Jason Statham Ben Foster interviews on THE MECHANIC

COVERED BY: Brenda Meyer

On remaking The Mechanic and how everyone approached it:
Robert Chartoff (producer): The only reason studios make movies is to make money. And why do they choose remakes? Often, one reason is that the audience has some familiarity with it, the cost of making movies is so expensive today, and on some level, we have a leg up, we have something to work off of, there's an awareness.

Bill Chartoff (producer): Every film, you try to make a good film, whether it's a remake or not. With a remake, you're always going to be the comparison to the original, so, in some respects, you're at a disadvantage, and you have something to live up to, especially if you're working off of a classic like we were. Also, there's a whole issue of which elements of the original film do we want to keep and which do we need to update, which ones worked back then that wouldn't today. It makes things a little more difficult and challenging.

Robert Chartoff: The most important element [we wanted to keep] is the relationship between the two characters. Above all, that was the most important to me personally. The mood and feel [were] also important, but you might get different responses from other people.

Bill Chartoff: It was a challenge, to some extent. There were certain expectations that audiences had back then, certainly in terms of plot and level of action. And I think there were certain things you could get away with back then that you simply could not get away with today. This film is more of an action film than the original film and that was done consciously, because we realized that's what audiences want today. And there are certain things that this film has that the original didn't have. [The original] was more about mood, and if you look at the original, it was such a wonderfully moody film, and has so much subtext and color and motion.

Robert Chartoff: Just to follow up, I think a lot more is expected from the audience now, as far as the quality of the action is concerned. And when you look at the two pictures, to some degree, the original looks somewhat primitive, in that regard, compared to the sophistication of the effects where the new one is concerned.

Bill Chartoff: I think the very nature of the story is classical, it's mythological - it's father and son, mentor and protégé - and it's dealing with very classical themes in an thriller/action genre, and that's one of the reasons the original worked so well, is because it took these mythological themes and put them into a thriller film genre. And in a sense, we've done the same thing, only in more of an action genre. I think there was a challenge in how the two characters relate to one another now [in the remake]. It's a little bit different now, and I think that's good, especially when it comes to Ben Foster's character, who is much more sympathetic when compared to Jan Michael Vincent's part in the original.

Irwin Winkler (producer): It was a surprise, because we'd been working on it for almost 15 years. The idea of remaking it has been with us for quite a long time. And we finally got a screenplay we felt was worth it.

David Winkler (producer): We went back to the original - we tried to be so faithful to that in terms of tone and structure and feel. By going back to the original, we made the best version we could have made. We wanted to be faithful to the overall tone - it was not a bright, cheery, high-tech movie. This is a man who lives in the underbelly, someone who's very quiet, and we didn't want to make it into a trainwreck of car accidents and helicopters. And [we wanted to keep] the basic structure of the relationship between these two men and how they work out their issues through the relationship - not necessarily or unnecessarily with each other.

Irwin Winkler: That's really what we wanted to capture from the original was the relationship between these two men, both of whom were desperate to have some human contact and they choose each other because of circumstances.

Richard Wenk (screenwriter – remake): I had actually been approached by MGM 10 years ago when everyone was trying to get it off the ground, but it fell by the wayside. And about eight weeks before shooting, Simon [West] called and wanted to know if I wanted to talk about this and we hit it off right away and we wanted to do the same kind of movie. He had the original script and I had been given a version that someone else had written, and I thought, 'I think you just gotta go back to the original structure,' so we hashed it out in a really short amount of time for a movie this size. I basically collaborated with Simon: I would write scenes during the day and send them to him and we'd talk about it. I think the only thing we wanted to do was take this genre that you've seen a million times before and try to take these hits and make them more interesting. The three main components were: a hitman who did this for a living, he kills his friend and he takes on his [friend's] son, and the son finds out. Those three things, I haven't seen since the original, and the work itself became, how do we weave that story into a modern day retelling. We kept the fact that this was just an organization [Bishop and Steve work for]: it wasn't political, it wasn't governmental, it was just businessmen who pay other people to kill people. And Bishop is smart and keeps his distance. And we loved finding ways to kill people in ways that it would look like an accident. [It's different from the original and shows how good he is in a different way.

Simon West (director): And that's a unique selling feature is that the hits had to look like an accident, otherwise it's just another hitman movie and the interesting thing is that [Bishop] has to work out how to get away with it.

Richard Wenk: It was a classic structure, it was a relationship movie in the end with a lot of fun and no one had really done the down and dirty, hands-on hitman movie that I've seen in a long time. I was respectful of the original material because it held up.

