John
Stockwell was “the man” when I was growing up.
He appeared as an actor in such films as TOP GUN, CHRISTINE,
LOSIN’ IT and a few other classic 80’s fare.
And if you are starting to remember his face and wonder what
happened to him, he has found success behind the camera as the
director of such films as BLUE CRUSH, INTO THE BLUE and now the
travel friendly TURISTAS.
All his films feature a whole lotta water, but his latest
also features a bit of blood, sex and surf.
I
got the chance to meet up with John at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in
Beverly Hills
. He came in, shook
everyone’s hand and had a real honest sensibility; which includes
an honest reason for jumping into the horror genre.
He was very open about his thoughts on the MPAA, what it’s
like to have a studio interfere with a film and about how he loves
to travel to not so safe places. He
has officially upped his cool status even more, as he is a great guy
to hang with.
John
Stockwell
So
is this like the anti-tourism ad for
Brazil
?
I’d
hate to think that because I’m a huge fan of
Brazil
, we had a great time there, it was just… The original movie was
set in
Guatemala
and it was sort of inspired by an incident in which a British woman,
a tourist was taking pictures of children in a little village in
Guatemala
and there had been rumors of children being abducted for their
organs, and she was stoned to death.
And
so Michael Ross wrote this script, I had just been robbed at gun
point in Peru, came back, read it, it resonated with me and we sort
of decided on Brazil because – first of all, production…
there’s crews there, you know there’s a movie world there.
But also because it’s a place that’s so seductive and
intoxicating and things can go from good to bad quickly there so…
I think the end of the day; you can go to Brazil and come
back with all your organs intact.
Might get robbed, might get kidnapped, there’s a lot of
crime there, I mean, people saw CITY OF GOD, I don’t think we’re
the first people to depict Brazil in a not so nice light.
This
is as close to a horror film that you’ve gotten since you acted in
CHRISTINE…
It’s
true, that was my only other real experience in this genre.
So,
why now get into the horror genre?
You
know, I read it… I guess I’m so bad, I’m always asked in pitch
meetings, “Okay, what genre is this?” I never know; I have a
really hard time categorizing movies.
If you say drama today, meetings over, because no one makes
dramas, so I saw it more, maybe this is just my delusion, but I saw
it more as a DELIVERANCE movie… maybe that’s a horror movie too,
in a different way.
But
just taking ordinary people in a place that – you know, it’s not
HOSTEL, their not going to Eastern Europe to some dark, dingy, weird
place, they’re going to this sort of fantasy land.
And I guess it was… two things, these kind of movies are
easier to get made today than anything else so you kind of push the
other movies uphill and then your like, can’t get it made, can’t
get it made, alright, I’ll do this because I can get this made.
But I also liked it because I love immersing myself in other
cultures, I like working on location, I like working with young… I
like working on movies where I don’t have to wait for Brad Pitt to
say yes in order to get it made.
There were a lot of things that were attractive about it.
Can
I just ask you why you chose Melissa George and was that character
supposed to be Australian?
No,
Melissa came in and read as an American, and read with an American
accent and she was great and I said “But you’re Australian
right?” and she was not sure whether to speak or not, with her
Australian accent and she said yeah.
And I said, “Just do it as an Aussie.” Like, why
couldn’t there be an Aussie there, Aussie’s travel more than
Americans, you’re more likely to run into an Aussie in Brazil than
you are an American. She
did it and I thought she was so much better, not having to
concentrate on the accent and I was also asking her to learn
Portuguese and improvise a lot so I just thought it was easier for
her to do it.
How
did you know of her?
I
knew of her from… I’d seen the remake of… whatever that was…
AMITYVILLE
HORROR?
Amityville
Horror, I’d seen a little bit of ALIAS.
I’d seen her in that, DERAILED… a couple of things.
As
a director, did you ever go into the ghettos of Brazil and actually
experience anything there or talk to the people and kind of get a
first hand account of some of the situations there?
Well,
Rio, which is where we started, you know, the favelas is sort of a
flip side of LA, the favelas are in the hills with the great views
and the affluence is in the flats.
But there right on top of each other but when I wanted to
actually… first when I was looking for locations I was like I
wanna go up and scout the favela here, oh, you can’t go in. You
know, or if we go in, we have to get the drug dealers to take us,
the cops won’t go.
So
I finally got my location guy to line me up with a big, bad drug
dealer guy and we did go up and scout and, you know, it’s like a
regular community, it’s not… it’s working people, the police
have barricades at the bottom but they don’t up into the favelas.
One day I was driving from one part to the other and I heard
what sounded like automatic gunfire and RPG’s and I told the guy,
“What is that?”, “Oh that’s automatic gunfire and
RPG’s.” And these
two favelas were battling each other so there is a lot of crime and
a lot of it is just directed amongst them, between warring drug
gangs in different favelas.
Did
the actors go in there and do research?
Ah,
maybe just to score drugs, [Laughter] and like inadvertently end up
there, I don’t know that they ended up… We weren’t in Rio that
much, and that had, like the favela we shot in… that’s like the
sweetest people, it wasn’t a dangerous favela.
I was just talking to someone; I was also in Columbia…
Columbia right now, the cities are quite safe and the countryside is
quite dangerous. Brazil,
the cities are very dangerous and the countryside is completely
safe. So our experience
was mostly in rural areas and we didn’t have any… you could
stumble home drunk at five in the morning and you were cool.
