By Christina Radish
|
|
|
Jason Statham at the San Diego Comic Convention on July 20, 2006. |
Taking place over the course of one frenzied day in Los Angeles, the new Lions Gate film Crank tells the high stakes tale of hit man Chev Chelios (Jason Statham), as he learns he has been poisoned in his sleep by thug Ricky Verona (Jose Pablo Cantillo), and has only an hour to live. Now, Chev must keep moving, and keep his adrenaline flowing, in order to stay alive. As the clock ticks, Chev must rescue his girlfriend Eve (Amy Smart) from danger, stay two steps ahead of his nemeses as they try to eliminate him, and search for an antidote to save his own life.
For writer/directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, former commercial helmers making their feature film debut, Crank stemmed from their own personal desire to make a non-stop action movie. Absolutely crucial to the success of the filmmaking process was casting the right actor to play Chev. They found that actor in British born Jason Statham.
Statham was excited about getting involved with the project because it was so full of violence, romance, comedy and drama. “I love doing a film like this ‘cause it breaks through boundaries,” the 33-year-old star of The Transporter tells MediaBlvd Magazine. “We ain’t spending hundreds of millions of dollars to do something that people are gonna like. This is pure action. Crank is like an old school action movie where the stunts are real stunts, and that excited me. You can swing people on wires in front of green screens, but so what? It’s just a case of money, and that doesn’t excite me. What excites me is the creative side of action movies.”
{quote_top}An Olympic Diver on the British National Diving Team in 1992, Statham loves to do his own stunts. “Brian and Mark did a very good job of poking me with a very sharp stick and saying, ‘Don’t you dare stop running.’ The shoot was a 30-day shoot and the only day I got off was a Sunday, and that was everybody’s day off. It was a very frenetic shoot for me. It was non-stop craziness. We just kept going. A lot of the time, Mark was on roller blades, and he’s a very good roller blader. To try to get away from a man that’s got his physicality is a difficult achievement. I went green several times and nearly ended up in a pile of my own puke. That was just par for the course with this kind of film.”
Because they shied away from using green screen for the stunts in Crank, Statham reveals that that’s what made it more dangerous than something like The Transporter, and its sequel. “We pushed the boundaries. We risked ourselves -- not just me, but the two directors -- many times. It just lent itself to the way the movie had to be shot. Everything was shot in camera. There’s no way you can get away from the dangerous aspects of what we did.”
Even with the fact that Statham always tries to do his own stunts, he admits that there still is fear in some of the work that he does. “The decelerator rig that we used was an adventure for me because, the first time, you don’t know what’s going to happen. You don’t know how to prepare for it because you’re relying on machinery. I’m very confident when I’m relying on my own physical capabilities for stunt work. I’ll jump, if I can land on my feet. And, if someone throws a punch, I know I can move. But, when you’re putting your life in a machine’s hands, that’s where I get a little bit uncomfortable. So, with the decelerator rig, I asked 50 million questions, and went through every little nut and bolt, and every piece of equipment, and I wanted to see it work. I wanted to know that, if something electronically failed, there would be something else to stop me from turning into a pool of blood.”
As Statham’s star status rises, his desire to do his own stunts can be a producer’s nightmare, from a liability standpoint, but he says that he still finds it very hard to say no. “I get a big thrill out of doing it. The producers would normally prefer me to sit in the tall chair and let the stunt man do the stunts. There’s so much faking that goes on that I just feel like the audience gets cheated a little bit. If you’ve got a guy capable of doing it, then stick him in and let the audience see it.”
{quote_middle}The set of Crank was not entirely without its injuries either, as some of the scenes were pretty intense to shoot. “That wasn’t exactly my fault, but I will take a certain amount of responsibility. We were fighting, in and around the outside of a helicopter a few thousand feet about downtown L.A., and trying to keep our composure at all times, while we were highly energized with a certain degree of fear that we were all going to fall to the floor. In an attempt to make it realistic, we got a bit carried away. Poor Jose Pablo Cantillo reached in for a punch, and he reacted so much that he cracked his head on the side of the helicopter.”
Along with all the action scenes in Crank, Statham has a rather public sex scene with Smith star Amy Smart, who plays Chev’s girlfriend, Eve. “That was a tough one. One of the hardest things I had to imagine was how they were going to film this sex scene, and how it was going to stay in the movie. If I were to just get on a table and drop my pants, I’d probably feel the same way I felt that day. I had a whole group of people staring at my pasty, white bottom. It’s just a crazy, desperate moment, and that’s why it’s funny. This guy is lulling to the point of dying, and that should be the last thing on his mind, but he grabs his girlfriend, and away they go.”
Making the transition from con man on the streets of London, hustling fake designer perfume and knock-off jewelry, to bona fide film star, Statham has worked with the likes of Academy Awards winner Charlize Theron, Edward Norton, Mark Wahlberg, Donald Sutherland, Brad Pitt and Ice Cube, among others. Quickly establishing himself as a bankable action star, Statham says that he was drawn to the genre for the chance to play a leading man.
“It wasn’t like I’d had intentions of being in action films. What you want to do is restricted in many different ways. You can’t go up to some producer and say, ‘By the way, I’m gonna be in an action film.’ It’s a lot more complicated than that. It was just a lucky shot that Luc Besson (writer of The Transporter) gave me, and it allowed me to do another one. I’ve had a ton of experience in the physical world. I’ve done a lot of sports, martial arts, and fighting as a kid, so it just came very naturally to me.”
{quote_bottom}Hoping to do a dramatic film next, the Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels star doesn’t discount the possibility of a third film in The Transporter franchise, or The Brazilian Job, a sequel to 2003's The Italian Job.
“We want to do The Brazilian Job, but whether that happens is another thing. We’re all good friends. We’re a good little group and, if that comes along, I’ll be smiling. I think we made a good movie, and I think we can make another good movie.”