Simon West: They knew how to structure a film in those days - it wasn't 2 1/2 hours long and went off on tangents - it was very succinct.

Richard Wenk: Bishop takes the kid on in the original because the kid said so, but in this one, there's a reasoning behind it. The kid is curious and he's insistent, but at the same time, we worked in that there's this whole [reasoning behind why Bishop said yes and took Steve on that first hit] and if he gets killed, so what, but he didn't, so maybe we can have a partnership. So, we made that a conscious decision.

Simon West: I wanted to make things realistic, and killing people is dirty, nasty work. And the technology is that you can shoot someone from a long ways away, but that's never going to look like an accident. When you need to make it look like an accident, you need to get in there and make it look like a heart attack or electrocution or whatever, it can get messy. It comes out of character - it's more like, this is the world we're in, we're not making a film about Sunday school teachers, it's about hired assassins.

On casting Ben Foster as Steve McKenna:
Bill Chartoff: There were several people we were interested in, and ultimately, we went to Ben. What we liked about Ben was that, it was very hard not to be aware of the actors in the original film, and Ben does have certain qualities that did remind us of Jan Michael Vincent (who played Steve in the original film). He's capable of pulling off that slightly obnoxious aura as an actor, and that somewhat psychotic quality that really works for the part. And I think Ben pulled it off beautifully, but also brought himself to the part in that the character is much more sympathetic. But Ben didn't want to see the original because he didn't want to be influenced by it.

Ben Foster (actor – Steve McKenna): I didn't want to be informed by any of it. There's always a pressure when you do a remake that you're not going to live up to any of it and there's a big fan base for this and I was afraid of unconsciously stealing or having preconceived notions of how things should be. And it took the pressure off of trying to live up to something people adored instead of connect to it in my own way, do my own prep and hope that something unique or different shows up and it becomes its own film. Steve's in a tough situation. We've all had this experience of being alone and the experience of being betrayed in our life by a friend or a love or a parent - that feeling is not uncommon. His actions aren't necessarily ones that I would physically want to act out in real life, but it's really a gas to do it with permission.

Robert Chartoff: Ben was a stroke of good fortune, as far as we're concerned. He's a brilliant actor and we needed someone strong to play against Jason. We wanted him, everyone wanted him, we were fortunate that he said yes.

Jason Statham (actor – Arthur Bishop): He's such a good actor, and we had a couple of beers and spoke about what was necessary, but we had such an easy chemistry that it all came very naturally. And a lot of his ideas were great. If he ever wants to do anything other than act, he'd be a brilliant writer or a brilliant director. I think he's got so many talents up his sleeve. I've got a lot of respect for him for all of the right reasons.

Comparing Jason Statham to Charles Bronson (who played Arthur Bishop in the original film):
Irwin Winkler: They're very similar in that they're both internal actors, they don't talk a lot. Dialogue is not something that they both express themselves with. They express themselves with through the actions and body art. They're both very committed - Charlie was a little looser, once he okayed a screenplay, he let it go at that. Jason is very...if you give him a page change, he wants to know why and how it affects his character. He's more involved in the script, but as actors they're similar. I also think Jason's a bit more intense than Charlie was.

Jason Statham: I was excited. He's a great actor, one of my many favorites. I liked the original, it made sense to do it. [But] I tried not to get too attached to something he was doing. It's very difficult with a remake not to try to repeat something, but at the same time, pay homage to what worked the first time. I tried not to watch the movie and be influenced by Bronson's performance.

Jason Statham, on the possibility of being pigeonholed as an action star:
Jason Statham: Look, we can only ever do what's in front of us, and a certain amount of the offers that come my way are driven by action. If it's a good story and has great characters and some great action, then that rings all the bells. I don't think I necessarily need to prove a point just to say I can do something else. I'm not driven by trying to impress people by how many things I can do. It's a good life, I'm enjoying myself, working with some great people. It's definitely better than what I was doing before.

On Jason and Ben doing their own stunts in the film:
Bill Chartoff: Jason loves to do the action stuff, he loves to do the stunts, he really gets excited by it, and obviously, he's really experienced at it. To this level, it was something new for Ben, but he really threw himself into it and, in a way, it was a little more frightening for Ben, only because you knew that Ben wasn't as experienced as Jason was. But you see Ben flying down the side of a building and being thrown into a wall by a 6'7" guy and that was Ben and that was a wall -

Robert Chartoff: (laughing) and that wasn't the last day of filming.

