directing the action superstar on “Jack Reacher.”
Yet no matter how convicted Cruise was on those projects, McQuarrie said there was something extra special watching Cruise come to life as Ethan Hunt in their latest collaboration, “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation,” and proving that the life of a legendary super-spy isn’t as perfect as you would expect.
“What was especially great in this one was Tom’s ability and his willingness to not only to have fun with himself, but with the character,” McQuarrie told me in a recent phone conversation. “It was fun to direct Tom in a scene where he was supposed to jump over the hood of a BMW. Your expectation is that it’s going to be this movie star hood-slide, but instead, he trips and takes a face-plant on the hood. That part was improvised. He said, ‘I got something, just roll the camera,’ and he did this great sight gag.”
New on Blu-ray and DVD on Tuesday (Paramount Home Media Distribution), Cruise again embodies Hunt, a rogue agent of the Impossible Mission Force (IMF) and bane of CIA honcho Hunley’s (Alec Baldwin) existence. Tired of the destruction Hunt continually leaves in his wake, Hunley finally manages to convince the government to absorb — and effectively, abolish — the IMF program. Apart from his past misgivings, Hunley is also fed up with Hunt’s obsession with the terrorist organization known as “The Syndicate” — a group that the CIA claims is a product of Hunt’s (Cruise) imagination.
However, a deadly encounter with The Syndicate’s head (Sean Harris) confirms Hunt’s suspicions that the group is indeed for real, and he needs to enlist the handful of his IMF colleagues (Simon Pegg, Jeremy Renner and Ving Rhames) to bring the group down. The situation is so desperate that Hunt is forced to take a leap of faith and trust Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), a Syndicate agent who for reasons unexplained, helps him escape torture and certain death at the hands of her employer.
“Rogue Nation,” like the previous “Mission: Impossible” installments, is chock-full of death-defying stunts, not the least of which Cruise’s heart-pounding scene as he clings to the outside of a cargo plane. Despite all of the planning that went into the scene, McQuarrie doesn’t deny that it’s the stuff nightmares are made of, especially for the guy directing the film.
“His falling off the plane was actually the least of my concerns,” McQuarrie said. “It was the debris on the runway and potential bird strikes that made me worry about him being torn off of the plane rather than falling. We realized as we got closer and closer to that stunt that there was really nothing we could do about it. You were really doing something that had never been done before, and you had to go with a ‘Let’s see what happens’ approach. It was pretty terrifying.”
The interesting thing about the shot is that the cat was let out of bag early about it. Not only was the sequence heavily featured in the film’s trailer and TV spots, it was depicted on the film’s theatrical poster. Because of that, McQuarrie used the scene very early in the film, and surprised many viewers in the process.
“We knew instinctively that it was the right thing to do to put the scene where we did,” said McQuarrie, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of “The Usual Suspects.” “If we built the whole movie about that shot and put it at the end, it simply wouldn’t be fresh or satisfying.”
Perhaps one of the freshest surprises to come out of “Rogue Nation” is Ferguson, a Swedish actress relatively new to the Hollywood film scene. McQuarrie, who will be back with Cruise for yet another “Mission: Impossible” film in 2017, said he hopes Ferguson will be a part of it.
“Since I had such a great experience working with Rebecca, I would love, love, love to work with her again,” McQuarrie enthused.
Then, the writer-director suddenly remembered how “Rogue Nation” effectively catapulted the actress to superstardom.
“Unfortunately, everybody else in the world loves her as much as I do now. I only hope she’s available,” the director added with a laugh. “I just hope she returns my calls.”
It’s a question that’s collectively weighing on the minds of its legions of fans, wondering whether the movie version of “The Hunger Games” will be faithful to author Suzanne Collins’ blockbuster source material.
If you take it from Jennifer Lawrence — and there’s absolutely no reason you shouldn’t — then there’s nothing to worry about. After all, Lawrence, who plays the movie’s heroine, Katniss Everdeen, is a huge “Hunger Games” book fan herself, having read the international best-seller even before she auditioned for the part.
“It’s one the hardest things to do, to try make a book into a movie. If you focus too much on trying to keep everything accurate to the book, you could say, ‘Yeah, everything is in there,’ but at the same time, it could end up being a bad movie,” Lawrence told me with a laugh in a recent interview. “Instead, you have to take a chance and change small things and focus on making a movie, and that’s what they had to do. They wrote a script and from that script, they made a movie and didn’t go back to the book.”