What’s
your fascination with that part of the world?
Well,
I’ve traveled through most of South and some Central America and
just partially as a surfer I’ve gone through those places because
they have good waves but also I like going to places that either
people tell you not to go to or to be weary about going to where
there are fewer Americans there.
The only plus for me about this movie in any way hindering
Americans going to Brazil is there’ll be fewer people when I’m
there.
What
is it about water sequences that you love to shoot?
Between this one, INTO THE BLUE and BLUE CRUSH there are
amazing water sequences.
You
know, I think my next movie’s going to be all in the snow and no
bikinis [Laughing]… seriously, like that is probably what I’m
going to do next. I just
did BLUE CRUSH and everyone asks you to do what you’ve done
before. And I love the
water and I think I know how to work in it.
Most people are scared of it, like my water DP was just here
and he was amazing. What
I like most about working in the water is, especially in this movie,
we were far, deep inside caves and no one could come get us,
producers couldn’t be there, the studio couldn’t be there, no
one could look at a monitor, no one was like… you didn’t have
that crowd around that you do on back lots, no one second guessing
you.
So
how many days did that take to shoot?
That
went on, kind of, in different places, different locations… it’s
so freeform and hard to choreograph the specifics of what’s going
on underwater. I was
trying to communicate and there was a speaker system and we had
Portuguese speaking actors and swimming, they couldn’t understand
what I was saying to begin with and there was a big clusterf*ck but
thankfully no one died.
How
did the actors deal without the luxuries that you have on a normal
set?
Melissa
didn’t like it. [Laughing]
No, I think what happens with actors is when one says, “You
know what… this is cool, I’m into this.” Which is what Josh [Duhamel]
did, “F*ck, I like this, I wanna get down and dirty.” It was the
antithesis of working on LAS VEGAS, you know, which he has a huge
eighty foot trailer so once he said, I’m down with this. And
the other actors kind of looked at each other and, oh, he’s cool
with this I guess we have to be cool with this, so, they were.
There
were some moments like, where people were just, I don’t know bugs
were really bad and they were sleeping on air mattresses, it was
just muddy and gross, there was a little bit of grumbling.
But the actors for the most part wanted to feel like, wow,
we’re doing it for real, were not play acting, were not operating
against a green screen… our stunt doubles aren’t called in every
time something hazardous, that they, in some ways enjoy that, up to
a point. And I found it
in BLUE CRUSH and INTO THE BLUE that the actors start going, whoa,
maybe this is a little too real or too dangerous or too strenuous.
Did
you have any problems with the studio on content like wanting to
push a PG-13 or were they okay with an R?
No,
they were okay… but we got an NC-17 for a long time, they
weren’t okay with that.
Really,
what did you cut?
Weird,
little stupid things, like I went back to do the unrated version and
I looked at the… my editor had it out and to be honest there’s a
lot of… you kind of wear the MPAA down, we went back with it at
least eight or nine times and frame cuts, frame cuts… sound is a
huge issue. Little
things here and there, nothing wholesale.
They have a real problem… they have more of a problem with
Beau’s [Garrett] breast being shown while there was blood.
Like blood and nudity mixed together, the MPAA really has an
issue with.
So
how do you approach a film like this so it doesn’t feel like the
same thing you’ve seen over and over?
You’re
hopefully trying to start with a world that feels somewhat
believable, and characters that could maybe exist in the real world.
With these kinds of movies all you can do… well, not all
you can do but you try and add things around the edges that make it
feel a little more real, a little more plausible.
Do
you know what you are doing next?
I
think I’m doing this movie… I’m either doing, I’m writing a
movie based on a Rolling Stone article called Kid Cannabis about
these pot smugglers in Idaho who brought in a lot of BC bud in.
It was an amazing story about these nineteen year-old minimum
wage kids who went from making six twenty-five an hour to sixty-five
million a year smuggling weed. It’s
really funny; I’m doing it for HBO Picture House or I’m doing
another movie for these guys called VILLAIN, which is a small
two-character piece in the snow in Alaska.
You
said you were robbed in Peru?
Yeah.
So
was TURISTAS like a therapeutic thing for you?
Maybe,
[I don’t now] if it was therapeutic as much as… not only was I
robbed, I was shot at and then I went to the police and they said if
you give us three-hundred bucks we’ll find these guys and you can
kill them. And I
thought, that’s an interesting offer but I don’t want to kill
them, I just want my shit back and the police got all squirrelly on
us and I was… I just wanna leave.
But then I read this piece and as much as you wanna say come
on, this could never happen; maybe it felt a little more plausible
from what I just gone through.
So
how long ago was that?
That
was literally a month before… it was a year and a half ago maybe.
So
that hasn’t put you off going to dangerous places?
No.
After that I went to El Salvador which is a squirrelly place.
Nicaragua…
Do
you ever just go to Paris or Rome? [Laughter]
You
know, I’ve been to Paris and Rome but it’s so boring.
Too many regular tourists there and it’s expensive… super
expensive. And I don’t
feel like you really have a complete cultural emersion, a different
world… Maybe if you went and lived there you could have it, but to
go to Paris for a week and have a real experience, Paris is hard.
Let
me know what you think. Send
questions and comments to jimmyo@joblo.com.