BY TODD GARBARINI
Film director Jonathan Mostow began his career in film shortly
after graduating college in the mid-1980’s as a television writer and director for
segments on Fright Show in 1985, Beverly Hills Body Snatchers in
1989, and the TV-movie Flight of Black Angel in 1991. While working as
the executive producer of the Michael Douglas suspenser The Game (1997),
Mr. Mostow was also looking to adapt Stephen King’s short story “Trucks†into a
film. Although it had already been shot in late 1985 by Mr. King (in a
directing capacity) as Maximum Overdrive (1986), there was interest to
do another film version of it – until all involved were told that they could
not use Stephen King’s name with the project. This proved to be fortuitous as
most of the locations had not only been scouted but also secured for filming, although
there was no film to be shot. Mr. Mostow took the locations and fashioned a
story about a couple driving across the country to start a new life when
unexpectedly their life takes a huge wrong turn. The result is Breakdown,
a nail-biting suspense thriller that is Mr. Mostow’s feature film debut as a
director, which is now available on Blu-ray from Paramount Pictures Home
Entertainment. I spoke with Mr. Mostow recently about the film and the new
Blu-ray.
Todd Garbarini: Thank you for having gotten Breakdown made.
I can safely say that this is the most intense motion picture that I have ever
seen. I initially did not want to see it based on the theatrical trailer
because it looked “run-of-the-millâ€, however I found myself at the Glendale 9
Drive-In in June 1997 while in Arizona on business, and Breakdown was the
only title, aside from Jim Carrey’s Liar, Liar, that appealed to me. I
love Kurt Russell and the film completely blew me away. I was not prepared for the
movie at all, and I don't know how you made it the way you did, but I'm
grateful because I think it's extraordinary. It's a film that possesses a level
of emotional tension that I have rarely, if ever, experienced in a
feature film and it also has one of the best movie scores I’ve ever heard.
Would it be fair to say that Steven Spielberg's Duel was an influence on
the film?
Jonathan
Mostow: I'm sure that it was. First off, thank you for the super kind words.
I'm going to guess that since you saw this at a drive-in, you heard the audio
from inside a car?
TG: No, actually I was sitting on the hood of the car, and
the movie was so full of tension and suspense that I honestly thought that my
sweaty palms would pull the paint off the car! The audio was actually very,
very good. The drive-in no longer had those small, tinny speakers. The audio
instead was pumped through the FM radio band, and there were many cars all
around me that were doing that. I didn't even have to listen through my Ford
Taurus station wagon rental car (laughs), and I heard all the music and
dialogue perfectly.
JM: Oh that’s good, because I'm really a stickler about good
sound.
TG: I am, too.
JM: I want to cringe when I hear about drive-ins because I thought
it probably would have sounded terrible! I want to address something that
you said earlier when we began speaking, and that's how you pretty much didn't
want to see Breakdown as a result of the trailer. I will never forget
when I was a young filmmaker at the time because it was my first studio film
and we had just had a test screening that had gone really well. The way that it
works is that they have a test screening and afterwards they ask questions of
the audience. So, the whole audience was still inside the theater, filling out
the questionnaire, and in the lobby a group of the senior executives from the
studio were milling around and asking each other how they were going to market
the movie. I happened to overhear them, and they sort of intimated that this
would be a good movie for the drive-in crowd, so-to-speak. Especially in the
South, they felt that the South would somehow like it more. Since I was a young
filmmaker at the time, I didn't feel that it was really my place to walk up to
the top people of the studio and tell them their business, but I really wanted
to tell them that this is not the crowd that this film was designed for.
I saw the film as really a nightmare for yuppies. This is a nightmare for the
metrosexual, educated, polo-shirt wearing, white collar middle-aged Everyman. That's
who this is a nightmare for and that's who you should be selling this to.
The marketing campaign, in
a way, I believe sent a different message to the audience than what I was intending
about the film and the result was what you said earlier about not wanting
to see it initially, and how the film ultimately surprised you and you came to
like the film a lot more than you initially thought you would.
TG: I must admit, that doesn’t
happen to me often.
JM: I have heard that reaction
from so many people, and Kurt (Russell) heard that from so many
people. The question was, “Why didn't you think you would enjoy it?â€, and the answer
was, “The way that it was originally sold was that the ad campaign set up
certain expectations that were not the expectations that I would have set
up had I been designing the ad campaign.†I have to say that the
studio (Paramount) did a fantastic job with this brand-new Blu-ray transfer. It
looks gorgeous. For so many years, people have been asking me why they couldn't
find this movie on Blu-ray.
