INT: Geoffrey Sax

Director
Geoffrey Sax has had a great deal of experience with the BBC
including TIPPING THE VELVET, DOCTOR WHO and many others.
He had his first introduction to American audiences with
WHITE NOISE. But he is about
to give teenagers their own personal James Bond movie in ALEX
RIDER: OPERATION
STORMBREAKER depending on who you ask.

I
had a chance to meet up with Mr. Sax at The Four Seasons in

Beverly Hills

where he spoke about Mickey Rourke and eyeliner and finding the
actor to play Alex Rider. A
true Englishman, he is funny, charming and one helluva storyteller.

Geoffrey
Sax

How
did you find out about the [Alex Rider] series of books?

They’re
pretty well known at home, I mean, I think Anthony [Horowitz] wrote
the first one just a few years ago and they’ve become really
successful over there. He’s
on his seventh one now. They’re
very, very popular; they’re on the national curriculum for schools
there, in fact. I was
just aware of them, I mean; I’ve got two girls… younger girls…
I’m just aware of them.
It wasn’t really until I started talking to other parents
at school and they said, “Oh, no, we listen to them on tape in the
car and…” it was really quite extraordinary and they really are
popular. Every time you
go into a book shop you notice them, you go, “Oh, they really
are!” [Laughing]

Was
it really important for you to make this like a mini-James Bond
rather than be “silly” or the stunts be too “childish”…
was there a thin line that you were riding?

Well,
yes, I mean my feeling was that so many children now have access to
their parents DVD’s, from my own experience you suddenly go and
you think, well, what are you watching, and then they pinched them
and loaded them up. So
many kids see films – they’ve probably seen the Bond films and my
feeling was… that we should try and do something that was a bit
more grown up. And there
is that sort of thin dividing line with violence; I mean, we really
did want to get a PG [rating], obviously [we] want people to see it.
It was trying to find ways of making it stylish and plenty of
jeopardy without a load of outright violence.
I mean, some people have even said that, you know, have you
been too violent? I
don’t think we have.

How
did you find Alex [Pettyfer]?

Alex
was one of the first in [for the auditions] – I think the first
day actually. And we
thought, well, he’s absolutely perfect.
We’d seen him on TOM BROWN’S SCHOOLDAYS.
I liked him in Tom Brown.
So we then of course, did the usual thing of interviewing the
other four-hundred and ninety nine [Laughter], just to make sure we
got it right. Trying to
find somebody who is sort of comfortable in there own skin and
comfortable with their moves and looks natural and has acting
ability was a much taller order than I… I mean, I thought we would
have a choice of two or three dozen really good people.
But it’s very hard to find – they’re either wonderful
little actors but when you actually put them with the stunt team
they would look just idiotic or the other way around.
So, you know, you get some of these people coming in to all
that. And then you say,
“Can you just read something?” and then you kind of wished you
hadn’t. [Laughter]

Did
he [Alex Pettyfer] have a little bit of sports training or was he
already a bit athletic?

Yeah,
he’s a natural sort of athlete.
And I think that he really wanted this role so he’d gone
and done some extra sort of martial arts type things as well.
In fact, when we first saw him we were worried; one of the
concerns was that he may play slightly too old because the boy’s
meant to be fourteen and Anthony really wanted to keep him as
fourteen.

How
old is Alex?

Well,
Alex was fifteen when we shot the film and he’s sixteen now, but
because he developed such a physic he just looked older.
So we said, you know, if you want the part… stop training a
bit because he looked sort of like Charles Atlas [Laughter] you
know, I wish I had muscles like that.

I
noticed Donnie Yen is credited here are you a fan of his movies?
Is that why you hired him?

Well,
I’ll tell you what happened, there was that we had a meeting quite
early on with Harvey Weinstein and he said, ‘One of the things
that the kids in America love is martial arts.”
And he said, “You have to have the best you can get.”
And you know, we had great stunt teams and they did some
great stuff, but it is a different sort of discipline altogether.
So we went after Donnie and found that he could do it which
was great – it was great for me as well to watch because they work
in a very different way than we do.
You know, they do… like for example they say, well all I
need now is that bit.

