TO CONTROL THE FRAME

Whether he made a little known action movie called GETTING EVEN (a vanity project financed by a wealthy Texas oil clan), brought back Michael Myers in HALLOWEEN 4, helped to cement Steven Seagal’s reputation as an action star by giving him his third success in a row with MARKED FOR DEATH, or made his biggest mainstream movie with MURDER AT 1600, director Dwight Little always brought tightness and speed to the action. A true craftsman because of his technical skill and professionalism. But, as he points out, even in a Steven Seagal movie there’s ‘a lot of artistry that goes into it’. After a long period of doing mostly television he returned to filmmaking in 2017 and made the hard-hitting true crime drama LAST RAMPAGE, which featured fantastic performances by Robert Patrick, Bruce Davison and Heather Graham. In January 2021 he spoke to Roel Haanen about his long career.

Let’s start with your latest feature, LAST RAMPAGE, which was terrific. The movie seems built around characters and performances. Did you approach it like that?  

It was partly done out of necessity. It’s not a very commercial subject, so we had very little money. We did have one of the great character actors in the business, but Robert [Patrick] doesn’t have the exposure to raise a lot of money. I knew he could play Gary Tison, because I had worked with him three times by then. We needed to shoot it quickly, so I thought: let’s make this very simple and keep it contained. Not that we devised it as a play or something, but it had to be about the characters, because we couldn’t let the film be depended on action and events. Interesting that you picked up on that. If I had had thirty million dollars I probably would have made a slightly different movie. 

On IMDb Pro the budget is said to be thirty million. 

I don’t know where they get that. It was made for under a million dollars. There were some investors in Palo Alto who put up the money. We shot it right here, out by Magic Mountain, about thirty miles out of LA.  

Even though you had a small budget, you evoked the 1970’s very convincingly. 

You have to think about the things you can control. We could control wardrobe and vehicles, but if you look at the movie, almost everything is desert. If you’re out in the middle of nowhere it’s much easier to control the frame. If I was filming in the city, like ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD, I would have had to rebuild everything, from the cars to the advertisements.  

Robert Patrick is amazing in the part. What are some of the things you talked about with him in regard to the darkness of that character? 

Gary Tison is – we hear this word a lot these days – a classic narcissist. In the end, everything is about Gary. There’s this interesting scene where he talks to his son Donny about how his father had worked him and beat him, and you get a taste of the fact that this kind of violence is generational. The violence is visited upon the son, the son becomes a man and the violence is visited upon the next generation. I was fascinated by the idea that these three boys really didn’t have a chance. That’s why there’s a picture at the beginning of the movie of them looking really innocent. They want to love their father, but they’re doomed. It’s always cycles of abuse, violence and dependency.

How did the book come to you? 

I have a stepson who is an actor. His name is Jason Richter and he played the boy in the FREE WILLY movies. He had been given this book by a producer who wanted him to play Donny, when he was much younger. The movie was never put together. Jason gave the book to me to read and I was fascinated by it. I gave it to a writer I had met on [the TV series] From Dusk Till Dawn, named Álvaro Rodríguez. He read it and started working on a draft. And when I read Álvaro’s draft, I thought: Now I gotta make this movie. Because it was so good. Then I asked Robert what he thought. He called the next day and said: I want to do this, when can we start?

You obviously invested a lot of time and energy in bringing this story to the screen. In what way does it speak to you personally? 

We had a senseless shooting out here in Riverside, California. There are always these incidences of unexplained violence all over the world. And it made me think about how I would react if I was confronted by such evil. If you are pulled over to the side of the road by Gary Tison, there’s nothing you can do. He’s going to take your life. We can all comprehend how a bank robbery or a kidnapping goes bad, but what we can’t comprehend is random violence. Murdering people for no reason. This pondering the nature of evil is represented in the movie by the Bruce Davison character. There’s a scene near the end where his wife tells him: You did all you could. And he says: But did I really? Because he knows it was on his watch that these people got murdered.  

That scene where Gary and Randy murder the young family is horrifying, mostly because of their indifference.  

Yeah, we even had to pull back a little from what happened, because it was so horrible. In the movie, you don’t actually see the family getting killed, but it’s shot in such a way that your mind fills it in. Then Randy says: Well, that’s that then. These guys are cold. To them, it was just a mathematical calculation. If the family was found alive, they would tell the police it was them.