Jason Statham: Ben's one of those kids that's got a certain sized ego that will push him beyond the limits he would normally like. As an example, he's very fearful of heights, and we did a very high decelerated fall that was 300+ feet, and, for someone that doesn't like heights, to get in the saddle and throw himself in that position in that kind of situation is, in my opinion, very brave, indeed. I'm always involved [in the stunts]. It's something I've made a big shout about ever since I started in the action genre. I was working closely with Chad Stahelski and David Leitch (the stunt coordinators on the film). I'm very involved from start to finished. I hate green screen, personally. There's nothing that can allow you to feel the true adrenaline of dropping down the side of a building and to pretend that you're doing that on a green screen flailing your arms is just so fake to me. I've always been impressed by real stunts shot through the camera's lens as opposed to being created after the day in a studio somewhere. Simon West is someone I respect for him trying to keep everything away from the green screen and keep it with that feel. He was very cool because of that.

Simon West: No, [Jason didn't put Ben up to doing his own stunts], but there's a psychology of doing it, I mean, there's the morning of the jump off the building and we knew, obviously, that Jason was going to do it cause that's what he does, and there's this terrifyingly high skyscraper. I could barely stand on the top of it, like, up against the wall, and I'm 30 feet from it, I'm not even looking over the edge, and Jason's sitting there, just sort of hanging his feet over. And then Ben says at breakfast, "so Jason's going to do the jump himself, no stunt double", and I said, "yes he is," and he says, "so I guess I better do it then," and I said "fantastic." Because, you know, you can't beat the reality of the actors. So Ben got there with Jason and Jason gave him some advice, you know, focus on the horizon, a spot on the horizon and Ben, (who) has vertigo and can barely stand on this table, did it. And it's this cable that's this thick (about an inch wide) I mean, you look at the cable and you can barely see it and your whole body weight's on it, and you're jumping 350 feet. I've got this great shots of him looking terrified, and we could have shot it green screen, but it never looks the same. And since he's the apprentice, it's okay for him to look scared. I mean, the action's written into the script and just with Jason, it's from day one, he does all his own stunts, everything from the simplest punch, he doesn't want anyone doubling him, and he does all of that really well, driving cars really well and motorbikes, you can throw him on any piece of equipment and he'll be great. He's always saying, "this is what I do for a living." We worked with the stunt team and we shoot everything on video first with the stunt guys and they roll around at the gym with mats and toy guns, and we shoot every angle beforehand on video and show it to Jason, and he goes, no I don't like that bit, and then we rework certain moves in it until he's totally happy. So by the time we get on set, he knows all the moves and he becomes one of the stunt people in it, but he's already approved all of the action because he's such an expert on fighting and action and movies generally that he's not just going to turn up and wing it. We weren't in one of those action movies where anything can happen, this was more about real world, this is what really happens when you throw someone through a window or when you try to kill somebody, it's dirty, messy, not quick, and it has to be real.

Ben Foster: I got to set and we weren't talking about [the fall from the side of the building] and no one was talking about it, we just said, on there's a big fall and Mike, your stunt guy's going to do it, and he's terrific. But we just got to set and I looked at it... if you're lucky enough to work as an actor, the gift is having the opportunity to do things you wouldn't ordinarily get to do, and that can lend itself to being in an emotional circumstance or a physical one. So, because this film is what it is and it's supposed to be high octane thrill, it felt like, when else am I gong to get the opportunity to do something that literally scares me to death? There's this cord, so your whole life is basically that big, and it's on your hip. And we did it six times and by the end I wanted to do it again and faster and that's the drug. And when you watch the sequence in the picture, there's no acting to it. I'm frightened. And that's why it works. You use what you're given on the day. It was a great opportunity to make a little bit of cinema and confront something I don't like and talk about it and feel kind of brave and that feels good.

On contrasting the fall with another fight scene earlier in the film:
Ben Foster: Oh, yeah, that was nothing. The drag of that was getting injured on that the night before, snapped my shoulder doing a stunt I shouldn't have done - a very small stunt. I [was supposed to be thrown] against a wall, but I was too loose, and my shoulder snapped and I didn't say anything and did it again and I knew something was wrong, but I went home. And woke up in the morning and my shoulder was up to [his ear] and I couldn't move, I couldn't get out of bed, and it was a struggle to try to find the phone to call production - which is not a call you want to make ever - to say, hey, you know this thing we've been training to do for the past three months doesn't work, I'm broken. So they send me to this doctor - who works for the New Orleans Saints football team - and they take a big needle and jam it in my shoulder, and it felt amazing. Whatever's in that needle [is magic]. So, we get to the set, and I'm all, I'm loose, I'm ready, let's do this, and then my shoulder goes like this again. So I'm all, call the doctor, and he comes and he's all, y'know Ben, I work with professional athletes who do this for a living and they're bigger than you and I've never given them this much, ever. But [he gave me the shot] and I felt great, felt great, but I couldn't do a lot of action because my shoulder was still messed up, so I thought, hey, we gotta switch hands, and do it left-handed, and I was just cooked enough mentally to be okay with that, learn everything backwards. We'd been training for this fight for three months, and then just did it backwards. What I learned is... stunt men and actors are two different beasts, but having the opportunity to get closer to any kind of specialist and whatever they do, be it stunt guys or being a military advisor, it's a great opportunity to meet people who are professionals who have devoted their life to a subject, it's great to just learn things from them.