Because
with us, what we tend to do is you’ll shoot the whole thing from
one angle and then you’ll bring the camera around and repeat it
and then you’ll go into bits and bobs.
There, he’ll do… that!
Cut! And then
you’ll do… that! Cut!
And you say, but that doesn’t go with that, and he’ll go
no, that’s move number thirteen, this is move number three.
And you think, God this isn’t going to work.
But it was fascinating and they just used the bits and
ultimately in a funny sort of way it’s quicker because you only
have to get that bit and then you can move on so you tend to do a
huge amount of set-ups. Whereas,
normally you’d probably do, I don’t know, you’d have it come
from every angle and there’s only one take of each bit that I can
use anyway so… But
it’s scary not overlapping because we overlap everything, I mean
if we picked a scene again, do we do it that way or we do it that
way… and they just, no overlaps.

Is
this the biggest action movie that you’ve directed?
Was it pretty daunting?

Well,
I always think that the hardest thing for any director is dialogue,
two people in a room. Because,
the thing is you’ve shot many scenes with two people in a room and
you’ve never shot that particular scene before and it’s the
dynamics and what are the actors going to bring so you can’t…
you have to be looser. With
a big action scene, frankly, I mean – the Albert Bridge for example,
we must have gone in there fifteen times.
We took the stunt teams with us, we took the designers, we
took the people who are going to build the bikes, [and] we took
everybody with us.

So
by the time we came to shoot it, I had it all storyboarded out and I
knew exactly how the day was going to go.
I mean, there’s always something comes up to bite you in
the butt; that happens. But
on the whole, you’ve planned it out.
So with the big action – Piccadilly, the first time it had
been done we closed it for four hours… I have friends of mine
saying, “God. I was
stuck in…” [Laughing],
it was backed up for miles but because it was the summer we got
there early and finished. But
because of that, we had to know exactly what shots that we had…
for example we had a camera vehicle with a camera already mounted.

When
I got there, they were already mounted because we talked about it…
So those scenes are kind of – they’re daunting when you
first read the script because you think… Oh, how can I do all
this? And then, when you
break it down then it becomes easy but it’s… I still think
it’s the acting because without a character you care about, it
doesn’t matter – that’s why I think SPIDERMAN was so popular,
because you loved that character and I thought it’s a great
character and amazing effects. Those
other expensive films, some of them, you just come out sort of
humming the stunts as it were. I’m
thinking I couldn’t care whether he lives or dies or falls off
or…

Now
obviously if it’s successful, they are going to try and do a
sequel. Are you worried
about Alex getting older too quickly?

The idea with
Alex is that he – the theory was that they change the boy on every
film. Now whether that will still happen – he’s meant to be
fourteen and stay fourteen and Alex is clearly already… the time
that the next film is prepped and made Alex is going to be headed
into seventeen isn’t he. I think that if he does prove popular
here then there will be the pressure for him to do another one, you
know I think that would great. I think he’s terrific.

What was the dynamic of having the writer on the set?

Well, the thing
is Anthony and I had a terrific collaboration together, I mean I
love writers and I think at home it’s very much a writer culture.
So, I have tremendous respect for writers and we work together, he
was only on the set – he wasn’t on the set everyday, he came
along and he was great, he said, “You know, I didn’t like to
say anything.”, I wish you would in a way because I’ve got no
problem with that, I know some directors are very nervous about that
and quite rightly too if the actors are saying, “Would my
character do this?” in a way, I’d rather the actors go and
badger the writer than talk to me when I’m filming. [Laughter]
I don’t know, I just want to film the scene. [Laughter] But
there was not problem with Anthony being there. You know, we
had dinner last night and we were saying let’s try and find
something else outside of the Alex Rider, just to develop and do
cause we did have so much fun.

Are you signed on for a sequel?

No. Again,
well I think the whole thing was they were sort of thinking of it
like a Bond sort of thing as a model. Whereas they’d have
different sort of voice for each film and I think everyone’s feeling
is wait and see how it does here [United States]. Because this
is really the market, I mean we can’t fool ourselves, I mean it’s
very nice if the film does well at home [England] but I’d be very
proud…

When did it open in England?