Did you watch the TV movie that was done about the case in the early eighties? With Robert Mitchum as Tison? 

Yes, I did. Because I didn’t want to do something that was already done properly. I looked at it and didn’t like the approach they took. Nothing against the actors. I just didn’t think they got what that story was. Our version was very simple, but it has a power to it.  

I think it’s probably your best movie.  

Thank you. It certainly is the most honest of my films. It’s not a genre picture. I’ve done some things in television like that. But not in the movies.  

I also love that scene between Bruce Davison and John Heard. 

John was amazing. He was not that well. He was having health problems, so he didn’t have that much time to give us. But once he was in that chair – oh man – he knew all his lines instantly. He did it in one take. And Bruce… What he did was amazing. He really conveyed the moral center of the movie.

Let’s talk about how you got started. You grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. As a child, did you already dream about going to California and becoming a filmmaker?  

Absolutely. It came to me early, around seventh or eighth grade.  My father was intuitive enough to get me one of those Kodak Instamatic Super 8 cameras. It cost about 45 dollars. I got it for Christmas.  It had a fixed lens and all you could do with it was point and shoot. You would take the cartridge to the drugstore and a few days later you would get the developed roll of film back. Then you could project it on the wall and see what you got. It was magic! Then I learned about editing and all the other stuff.  

I applied to some schools that I didn’t get into, like Northwestern University and some schools back east. At the last minute I got accepted at USC, conditionally. I needed to keep my grades to a certain point during the first two semesters. But money was a problem. My grandmother had inherited a little bit of money, so she made it possible for me to go to film school. I was pretty lucky.  

What kind of movies would you watch during that period, thinking: that’s what I want to make? 

I was deeply into seventies movies. I left for California in 1974, so there was THE FRENCH CONNECTION, THE GODFATHER, THE CONVERSATION, later on TAXI DRIVER. It was the three Italians mostly: Scorsese, Coppola and De Palma. My interest in directors like Spielberg came much later, although I did love that road movie he did with Goldie Hawn, THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS. I was also taken by a British director named Lindsay Anderson. I was at that impressionable age, and there was so much. There was Altman and Kubrick. Between ’71 and ’78 there was a renaissance of outstanding movies. And then I also liked action movies as well, like THE GREAT ESCAPE. I’m sure younger generations have their own classics, but boy, that was good stuff.  

What were your student films like? 

The first one that got any attention came out of my personal experience. I had gone over to Spain to finish an academic thing. I went out with a bunch of people at one or two in the morning. Franco had just been given the boot. The police surrounded this area where drugs were being sold. They did this sweep and I got caught up in it. I was put in jail for quite some time. I was just at the wrong place at the wrong time. Eventually it got sorted out and I was let go. By the time I got back to LA I had these images in my head. So I shot a short film right here in LA about a foreign student who gets involved with a political movement – that part I made up – and who gets thrown in jail and has to betray his Spanish friend in order to get out. Kind of a moral dilemma story. It just hit the spot. It was the right casting, the right story for that time, which was the end of the seventies. It won everything. They wrote about it in The Hollywood Reporter. A real calling card.

It took you a couple of years to get your first feature off the ground.  

Yeah. I had no money, so I worked all kinds of jobs. If I could get a short documentary or music video I would take it. I also worked freelance for a TV station. My big break came with this old time movie producer named Sandy Howard, who had one big  hit: A MAN CALLED HORSE with Richard Harris. The rest of his movies were mostly B pictures. He was like Sam Arkoff or Roger Corman. He made a movie called  TRIUMPHS OF A MAN CALLED HORSE, which came out so badly that it was eight minutes short. He couldn’t sell it to the foreign buyers unless he delivered a ninety minute movie. He was strapped for cash and he came to me because he knew I wasn’t going to cost anything. He only had five thousand dollars to spend on eight minutes. This is the Hollywood producer. Only has five thousand dollars. So, we devised a title sequence where the lead actor, Michael Beck, rides from Boston out west through this landscape. It’s four minutes of him riding from right to left, under titles. Sandy had a Rita Coolidge song that he had bought for another movie and never used. Now, when the movie is over, he goes back to Boston. So he rides from left to right, under the end credits. For four minutes! We just went out to Sedona, me and my cameraman friend from film school, and we rented some horses and a cowboy and shot this footage of him riding. And then it was: Okay, turn around and ride the other way! [Laughs] With this longest title sequence ever, Sandy suddenly had a movie he could legally deliver to the foreign buyers. He was so appreciative that he asked me to make him a three hundred thousand dollar movie. The video market was booming and all these companies needed titles. So I came up with an idea for a spy movie, which became KGB: THE SECRET WAR.  