The main thing, Lawrence added, is that there are no fundamental differences between the two. The script — co-written by Collins and director Gary Ross — had to be condensed simply because it’s the nature of moviemaking.
“Some things are shorter than you’d expect, because we didn’t have room,” Lawrence said. “Otherwise you’d have a five-hour movie.”
Opening Friday in theaters nationwide, “The Hunger Games” is set largely in the evil Capitol of the nation of Panem, the future ruins of what was once known as North America. It’s there where each of the country’s 12 Districts annually sends a teenage boy and girl to compete in the Hunger Games: a nationally-televised event where the participants, known as Tributes, must fight each other to the death, until one survivor remains.
Representing District 12 in the games — a twisted form of punishment for a past uprising — are Katniss and Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), a baker’s son who has long-suppressed feelings for his fellow Tribute.
Of course, a lot of buzz over the movie’s faithfulness to the book has been generated online, and while Lawrence, 21, said that she cares about what the fans think about movie, she ultimately can’t let it influence how she does her job on screen.
“The online talk is the first thing that you’re aware of, and you definitely have to take that into account and respect it. But the talk also has to be the first thing you forget because your job is to make a movie just like you would any other movie,” Lawrence said. “From there, I have to use my instinct and go by what my director wants. When I’m on set, I can’t have everybody else’s voice in my head to the point where I can’t hear my own.”
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Rising star
Lawrence’s star has no doubt commanded Hollywood’s attention in the past few years, spurred by her Best Actress nomination in 2011 for her harrowing turn in the gritty drama “Winter’s Bone.” That was followed by a high-profile role as the blue-skinned mutant Mystique in the 2011 summer smash “X-Men: First Class.”
But before that, Lawrence got her big break from actor/Blue Collar Comedy Tour star Bill Engvall in the TBS comedy series “The Bill Engvall Show.” During the series run from 2007 to 2009, Lawrence played Lauren Pierson, one of the children of therapist Bill Pearson (Engvall).
“I could not be more proud of her if she was my own daughter,” Engvall told me in a direct message on Twitter. “I always knew she was destined for great things the first time I saw her act.”
During the filming of “The Hunger Games,” there was no question Lawrence’s fellow stars were convinced that Lawrence was destined to play Katniss.
“Working with Jennifer was unlike any experience I’ve had before as an actor — she is so in the moment,” Hutcherson told me in separate interview. “That’s the No. 1 thing I try to do when I’m filming, and when I looked into her eyes making ‘The Hunger Games,’ she was Katniss. She believed it through-and-through, and if she believed it, you believed it. It meant I believed I could be Peeta, also. Anytime you work with that level of an actor it really elevates your level of performance.”
Two of the younger stars of the film — Jacqueline Emerson (Foxface) and Isabelle Fuhrman (Clove) — told me they were worried about working with Lawrence at first because of her soaring level of stardom, but that changed quickly.
“I know I was personally nervous to meet her on set, because I was thinking, ‘Is she going to be one of these types of actresses who say, ‘You can’t talk to me before I film and get into the zone’ and I that I would annoy her,” laughed Emerson. “But she was so funny and put everyone at ease. She’s a great person.”
Fuhrman said Lawrence’s level of professionalism is something she strives toward.
“Jennifer would make all of us feel so comfortable in a scene no matter how serious it was,” Fuhrman said. “Just the way she could slip in and out of character was so admirable. I definitely learned a lot from her.”
A View To A Kill
While Lawrence played an Ozarks survivalist in “Winter’s Bone” — the role that she said tipped off filmmakers to cast her in “The Hunger Games” — she said the idea of being thrown into the competition where tributes have to kill another human in order to “win” has been a difficult one to wrap her head around.
“That’s just one of those things that, you can try to imagine it as hard as you can, but you can never fully grasp that feeling,” Lawrence said. “It didn’t affect me that much as an actress, but more as a human. It’s something you really don’t want to ever think about. You never know where it could happen or how you could do it. Nobody could ever describe that to you.”
Thankfully, since “The Hunger Games” is only a movie, the first and foremost thing Lawrence wants for fans is to be entertained by the spectacle of it all. She ultimately hopes, though, that the film will also affect them as a cautionary tale — much in the same way the book has to readers worldwide.
“It’s amazing how these characters are so beloved and it’s so widespread. It’s affecting so many people and it actually has substance,” Lawrence enthused.
“There is actually something you can learn from this. There’s actually a great message in there for our generation, our society and for our young people.”