It opened in
July at Leicester Square. It was unbelievable. I’ve
never seen anything like it really, when he [Alex Pettyfer] got out
of the car – it was crazy, they’d been there six in the morning.
It was insane, he really is you know, just popular. But you
know what he’d done just before the premiere? Had his hair
cut, did you hear about this? He had the long hair and he… I
saw him, he was on TV the previous Saturday and I watched the thing
and I said Alex wasn’t on. And as I phoned Mark the producer
and I said, “Alex wasn’t on.” And he said, “Yes he
was, have you seen his hair?” And I went back and there
was kind of… Oh, my God. It was really short, seriously.
But it’s grown a bit now it’s getting back to how it was.

Could you talk a little about working with Mickey Rourke and
his character choices, such as the make-up?

Well, we talked
quite a lot about the character and he was very, very keen on doing
something that would [work] with a younger audience; he wanted to do
something that was really interesting. But on the set he did
kind of everything, he had the dark glasses… I mean he didn’t have
a limp and a parrot [Laughter] but it was a lot of “props”
going on and it was fine for the character and it was fun. I
think he enjoyed himself.

What about directing him?

He was fine, you
know, he was very, very good with young Alex because I think Alex
really looked up to him. And he was helping Alex on the set a
lot, he was asking him a lot of questions and sometimes if Alex was,
you know, during the dinner scene if Alex was to not look at him or
mumble and all, he’d “WHAT DID YOU SAY?” and it gave the
scene a terrific edge to it. Obviously we cut those bits out
of… it gave it more of an edginess I think. But he did it in
a very, you know he said to me, you know I’m really trying to help
him and – because, that’s why I say those scenes are harder cause
they’re the pure acting scenes. You know, if you’re putting
eight cameras on the thing and you’ve got a stunt team doing
explosions… you know, I don’t want to over simplify but it’s
easier to screw up a dialogue scene than it is a stunt scene… in
my mind.

What about Mickey’s make-up… the eyeliner?

That was
Mickey’s idea… [Laughter] Which
was fine. [Laughter]

What about the Missi Pyle character?

Again, it was a
surprise to me; we talked about it, we did drawings but when she
first turned up on the set… when you see the combination with the
heels and everything, I went, “HOLY $#&!” [Laughter]
This is great really, you know she’s sort of “verging” on
cartoon I guess in a way but we still wanted to keep her scary and
again we wanted to keep the jeopardy and I hope we did that.
I’ve sort of lost judgment with it now because you see it so many
times, all you see is; you see the film as a series of mistakes I
think, as a director and I can’t watch anything that I’ve ever done.
There’s one documentary I did, the worst documentary in the history
of film [Laughter] and I’ve still never seen it. And I’ve got
it on tape. It was about Kevin Keegan, the footballer and we
went and followed him around Germany and he used to score a lot.
Well, in this season, he only scored one goal and we missed it
[Laughter]…

You’re right; it is the worst documentary in the history of
the world… [Laughter]

But I learned a
lesson because – I said to a guy, camera one came out and he
said, “I’m really sorry Geoff, I didn’t get the goal.”
And then I said, “What about you did you get…” and he
said, “No, we ran out of film.” – What I learned, of
course I learned too late but because I’ve never done a sports film
since, is that you have to re-load at different times. So we
had to buy the goal from the BBC… it was the most embarrassing
thing. [Laughter] Yeah, we had to buy this goal we said,
“Do you have the goal?” and [they said] “Of course we
got the goal, we’ve got about forty angles.” [Laughter]
“Well… we sort of, didn’t get it.” [Laughter]
I can’t watch it.

Everything we
did was wrong. It was
the early days of steadicam, and we took the steadicam, I said,
“We’ve got to have steadicam.”
What we didn’t know at the time is that you’ve got to
learn to really balance yourself.
So this operator [Laughter], it’s like the [rockiest] film
you’ve ever seen… [Laughter]
It’s insane. It’s
insane, honestly. If you
wanted to blackmail me, you get a copy of that film; it was
terrible.

Has anything changed from the UK release to the American
release of Stormbreaker?

No.
It’s absolutely frame to frame identical.

What about the name change from Stormbreaker to Alex Rider:
Opertation Stormbreaker?

Well, you know,
I’m going to be honest with you, the first time I knew about it I
was – I got a thing from the company saying, you know… press
tour, Alex Rider: Operation Stormbreaker and I thought that’s what
they were calling like the press crew. [Laughter]
Then I saw a poster and I was… “Oh, nobody told me.”
I thought it was [just] Stormbreaker.
Honestly, I didn’t know.

Let me know what
you think. Send
questions or comments to [email protected].