Did GETTING EVEN come right after that? 

Yes. I cut a promo reel out of KGB, because that movie is uneven. It’s slow and the acting is not very good, but it’s got some good stuff in it that I cut together in this promo reel. It looked fantastic, like a long trailer. Now, there were these guys out of Texas with oil money and they were looking for a non-union director. Someone recommended me. They were part of the Hunt-Hill family, which is very wealthy. They owned helicopters, a Lear jet, ranches. Their only condition was that we used all of their stuff. The whole movie was written and devised around what they owned. They also knew  the people who owned the restaurant on top of Reunion Tower in Dallas. There’s this crazy ending where Edward Albert is on top of the building, trying to diffuse the bomb, and Joe Don Baker is shooting at him from the helicopter. They were flying that thing thirty feet away from the tower! You could never shoot something like that today, not in a million years. That whole movie was a vanity project for these guys. The girl, Audrey Landers, was dating the money guy. It got made for all these weird reasons.

Besides Audrey Landers there were a lot of actors in the movie from the TV series Dallas. Edward Albert was also mostly a TV actor. Because of that, GETTING EVEN gives off that vibe of becoming a TV series.  

That was never the plan, as far as I know. The Dallas part came from Audrey Landers, who’s a very lovely person by the way. She was a star on that show and she knew a lot of people. We wanted to have local actors, because that would save money. She picked up the phone and called them. Edward Albert was pitched to us by the casting agent, I believe. And Joe Don Baker came to us through our producer Alan Belkin, who had made two Chuck Norris movies. He knew Joe Don’s agent or manager, because he had almost cast him in a previous movie.

In an interview, Joe Don Baker praised you as a director, saying that GETTING EVEN had the best used budget he had ever seen. What were some of your strategies of getting the most production value out of your budget? 

For one thing, I storyboarded the movie, which I hadn’t done before. I felt so overwhelmed by the size of it. The other thing was, our producer Alan Belkin knew Paul Baxley, who had been the number one stunt coordinator for a long time. His son Craig Baxley also became a stuntman and a director. Paul Baxley is the key to this movie. Because by the time we made GETTING EVEN, Paul was at an age that he was just happy to be working. And I was honest with him. I said: Paul, I know how to do the fight scenes and the car chases, but I don’t know how to do any of the helicopter stuff. I just don’t have the experience. Now, a lot of people would have taken that as a chance to elbow in, especially with a young director, but Paul didn’t need to do that. He was like a mentor to me. He really helped me to figure out the helicopter sequences, the explosions, how to do all of it safely. He was super knowledgeable. If he wanted a guy to drop from a helicopter, he knew who to call. Paul Baxley was my secret weapon.  

What kind of guy was Joe Don Baker to work with? 

After eleven in the morning he would be the greatest guy in the world. He would always stay up late and I guess he liked his brown medicine. If he had an early call, he would be a bear. Just cranky from being hung over. So, we figured out how to do other scenes in the morning and not to knock on his door until eleven. From that time on he would be a great guy, funny too. But we had to plan around him. I had the same problem with Donald Pleasence [on HALLOWEEN 4], but he was the opposite: from seven in the morning until three in the afternoon, he was spot on. Then he would get into whatever he was doing and he would lose his concentration and he would get crankier and crankier. About six o’ clock we would have to send him home. It was always the drinking.  

But Joe Don was easy to work with otherwise. You know, WALKING TALL was a blessing and a curse for him. In Texas, every local guy in a bar would want to pick a fight with him. They all wanted to say that they kicked Buford Pusser’s ass. But he’s not that guy. He had to buy rounds of drinks and calm everyone down. The role gave him notoriety, but it also typecast him.  

I thought his work became more interesting when his days as a leading man were over and he became this character actor.  

Yeah, he was in a Bond movie, wasn’t he? 

Three Bond movies.  

That is huge. He was also great in CAPE FEAR. When I read that Scorsese cast him, I was curious to see what the maestro got out of Joe Don Baker that maybe I didn’t get. And then when I saw the movie, I was like: Yup! That’s Joe Don! Because you cast him for a certain thing and he does that really well.  