TG: Yes, I was one of those…
JM: And I would have to explain to them that it wasn't available
on Blu-ray. I was thrilled when the studio got in touch with me last year and
they told me that they were going to do this movie right, that they would do a
whole new transfer. I went in and sort of supervised it and signed off on what
they did. I was just thrilled with it. Now, to answer your question about Duel,
I'm a little older than you, and I grew up watching TV movies. Duel was
originally a made-for-TV movie, and it did receive a theatrical release later
on. But there were lots of these TV movies at the time, where a couple is
driving somewhere, they're pulled over for a speeding ticket, or there is a
corrupt cop who ends up imprisoning them and embezzling them for money, or the
wife disappears, etc.
TG: Yes, Dying Room Only with Dabney Coleman and Cloris
Leachman was one of the more famous films of that ilk.
JM: Right, and all these horrible things happen. I don't even
remember the names of most of these movies, but I'm thinking of an aggregate of
that, plus the types of themes that you would see in an Alfred Hitchcock
movie, they were all kind of rattling around in my brain. So, when I had an
idea for this, even though this is a quote-unquote “original ideaâ€, and
arguably no ideas are original because everything's been pretty much done in
cinema, because we are all creatures of the culture that we grew up in, I
thought it should be a road movie.
TG: The climax of the film looked like a real nightmare to shoot.
Did it take a long time to shoot that?
JM: Yeah, we actually spent a couple of weeks on that. That was
one of the few things that we shot that was in the Los Angeles area. The rest
of the film was shot in Utah, Nevada, and all over the place.
TG: I couldn't help but notice that Gabby Petito, the woman who
tragically disappeared and who has been in the news with her fiancé Brian Laundrie,were
stopped by police just outside of the entrance to Arches National Park, which
is in Moab, Utah. This location is featured prominently at the film's start,
particularly the general store where Jeffrey Taylor has words with the pickup
truck’s driver played by M.C. Gainey.
JM: We shot everything for real in this movie. Nowadays, if you're
going to shoot a car chase, most of it is digital. I have always been a
believer in the idea that even though you can do things digitally, and back
then the digital technology was still sort of in its infancy, it was kind of
cost-prohibitive, too – to make something visceral, you should really go out of
the way and do it for real. The only thing that was truly digital was in
certain cases during the climax when the Peterbilt cab is going over the bridge
and dangling, that was a real truck. But naturally, it was suspended by
construction cranes and we had to digitally remove all of them, the wiring
holding up the cab, etc. If you scratch beneath the surface, of any movie, what
you have is a director who's basically a child playing with a big electric
train set. It's never easy of course, but it was also super fun.
TG: I became a fan of Basil Poledouris after I heard his magnificent
score to John Milius’s Conan the Barbarian which I saw it when it opened
in May 1982. Was he your first choice to score this phone?
JM: Well, Basil had been suggested to me and we had ended up
bringing in a composer I had worked with previously, Richard Marvin, and he did
some of the music as well, and the net result of what we ended up with was a score
that neither one of them would have done on their own. In a lot of cases, where
we recorded a big score with a large orchestra, I went up just taking out the
orchestra completely and leaving in just a kind of percussion track or
something. Scoring the movie itself was an unusual process and everybody was
happy with it at the end. However, the initial issue that I was having with Basil’s
score was that he was capturing the emotion but not capturing enough of the
suspense. That being said, I don't believe that it was a score that anybody
would have devised on the outside.
TG: I think that the score works perfectly. Especially towards the
climax, the end of the film, you have Jeffrey struggling to get to his wife,
and the intercutting between Jeffrey and the kidnappers, that whole sequence is
just incredible. The tension that you built during that sequence was
magnificent.
