By Here it is, the final Q&A session from my time listening to famous people talk about Safe House, which, I might add, is a great movie. This final session, also with director Daniel Espinosa was specifically for games bloggers, so there are a few game-related questions in there. Even so, the vast majority of it is about movies, and it’s always interesting. Of the three sessions, this was by far my favorite. Espinosa is a fascinating guy, and I love the way he works.
Whereas with yesterday’s transcription I had some trouble understanding Espinosa, this time I had more difficulty understanding the other people asking questions. I cut the ones I could not hear down and let his response clarify everything. The questions really don’t matter, though, so don’t worry about that. The responses matter, and the responses are awesome. There are a few changes made to fix some grammar, but I didn’t “fix” everything, so what you read is really what he said.
Also, the blurriness of the pterodactly you see above is due to the fact that I had to take the picture with my phone’s terrible built-in camera, so I’m sorry about that.
How do you go about creating realism in your movies?
I don’t know how to shoot on a green screen. I don’t like it, because I think all of reality is around us. It creates a different mood. When I do rehearsals with actors, I don’t do them in a white empty room, I take them to the shopping mall or a restaurant or grocery places, and I get them to buy the groceries and read the lines, because when you do that, if people turn around and look at you, you’re doing a play. You’re not doing a movie. You’re doing a movie, they should just think that you are any other guy just having a conversation, and if you have a fight in a grocery store, people won’t look at you. They’re gonna walk away, because they’re going to be uncomfortable, but if they think you’re faking it, then they’re gonna stick around, so I use the reality around the actors to push them. That’s why being on a green screen is not for me. They can pick another director.
I use a lot of documentary techniques. You know in chase scenes, I want the camera to be running after them. I don’t want to depict the visual geography in a beautiful way from atop a dolly. I want the camera to be almost like a character with our characters, and that puts you as an audience at a place for you to experience with the characters, so I use wider lenses and get the camera close, because I believe that the distance the camera is from, the audience can pick that up, so if you’re using a long lens from 200 feet away, even if it’s a close-up, you feel like you’re distant. But if you’re wide-angle, you feel like you’re there, and then you’re going to be more affected by it. There’s all kinds of ways of doing stuff, and that’s just I choose to do this kind of thing.
How was it working on such a huge project with big actors like Ryan and Denzel?
The size of it doesn’t affect me so much. I think it gives me complete anxiety and total fear doing any movie, and if I do a small Swedish movie I am as terrified as when I do this one. You can’t get more scared than as scared as I get when I go out shooting, so that’s why it doesn’t move me more. I’m always going to deal with that fear, but working with somebody like Denzel, who is one of the true geniuses in his craft, that’s mesmerizing, you know? Nobody as works as hard as he does. Nobody. He probably has more talent than everybody in his generation. But on top of that, I think he works harder. When young guys are close to him, they are terrified, because he doesn’t just have more talent, he works harder. He just works. Hours and hours of work, and that tells you a lot about why he’s so successful, because he works so hard. And that’s cool.
Did you feel your soul in this film?
Yeah, I try to. You know the Carlos Villar character, [played by] Ruben Blades? That’s my father. And in my experience, coming in here to America and Hollywood, realizing how corrupt all systems around here are, trying to retain my soul in in many ways the same journey that Matt [Weston, played by Ryan Reynolds] is doing, so I try to put that in as much as possible, and that’s the reason why I do movies. I have an apartment in Stockholm, I’ve got 200 buddies on three blocks, and we’ve known each other since we were 10 years old. I’m not gonna move. My wife, she’s a doctor. She makes money, so I don’t need to do anything. I do it because I want to. If they don’t like it, then I’ll go back. That’s no problem, so I try to put in my soul, yes.
How did you go about selecting this movie?
I was looking for something that had an archetypical character journey. It’s in many ways like… I like it when you have very classical archetypes, because I think all the good plays, like Hamlet, are classical archetypes, and I thought that if you’re going to do a movie with such a fast pace, which I wanted to try, you need something that has all of that and the structure, and we even had an old gunslinger who knows the world is corrupt, and the nature of his craft is amoral and unethical, and it will destroy your soul. And you have this young guy that believes in right or wrong, but can do actions that are horrific. When he beats that kid down for the CIA, that’s not ethical, and you can’t walk away from that and be the same person, and I thought that in spite of it just being an action movie, that’s all cool and people want to see something fun. That’s fine. I wanted something that I could at least, as you said, put my soul into, and I thought it had that balance.
At what point did you decide that the bullets would do damage in the world, ripping chunks out of walls rather than just making sparks?
I want to make movies like I want to watch movies. I love—and I’m not comparing myself in any way, because that’s a masterpiece—Heat. As a film director, who doesn’t want to at least try to get close to it? You might not succeed, but you’ve got to try. And if you take a movie that is not so realistic, like The Matrix, when they’re shooting up that hallway, and those things are falling down, it became much more visceral, and I thought I could use the sound also, because then you can put a hole close to the camera, and you can hear as a duct tears apart and goes over you. That gives depth into the image, so you have the character here and then the sound is very close. It’s something that they don’t use so much in videogames, which they should. Have that close impact on the side. You hear them go by, but if something ripped over you and heard it splinter and it covered the frame, that would be a cool experience.