Why hasn’t GETTING EVEN been distributed on DVD or Blu-ray? Is it an ownership issue?  

Good question. Quite a few of my movies have had decent Blu-ray releases, even a crazy movie I made in India called BLOODSTONE. You would think GETTING EVEN is a perfect candidate for a re-issue. I would suspect there’s a copyright issue somewhere. It was released by Vestron on VHS and if Vestron owned it, who knows where the copyright is? They are long out of business. These kind of movies get gobbled up in multiple libraries. Probably nobody has tried to clear the rights. That’s my best guess.

How did you get involved with Nico Mastorakis for BLOODSTONE? 

Same thing. He had secured this financing in South India with a tennis player who became a movie producer, Ashok Amritraj. They wanted to make a ROMANCING THE STONE type movie. Nico had written the script and was set to direct, but at the last minute he couldn’t go. I’m not sure why, if it was business reasons or he had something going on here in the States, I don’t know. But he didn’t want to give up the deal. So, he started asking around town if anyone knew a non-union director who could handle action and shoot a complicated movie. Someone mentioned my name. For some reason I had this reputation of being cheap and non-union. 

Did you enjoy making it? 

I enjoyed it as an adventure.  But it was so difficult. You can do that as a young man. The food, the illnesses, the logistics, nothing working properly. We had a thirty-five day schedule. At day seventy-eight I was still shooting. And I wasn’t even done yet. It took a huge physical toll. I was sick pretty much every ten days. You get one bug, you get over it, you get another. That being said, the people were just wonderful. The Indian star we had, Rajinikanth, was fantastic. The camera just loves him.  

Other than the two American leads who were a bit flat.  

Nico didn’t even have the money to get SAG actors. We had to get non-union actors, and quickly. Anyone with any acting experience was already in SAG. You can’t really have non-union actors play the lead in a movie like this. It’s asking too much. They tried. But you couldn’t have done anything more with Rajinikanth. He was amazing.  

You’re going back to India to do TIGER HEART, right?  

That one has been cast, but it’s held up because of the pandemic. Honestly, I don’t know when it will actually shoot. Seems like another year at least before things settle down. It’s an action adventure film about the poaching of Bengal Tigers.

Was HALLOWEEN 4: THE RETURN OF MICHAEL MYERS your first union film? 

Yes. That’s why I took the job. Everyone told me not to. They said: HALLOWEEN is ten years old. They’re going to hang you up by your heels. It’s going to be the end of your career. Nobody thought it was a good idea for me to do that movie. But I thought: Are you kidding me? I would take the job for the opportunity to work with Donald Pleasence. On top of that I was anxious to get out of this non-union thing.  

Moustapha Akkad, the producer, found out that I had just been to India to shoot a movie. He had done these sweeping epics with Anthony Quinn, THE MESSAGE and LION OF THE DESERT. And he was thinking of going over to India to make his next film. So, he wanted to pick my brain about India. I think that’s one of the reasons he wanted to talk to me. But when I got to the meeting, I told them that the treatment they had given me to read, which was written by John Carpenter, Debra Hill and probably some other writers, was not something I wanted to do. It was just teenagers screwing and getting killed. I didn’t want to do any of that. They asked me what I would do and I basically pitched them HALLOWEEN 4.   

At that point the slasher genre had become tired. We had seen every cliché one time too many. HALLOWEEN 4 seems to avoid a lot of them by focusing on suspense instead of gore. 

I will take credit for that. And my collaborator Alan McElroy who did a great job on the script. But you’re right, I didn’t want to make a slasher movie. I approached it as a thriller. Of course there are some good kills, like the thumb in the forehead.  

That moment almost had a nightmarish quality to it.  

You know what’s funny? It was so simple. That was done with just a retractable thumb. It’s the oldest gag in the movies. Yet, your brain cannot process what the eye is seeing. It freaks people out because you don’t think: Ah, retractable thumb. You think: Oh my god! That thumb is going in his forehead! People were screaming fifteen minutes into the movie, which was pretty good.  

I like how you made a little girl the main character. And Danielle Harris really sells the fear of her character. How did you cast her? 