JM: Well, you should appreciate this story. One night, we were
working very late in Basil’s studio which was in Venice (California). This was
a very dangerous area back then. It was about two in the morning, and he tells
me that he has to go down the street and get some cigarettes. He asked me if I
wanted anything from the corner store. On the one hand I told him no thank you,
but on the other hand, in my head, I'm thinking, “Are you crazy?! You're going
to go to a corner store at two in the morning?†I wouldn't walk out in that
neighborhood at two in the morning even if I had armed escorts. It was at that
moment that I realized that Basil had no personal fear. He was the sort of the
opposite of me. I’m a fairly anxious person and that's how I was throughout
most of the making of this movie, dealing with my own anxiety. What I realized
at that moment was that Basil was connecting with the sadness. Kurt's
character, Jeffrey Taylor, had this feeling of having lost his wife and didn’t
know where she was or even how to find her. He was also facing potentially
losing his wife forever. Basil was capturing that beautifully, but the problem
was I wasn't feeling the anxiety. So that's why I brought in Richard so
he could just nail the anxiety that I really needed for the movie. In the end, the
score ended up being what I really needed, which was a hybrid between the
sadness and the anxiety. That's why I think the score worked so well for the
film. If these composers had done the scores on their own, I don't think that
they would have achieved the effect that I was looking for. It just had to be a
partnership.
TG: Do you have an all-time favorite movie?
JM: No, because it varies. There are movies that you love
tremendously when you are young, and I'm sure that you have probably
experienced this yourself, and then you look at them maybe 15 or 20 years later
and they just don't hold up for you anymore. I remember watching Barbra
Streisand getting a Lifetime Achievement Award, and she said something that has
always stuck with me. She said that it was great to get these awards, it's
great to be recognized for your work, but the real test is if 30 years from now,
which of these films will stand up? Which of these films will still work? And
that's what's amazing to me when I go back and I look at certain films that
were made, you know, 20 or 30 years ago, and they hold up, that's always, to
me, the miracle. Some films hold up and some films simply don't.
TG: I agree. In 1979, I saw two films that I loved very much: Moonraker
and The Black Hole. Both films have really wonderful film scores by the
late great John Barry. But the former is James Bond in outer space and the latter
was really beautiful to look at, but had very little in the way of action. I
really loved both films when I first saw them, but watching them many years
later, I found the former to be puerile and insipid and the latter to be plodding
and boring. And it killed me that I felt that way. One film from that era that
stands the test of time for me is George Miller's The Road Warrior which
was, is, and I think always will be, the best action film that I've ever seen.
I never tire of that film. There are some problems with it, when they overcrank
or undercrank the action and it just looks like a Mack Sennett comedy for a few
seconds, I don't agree with that, they should have left it alone. The
Shining is another one. That film terrified me when I first saw it and it's
still the most beautiful horror film that I've ever seen. What are some of the
other films that you've seen that have influenced your career?
JM: When I was a child, my father took me to see Alfred
Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes. We saw it at this old repertory movie
theater near where we lived, and this film plays a little bit like sort of a
light comedy. But to an eight-year-old kid like me, I found the film to be
totally gripping. The idea in that film is that this woman suddenly disappears
10 minutes into the movie. And the audience is wondering where the hell did she
go? I believe that that notion stayed in my subconscious all these years and in
a way, Breakdown was my way of exercising that out of my subconscious.
So, Breakdown is the film that kind of launched my career. Even though
that is one of Hitchcock's lesser works, for me personally, it had a great
influence. That's also a hard question to answer, because truthfully, I didn't
see a great many movies growing up. By the time I had gotten to college, I
don't believe I had seen more than 15 or 20 movies.
TG: What films did you initially not like, then you watched them
again later on and had a different experience and ended up really liking them?
JM: I have to be honest, there are very few films that I've seen
multiple times. Once I've seen a film, that's it. I've seen it. I remember
seeing an interview one time with a filmmaker, and it came out in the interview
that once he was done with the film he never sees it again. And I hadn't
directed any movie prior to seeing that interview. And I remember thinking how
crazy that was! I thought to myself if I'd directed a movie, I would watch it
every week! Sure enough, I found that once I finished the film, I've never gone
back to watch it again. Ever! Breakdown, of course, is the exception
because I watched it with Kurt Russell while we did the commentary for it. You
see it more than once when you're traveling around the world, doing press
screenings and that sort of thing. But psychologically for me, I'm just done.
And I move on. I have seen Goodfellas a few times. That's one that comes
to mind. Other movies that I've seen before, I might catch a few scenes of it
here or there on television. But I generally don't watch it again all the way
through. I tend to not be a big repeat viewer.
In closing, I just really appreciate that Paramount is releasing
this movie on Blu-ray with our commentary track and all the extras. There are
some really interesting interviews on it. We're actually including the
alternate opening to the film on this disc. This is something that has never
been shown to the public before.
TG: For me, that is worth the price of admission alone. Thank you
very much for speaking with me, it’s been a pleasure.
Click here to order from Amazon
Click here to read Todd Garbarini's review of the Paramount Blu-ray.