It felt like Call of Duty. Was that intentional?
I like the contrast, because the music was a bit more classical in a way. There are no electronic drums. Everything’s real drums and real strings, and I thought it would be fun to almost have a film noir kind of track. It’s something that, in the sound, was very hard, so they would struggle a bit with each other, so when it becomes silent and you hear something.
The fight scenes were all really intense, and many of them in close quarters. Why was that?
The last fight, where they are banging against the wall and everything is being torn to pieces, I thought that would be… always when people fight in hallways, nothing gets moved, right? And I wanted that last scene to be the scene where he really does something horrible, and the fights I’ve been in in apartments, the place goes to pieces. It just does. If you’re just slightly angry at somebody, things will be broken, and I thought that the sound of that would be also interesting to work with, so we built everything out of foam, and it was very complex to be able to make all those kinds of movements. But it’s also the fight coordinator, who did Taken and also did A Prophet, a very cool movie you should watch. He’s doing a movie right now about street fighting with the same director who did A Prophet. I think it’s going to be incredible. He’s very natural and very gifted fight coordinator, and we wanted that.
Where do you think games need to go in the future?
I think the sound that I was talking about, and how things get destroyed, I think that’s always something that draws me, you know? I got some Swedish friends who did battlefield at DICE, and they’ve been working a lot towards that too. You can have opinions about it, it’s not perfect, but I think that’s the path that we’re going down.
How do you go from the other movies you made to this one?
The last movie that I made in Sweden was a Swedish gangster movie [Snabba Cash], and 85% of the people that were in it were amateurs, real gangsters. The main character was a four-time bank robber. They’re very tough people, and they were there because they wanted to do honest work, and after working with them, you’re not so afraid anymore. Everybody are just people. If you’re just honest, you’re going to be fine.
How was the waterboarding technique done so effectively that it looked so real?
Denzel was really waterboarded. That was terrifying for me, you know? We didn’t plan for him to do it. You would never plan that, out of respect, so we had somebody there, and then I thought he was going to leave and that other guy would take over, but Denzel said, “So, are we going to do the waterboarding now or what?” And then we went for it.
How much inspiration did you draw from doing Snabba Cash into this new film?
A lot. It’s how I do movies. Every experience makes you move forward. The style… well, that’s my style. That’s what I do, so it was more about refining that, and working with great artists like the production designer was Brigitte Broch, she did Biutiful and Amores Perros, which are cool movies, and I always admired her, and the movie I did in Sweden, I ripped many things off from her, and it was a bit embarrassing showing her my movie, because she could see I just clearly ripped it off. So to work with the real thing was really cool.
How much communication and dialogue was impromptu or ad-libbed between Ryan and Denzel?
They improvised a lot. First we would do the scenes, and then they would ask if they could ad-lib, and when you’re doing the scene, you just have to go with it, and Denzel is one of the best ad-lib persons on the planet, so you have to go with him. A lot of beautiful lines and scenes were ad-libbed. In the pharmacy, that whole backstory he told, that was partly ad-libbed, and that’s a very important part.
What gave you the inspiration to do movies in the first place?
Where I come from, when I was smaller, it was a humble place. My biggest fantasy back then was having a coffee shop, and my friends would say, “Who the fuck are you? How are you going to get the money to open up a coffee shop? You need $200,000, who’s going to lend you that?” And they were right. So they thought I was dreaming. Then I moved to another area, and I met this guy, a Swedish director named Lasse Hallström, he did What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, and I always watched movies, and I loved movies, but when you come from a humble area, you don’t think it’s for you. You don’t think it’s even on the map. There’s no possible way. Why should you be so? But when I met him, he was a normal guy. He was smart, but he wasn’t like an astronomical strange person who knew shit I could never know. He was more of a person. He just had an opinion, and he could see things, and then I thought, “I can see stuff too.” I have dreams too. I have fantasies, and then I just went for it.
Who’s next on the horizon of actors you want to work with?
There are a lot of beautiful actors out there. I think Michael Fassbender’s beautiful, great actor. Tom Hardy’s a very strong actor. I think Ryan Gosling is a very, very strong actor. I mean, there are good people out there.
You mentioned the sound a lot and how it affected the movie. How much investment did you put in the post-production process versus what you recorded live to capture the cacophony of sounds in those crazy moments like chases?
The first guy I hired for the movie was a Swedish sound designer named Peter Staubli. He has done Ridley Scott’s movies, Heat, and the Bourne movies, and he is a great, great sound designer. We used a lot of time just building the car, but almost everything is replaced. But I wouldn’t replace any sound from the natural sound until it had the exact same kind of real feeling to it, so it doesn’t sound too close or too beautiful, because that’s not how you experience it, so we took a lot of time to make that sensation of you being inside. And what I also do is cut atmosphere. If I cut from here [front shot] to here [45 degree angle], in documentaries you have an atmosphere cut, because you shot one thing and it sounds like this and you shot another thing and it sounds like that. It changes, but normally in American movies you smooth it out, because you want it smooth, but I think the audiences are used to identifying that cut as something that feels documentary-like, because you see it in documentaries, so when you do that, it makes you instinctively feel it’s more real, so we used a lot of those things to amplify the effect.