I was looking for a young actress to play that part and I couldn’t find the right girl. Because out here in LA, if a girl at that age had any acting experience, it was from commercials. They were trained to be peppy and perky. Just fake, basically. All of them. Or they had no experience at all, and to be able to carry this movie she had to have some experience. I told Moustapha I couldn’t find the right girl and he paid for me to go to New York to look there. God bless him, because not many producers would have done that. I went to New York, we put a casting session together and the third person who came in was Danielle. There wasn’t much on her resume and she hadn’t even read her lines yet, but when she came through the door I knew. I’m so glad we went through that extra effort, because had we settled for less, it would not have been the same movie. I don’t know of a child’s performance that’s better than Danielle’s, ever.  

If HALLOWEEN 4 is more of a thriller than a horror movie, then how would you describe THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA? That movie combines multiple genres. 

That was the weirdest movie. It’s not like anything else. Some people hate it, because it’s Gaston Leroux’s classic, with the Phantom and the opera and the music, but then it’s got this Freddy Krueger type slasher weaved into it. It’s the oddest of mash-ups. Because we had Robert Englund, the producers kept pushing for these bloody killings. We couldn’t even pretend that the story took place in France, because Menahem Golan already had these sets of London.

Where did he get the sets from? 

Menahem was in Budapest, as a director, making MACK THE KNIFE with Roger Daltrey. Another crazy, weird project for which he had built this mid-nineteen century London. A beautiful set. He came to me because he knew HALLOWEEN 4 had made money. I got this call, saying: Menahem Golan wants to meet you. Turns out he wants to meet me in a hotel bar in Budapest. I thought: That’s a commitment. I had to fly over there just to meet with him. He didn’t have a script yet, but he had already spoken to Robert Englund. In this thick Israeli accent he told me he wanted to show me something. And he showed me this great set. He was a good salesman, he talked me into it easily. We also had access to an opera house, a couple of hours out of Budapest, and a great cathedral. We had spectacular locations.  

Were you ever in danger of staying in the horror genre too long?  

I guess I was. Moustapha Akkad really wanted me to do HALLOWEEN 5. He even pressured me to do it. I felt we got lucky on HALLOWEEN 4. Lucky in finding Danielle, lucky with that twist ending, which didn’t work on paper as well as it did in the movie. I didn’t think the movie gods were going to visit me twice. If I tried it again, it might turn out bad. Also, I wanted to do bigger things. So I did worry about being trapped in the genre, but MARKED FOR DEATH got me out of that.

Steven Seagal already had two modest hits under his belt. Did he have to approve you as director? 

Actually, he had called me in before, after he had seen HALLOWEEN 4. He liked that movie and he wanted me to do HARD TO KILL. People are quick to dismiss him as an action movie guy, but he was way more savvy about movies than you might think. He went to Warner Brothers and told them he wanted me to direct HARD TO KILL, but Warner’s said: No way! They went with another guy [Bruce Malmuth] who had done the Sylvester Stallone movie NIGHTHAWKS and who had a big studio credit. That’s when I went off to do PHANTOM OF THE OPERA.  

Seagal was very unhappy with how HARD TO KILL turned out. He didn’t like working with this particular director. Because he was pissed, he decided to do his next film for Fox. He had an out in his contract; he was allowed one movie outside the Warner deal. He went to Fox’s Joe Roth and Roger Birnbaum and said: This is the guy I want as a director. And they said: Who is this guy? Do we know him? Same thing all over again. But this time Seagal dug his heels in. I got that job only because Steven insisted. And Fox just wanted a Seagal movie, because they had nothing at that point. Joe [Roth] had just come in, HOME ALONE hadn’t happened yet. He needed a movie. And even though ABOVE THE LAW hadn’t done great business at the box office, Warner had sold an unbelievable amount of VHS tapes of it. 

It wasn’t until my third day of shooting MARKED FOR DEATH that HARD TO KILL came out in theaters. It opened huge and it stayed on top for a while. No one, including Steven, thought that was going to be success. But it was. Frankly, just based on his charisma and a couple of good action scenes. I was downtown shooting a scene for MARKED FOR DEATH when suddenly I see all these limo’s and towncars coming to the set. They were all CAA-agents and producers, coming out of the woodwork to see the next big action guy. They all wanted to talk to him. Not based on ABOVE THE LAW, but based on HARD TO KILL. It was a fascinating cultural experience. But I couldn’t get my shots done, so I told the producer to get rid of them.  

MARKED FOR DEATH did even better than HARD TO KILL. It continued Steven’s upward trajectory. I  think OUT FOR JUSTICE did pretty well, but then UNDER SIEGE was a monster hit. And then the train kind of… The first one that was really bad, was the one in Alaska [ON DEADLY GROUND]. But there was that moment when he was Warner’s number one action star.  