On filming in New Orleans:
Bill Chartoff: Certainly the tax incentives had something to do with it. They have a lot of good, professional crews, great town, great food, great music... I fell in love with it and I was sad to leave. There's something about a location that bleeds into the film - if we had shot outer space in New Orleans, it would still feel like New Orleans. The film sucks up the atmosphere of the city, which was great.

David Winkler: New Orleans is a great place to shoot - great tax credits, great access to crew. It's also a very moody place which benefited this movie.

Jason Statham: I can remember having a great time down in New Orleans. The people down there are superb, and the music. Its a great part of the world, and to see ten people on a street corner literally with their instruments - you don't see that in many parts of the world. It's great.

On the homoeroticism of the first film and how they approached that with the remake (contains spoilers):
Bill Chartoff: The discussion was had, no question. But also, if you watch, there is a scene where (SPOILER ALERT!!) Steve kills another hitman who is homosexual, so in a sense, we addressed it that way. (END SPOILER ALERT) But, you know, I think that it was something that was discussed intellectually, and it was something we were careful with.

Robert Chartoff: Also, I can say, as relates to the original film, it wasn't even an issue for us. It didn't even occur to us to talk about it.

Irwin Winkler: We never even thought about it.

David Winkler: I can't say it was something we tried to keep out or put in - sometimes a scar is just a scar.

Lewis John Carlino (screenwriter – original): Originally, when I wrote the script [in 1972], the relationship that Bishop was looking for with his apprentice was a homosexual relationship. And I developed that pretty extensively in the original drafts and it made a lot of sense, because he wasn't able to connect with anybody on the outside, and the only person he could have a close relationship with was someone who did what he did. But the combination of a hitman and a homosexual was a little too much for the times, so people backed off, but the subtext was still all there.

On the infamous ending of the original vs. the remake (contains spoilers):
David Winkler: I think we really just thought the audience would respond better to this particular version with this ending, which is a good balance between the bleakness of the first one and the satisfaction that audiences today now expect. I still think it's not a happy ending - he's still killed a close friend, a close friend's son, the man who hired him, he's found out that he's incapable of even keeping a relationship with a prostitute, so I don't think it's that far off from the original feel.

Irwin Winkler: We were happy with [the original ending] at the time, because it was bleak, and it part of that 1970s Watergate, Vietnam War, everything's got to be down, [sensibility]. But it wasn't very satisfying. The note that you see that Bishop writes [in the original] to Steve makes you realize that the Bishop character is smart enough to realize he's going to be killed. We just took that one step further - he's not only smart enough to know he's going to be killed, he's smart enough to NOT be killed. Other than that, it basically follows the original - a hitman, a relationship with a younger man, and how they develop into a team.

Jason Statham: You know what, the script changed so many times. I signed on to do the original screenplay - that exact screenplay. But then I went away and did a movie, and the screenplay changed in so many ways, it went this way and that way, so many rewrites. We didn't even know that the ending of the film you saw whenever you saw it was probably written the week before. It was hard to keep track of.

Richard Wenk: We wanted to kill [Bishop].

Simon West: We wanted him to die like in the original. In the original, he was crumbling, and he didn't want to do it anymore and he was vulnerable, but Jason's not like that. He's at the peak of his career and his fitness, and the only thing that screwed up his [version of] Bishop's life was taking on this apprentice. He made one mistake and all his life is turned upside down, so as soon as he gets rid of this apprentice, he can go back to his normal life. And it felt like the [test] audience now wanted him to go back to that life. It was very Shakespearean, killing the father, then taking on the son, then killing the son. It wasn't like everyone went off and became friends and [Steve] forgave [Bishop] and they became partners, [Bishop] just killed [Steve] because that's what had to be done. That was one of the best things, is that it wasn't too clean an ending. But my favorite version was them both dying - neither one winning.