Jon M. Chu has always been a resourceful filmmaker, dating back to his childhood when he shot mini-movies in his backyard with G.I. Joe action figures — experience that became particularly helpful when he made “G.I. Joe: Retaliation” a couple years back.
Fortunately, the “Jem and the Holograms” director also had sisters with “Jem” dolls, that yes, were featured in his movie mix. Talk about a guy with foresight.
“Since I was surrounded by sisters, we had a lot of ‘Jem’ dolls in the household. We had a giant bucket of toys and we would always fight over them,” Chu told me, laughing, in a phone conversation Thursday. “Jem was definitely included in the movies, out in the dirt with G.I. Joes. Those dolls got really, really dirty, but there was some glitter around, too.”
Opening in theaters nationwide on Friday, Chu’s feature film version of “Jem and the Holograms” — a live-action adaptation of the Hasbro animated TV series/toy line — stars Aubrey Peeples as Jerrica, a small-town California teen who in a month’s time is catapulted from an underground Internet video sensation to a global rock star.
Signed by a conniving music agent, Erica Raymond (Juliette Lewis), Jerrica, marketed as a mysterious girl named Jem, quickly gets caught up in the pitfalls of fame, and her sisters/fellow band mates Kimber (Stefanie Scott), Shana (Aurora Perrineau) and Aja (Hayley Kiyoko) become her biggest casualties on the way to the top.
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Clearly, Chu, 35, is not one to shy away from challenges, and his film resume validates that. He’s done everything from dance movies (“Step Up 2” and “Step Up 3D”), documentaries (“Justin Bieber: Never Say Never”) and of course, action adventure with “G.I. Joe: Retaliation.” Basically, he’s of the mind that any type of film genre is fair game.
“It’s so fun, but it’s also really scary,” Chu said. “By doing different types of films you learn about what you’re capable of doing and what you need to get better at, but I love that. I got into storytelling to be able to jump into different worlds and absorb myself in those worlds. When I did the ‘Step Up’ movies, I didn’t know a lot about dance — I had done some dance shooting but not in that world — so I absorbed myself in it and now people think I’m a dancer or a choreographer because of it.
“When I got into Justin Bieber’s film I didn’t know who Justin Bieber was but now I’m an expert,” Chu added with a laugh. “With ‘Jem,’ it was really fun to be able to take this beloved ’80s cartoon and try to translate it for a new generation 30 years later.”
Part of translation, Chu said, was to not throw viewers into the world of the plot of the animated series, but go back a bit further to examine how Jerrica was before “Jem and the Holograms” — and then introduce them to more familiar territory.
“In the ‘Jem and the Holograms’ cartoon there is a band called The Misfits that wants to destroy them, and not just in a band wanting to beat another band sort of way. They want to destroy them by trying to kill them,” Chu explained. “When you bring that to live-action, something like that just seems crazy and you just can’t throw that on an audience (new to the story). So we knew from the start, ‘Let’s get there. Let’s just take our time and build the story.”
To build it, Chu said, you have to start with a strong protagonist. “The No. 1 thing in a movie is that you have a great character that you can root for, cry for and celebrate with, so we changed our focus to make it less about ‘Jem and the Holograms’ and make this more about Jerrica,” Chu said. “We’re looking at the girl behind it, sort of like ‘Batman Begins’ to ‘Jem and the Holograms.’
“Once we changed the focus, it freed us of sticking to the stuff of the ’80s, and helped us look at who this girl is now, and how she would become famous now; how she lives her life and express her identity now. That’s allowed us to make a great story and follow a great character,” Chu added. “We slowly but surely infuse the crazy world of ‘Jem and the Holograms’ in the story, but as the story gets crazier and crazier, you still have a person at the foundation of it that is a girl that you relate with and you know.”
Of course, to bring that vision to life, Chu needed a capable perform to not only act the part of Jerrica, but sing the songs of Jem — and he feels extremely fortunate to have found that person with “Nashville” series star Peeples. “I hadn’t watched a lot of ‘Nashville’ before making the film, so when she walked into audition room, I just went, ‘Whoa,'” Chu said of the 21-year-old actress. “She has everything. She sings and is an amazing actress, and outside of that, she lives a real analog life. She drives a VW Bug that almost got towed the day she auditioned for us. She was everything you would want Jerrica to be in a natural, real way … whether she knew it or not, she had an analog style about her that works in a digital movie.”
Original Interviews, Reviews & More By Tim Lammers