What was it specifically that appealed to Seagal in HALLOWEEN 4? 

He loved that the movie had a consistent tone and atmosphere. He loved the performances, especially Danielle’s. He loved that it was more of a thriller.  

As an action film, MARKED FOR DEATH has a dark edge to it.  

It does. Everyone was constantly pushing for the movie to be more jokey and tongue-in-cheek. You know, a quip after every action scene. I kept saying to Steven: Do you want me to make a comedy or are we going to make THE FRENCH CONNECTION? If you stand by me, I’ll give you THE FRENCH CONNECTION, but I can’t fight these people. They’re too big for me. They’ll eat me up.

We had made this pact. Every time we got notes from the studio, trying to push the movie in the wrong direction, I went to Steven and said: Steven, what did we say? Are we making THE FRENCH CONNECTION or not? And he had made his bed with me. He had pushed for me with the studio, so it wasn’t in his interest to sabotage me. It was in his interest to let me make my movie. I know it’s funny to talk this way about a Steven Seagal movie, but even in a movie like that, there’s a lot of artistry that goes into it.  

So, Seagal was easy to work with? 

There’s nothing easy about Steven. He’s a very big personality. I never met Donald Trump, but it must be the same thing. He just takes up so much space. I don’t know if he’s a narcissist, but it’s all about him. But because I was his choice, I had a different experience with him. If the studio had assigned me to him, he would have eaten me alive. That’s why, when people ask me if Steven was an asshole and terrible to work with, I can say: Well, not with me. We actually wanted to make the same movie.  

Was your next action movie, RAPID FIRE, an attempt of Fox to launch Brandon Lee’s career as the next big action star? 

Yes, absolutely. At that time, you could make four or five successful action movies in a row if you had a Chuck Norris. There was a demand for these movies. They had seen Brandon in this Dolph Lundgren movie that nobody saw [SHOWDOWN IN LITTLE TOKYO]. They saw the potential. And them being the mercenaries they are, they also saw the Bruce Lee marketing potential. They clearly wanted their own in-house action star. And Brandon was young, handsome, he had the pedigree, he could do the action. Yes, it was a calculated effort to create a star.

Did he want to become an action star? 

Brandon wanted to use his name and his martial arts skills as a springboard to mainstream Hollywood films. He had every intention of being a Johnny Depp or Matt Damon style leading actor. He would have done fantastic had he continued.

RAPID FIRE is the greatest action movie of that era that people haven’t seen yet.  

I know. Although it does get rediscovered. In this country it’s on cable TV quite a bit.  I like it, but I don’t even know why.  

Well, because it’s almost non-stop action, which is expertly handled, it has a great lead in Brandon Lee, who is playing the underdog, and it has some great funny lines.  

It does have some funny lines, for which we gotta give Alan McElroy credit. But we made this fundamental mistake: we had two villains. I talked to Alan about this. In the beginning we meet them both: Nick Mancuso as the Italian gangster and Tzi Ma as the Asian drug lord. You spend two acts building up Nick Mancuso as the big bad guy, ending with this huge, crazy fight. Then he gets killed in the jail cell. That’s villain number one. There’s a lot of rooting interest in that. But now the audience has to change gears and put their emotional investment in this next villain. But by then you already had your moment of getting the bad guy. In retrospect what we should have done was combine the two villains and work our way up to one climactic scene. RAPID FIRE has this weird structure. I only realized this years later. With a different ending, that movie could have made a hundred million dollars. It was so much fun.  

When I re-watched MARKED FOR DEATH and RAPID FIRE, I realized how aikido is much less cinematic than Brandon Lee’s Jeet Kune Do. Could you tell me about some of the factors that come into play when making that physical stuff look good?  

Steven is the only guy who does what he does in the movies, where you let your opponent’s energy go past you. It that respect, he’s totally unique. But it’s not a forward, high kicking, punching thing. That’s why I felt I needed action movie stuff in MARKED FOR DEATH, like car chases, gun fights, explosions and some old fashioned cop stuff. Because if we tried to string together a bunch of Steven’s fights, they will quickly start to feel the same. In the end he’s only got a few moves. He does them over and over in different situations. He does nothing with his legs. They stay planted. And all his upper body stuff is very tight. Brandon on the other hand was flipping, high kicking and doing all this stuff.

You were credited as an executive producer on BROKEN ARROW and I was wondering if you were ever attached to direct it.  

Yes, I was. I developed it with Graham Yost. I had read about how the Navy has a term for when they lose a nuclear missile, so I got this idea for a movie. I pitched it at Fox, because I still knew those guys, and they hooked me up with Graham, who had just written SPEED. Suddenly, Fox wanted to go really fast with it, because the script had come in pretty well. But I was still doing FREE WILLY 2 at Warner Brothers. So, I had this weird Sophie’s choice of either leaving FREE WILLY 2 early, because I still had a long way to go with editing, or leaving BROKEN ARROW. Finally, I decided I wanted to finish FREE WILLY 2. In retrospect I should have made BROKEN ARROW. But it’s because of FREE WILLY 2 that I got MURDER AT 1600. The Warner people had faith me.  

Did John Woo make the same BROKEN ARROW movie you wanted to make? 

No, he made a very different movie than what I was planning. I wanted to do a Tom Clancy type thriller, much like CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER. John Woo made it much lighter. John Travolta played it over the top. The movie was tongue-in-cheek and campy. But you can’t blame him, because it made a lot of money.  

It’s so strange that these movies with sleazy presidents, like MURDER AT 1600, have now turned out to be less outrageous than reality.  

Well, it was funny. We had great difficulty filming that graphic sex scene on the desk of the Oval Office. The Warner people told us we couldn’t do that. They thought we were crazy to do that. They wanted us to have him take her off into a side room or whatever. Arnold Kopelson, the producer, told the Warner people: This is the controversy that’s going to drive this movie. People are going to be buzzing about this. Warner thought it was outrageous. And it seemed outrageous when we shot it, which was in 1996. Then, subsequently, the Monica Lewinsky thing happened, and I said: Not so crazy now, is it?

Movies like MARKED FOR DEATH and RAPID FIRE were some of the last of those mid-budget studio action movies. In the second half of the nineties action movies became so bloated.  

Yeah, action movies were losing their mojo. When the first SPIDER-MAN came out, around 2002, that’s when our business really changed. After that it was all universe-movies. That completely took over the business. And those movies are meant to be big and bloated. They’re events. After SPIDER-MAN it was: Why would we make anything else?

A lot of directors went into episodic television around that same time. You did as well.  

MURDER AT 1600 did not do the business people hoped it would. A lot of that is because of ABSOLUTE POWER, which came before us. I was promised right from the beginning that we would open in January and ABSOLUTE POWER in April. We did a test screening in Santa Monica in late December. Full theater. The Warner Brothers people were there. The Kopelsons were there. We got all the cards back. All the marks were high. The following morning the word got out at the Warner Brothers offices that this little Wesley Snipes programmer had had an excellent test screening. Somebody from Malpaso was there for a meeting and heard about it. He went back and told Clint Eastwood. I’m not sure Clint was even aware of our movie, but he started asking around, he found out MURDER AT 1600 did really well at the test screening, and he went to Bob Daly and Terry Semel, who were the chiefs at Warner Brothers, and demanded that ABSOLUTE POWER be released first. He’s a smart guy. He doesn’t want to be second with another White House thriller. So we get a call that our movie was pushed back to April. It was so disappointing. Every review said: Just like last month’s ABSOLUTE POWER… We looked like the copycat.  

So, that’s when you chose to go into television.  

Yeah, after that experience, I got a call from an old friend of mine, Jim Wong, and he asked me if I was interested in directing an episode of this show he was working on, called MILLENNIUM. I asked my agent and he said: Don’t do it! You’ll be a television director. My manager said the same thing: Don’t do it. I talked to my wife and she said: Do it! Turns out my wife was the only smart one. The script they gave me was called Midnight of the Century and the episode starred Lance [Henriksen], of course, and Darren McGavin as his father. My very first episode of a television series was spectacular. That led to other quality television, like the David Kelley show The Practice, which had fantastic scripts and great actors. Then I got hooked. But my agent and manager were right: now I was a television director. But that’s what everybody wanted to be suddenly. Get me into television! Get me into television! Because, as you said, the feature business was diminishing, unless you were making these really big movies. Luckily, I got there early.

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Thanks to GETTING EVEN superfan John Ira Thomas for contributing questions about the movie.

A previous version of this article erroneously claimed that Absolute Power was produced and released by Warner Brothers. It was produced by Castle Rock and released by Columbia Tristar.