Talking tactics with Todd himself: Kurt Russell

By Kim August

To prepare for his role as the battle-weary Todd, Russell had to begin an arduous exercise/diet program. “I told them it was going to take a year and a half, you might not want to wait that long. They talked about it and said ‘Yeah, if that’s what’s it going to take then that’s what we’ll do.’ So I did. I got together with a guy named Greg Issacs who is the Warner Brothers fitness guy. He’s an old friend of mine. He said ‘You can do it. It’s a year and a half,’” So Kurt went for it, as there was no other way to become Todd. “I had no choice, because I wasn’t going to have any ability through dialog or through make up or wardrobe to be sort of able to create an illusion of you know, like you normally do. Just say ‘Well, this is what it is.’ And they gave me the time. It was three to five hours every day and a real specific diet.”

When Kurt agreed to taking on the role, there were more than just physical challenges. “There are a number of choices you can make in playing a character. I always read the screenplay and say ‘What’s the honest call here, what does the screenplay call for?’ It seemed to me here that this was a man who very clearly from day one had been trained, and in a sort of LORD OF THE FILES environment. Survival of the fittest, but you’re also getting training at the same time to enhance your abilities and finally you graduate and go wherever they tell you to go. By that time, you are a thoroughly deemotionalized human being,” the actor says. “I thought that was an interesting concept by David Peoples, of what a person like that would be and it seemed to me that the reality was exactly what he had written. The guy had never been asked a question in his life, nobody has ever asked him anything. He’s just been told what to do, so not only was there no reason for him to speak there was no was no process for which he could go by to try to speak. ‘Yes Sir, No Sir.’ Do that, do this. That left no room to fudge in terms of playing the character outside the perimeter that had been drawn by the screenplay. And I liked what the perimeters were, I liked the idea of playing someone like that, “ he recalls. “Like any other role though, you rely on your instincts as an actor to think about what’s inside that person’s head and in the case here, that sort of made it a little bit of a double problem for me. You may think something as an actor and wish to have what you’re thinking expressed, but this character might be thinking something and not expressing it. But then you want to see that he is thinking it and not expressing it.”

Kurt may make it look easy, but playing a character that relies on emotion and body language is anything but. “That’s very hard. That’s very, very hard. It’s not what any of us are used to doing, “ Russell notes. “Where it’s probably the hardest and it’s nearly impossible is in the scenes where there are actors talking to you,and characters relating to you, it’s just possible to get into a groove, get into the character and just think about everything but respond in a just a non-verbal manner. And in that regard, it’s easy to carry somebody out who just doesn’t have the normal sort of expression that might take place on your face or your body language when you respond to something.”

However, Kurt points out certain moments in the film where it’s very hard to convey so little emotion. “Where’s it very difficult is actually when we are doing the fight scenes. I also felt that these guys were basically immune to almost all pain. So When you get hit, it’s normal in a fight as a person you exert your self (his body falls into a defensive fighting stance), it’s very difficult to exert yourself without any expression. But it was good to do that, it was good for me to do that. I did that when I was training. I learned to exert myself without any emotional feeling behind it. I was watching some of the stuff when De Niro did RAGING BULL, wishing I would have the luxury of eating my way into it (laughs) in eighteen months and doing the opposite. In a lot of films everybody exerts themselves, I looked at even some old pictures that I’d done, and everybody exerts themselves when they fight,” he says casually. “I didn’t think this character should do that. I told Paul, you have to be very aware of me with these fight scenes, I don’t want to see a great deal of facial expression going on; if you do see that, I want to do it again and try to get to a place where I do it with authority and force, but with no apparent emotion behind it, until the very last moment when he kills Caine. I think by that time, there’s the little bit of humanity that he’s discovered inside himself allows him to probably be a little confused and of emotion when he ends a life, because he’s ended so many.”

Todd’s banishment reminded me of Vietnam vets, Russell thinks of this in more clear cut terms. “I think I didn’t do any of that I felt that that’s what the screenplay was. I do that it’s significant in that’s what basically in our societies, the beehives, the job of the soldier is so highly unappreciated, it’s just expected,” he notes. “We, in our societies, just expect that they will give their lives up, but we don’t very often examine it. And the idea of examining it in a science fiction fashion, and that we come out the same year that SAVING PRIVATE RYAN comes out. It’s a strange and interesting (to me), examination of soldiers in 1945 and soldiers possibly from only 80 years later. We take our soldiers now: ‘Yours is not to reason why’, we do that. If you do run into a situation of an army that will question it’s authority, question it’s leadership, you’re not going to make it. But how could you eliminate that possibility? This would be what you would do.”

The actor sees his character as very primal, animalistic. “They are a pack of wolves. He is the alpha dog, they have a respect for that. That comes from years and years and years of challenging that authority, but when the alpha dog returns from having been apparently killed, they don’t question it. They just immediately accept it, and what I like is the fact you’ve taken an extreme society here and now they’re doing something that is so far beyond what was in their reasoning powers and that is they’re mutinying. That’s a full-on mutiny. Todd has obviously gone through and seen something that they aren’t going to question. He is alpha dog, they will do what he tells them to do and be satisfied in doing it. I think that kind of stuff is fun, is an interesting thing to study.”

Kurt notes there is extra pressure on the dialog his character does have. “There is. Paul and I talked about that quite a bit. You begin to focus and when he does speak you begin to hear it,” he remembers. “There’s three scenes to me that are sort of where I saw Todd affecting change that had taken place inside of him. That first one is when she asks him ‘Who are you? You must feel something?’ And he’s semi-comical, at times in that scene I feel part of the thing was to have the audience almost feel that Peoples wrote in the script that he could be almost mistaken for stupid here. It’s almost like he just doesn’t understand what he’s being asked. It’s just that, if you could imagine what that would be like to be asked a question for the first time in your life but you’ve lived for forty years, I don’t know what that experience would be to me semi-comical. I just tried to play it that way, he doesn’t know where to go in his brain to come up with the response that is being asked for. It’s not that you don’t have the response, it’s right there, it’s like we sometimes have something on the tip of our tongue, but we’re trying to get it out. He has the answer and that’s as far as it ever goes, it just never goes further than the brain. But now he’s being asked to verbalize it, and has never done that before. Practice trying out a new thing and he has a very honest response which I think is pretty surprising. We tend to think someone like that because of the way they look, is fearless,” Russell offers. “And you find out, just like all animals its just the opposite. All animals live in constant fear, even lions do. Fear of a bigger lion coming in and taking their kill, a fear of not being able to catch their prey, a fear of not being able to survive, that stuff I thought was interesting.

“The other scene is when he’s cast out. And he has the human emotions and again he’s never expressed them. And when he’s sitting there in that pipe and this is the rest of his existence will be guarding this round tube in the middle of nowhere, and realizes this is now what he’s been told what to do, this would be the result of somebody who just realized that they have experienced the ultimate form of child abuse,” he states. “Your life was taken from you, just ripped away from you. And I think that the emotional response to that would be devastating, but on top of that something happens that you don’t even know what’s that-when there’s water falling down your face when you feel that way what is that all about?!

“And the last one for me for him, is he has now put things together and realizes what he has to do. He responds with what he’s trained to do, but he is now the general as well as the soldier. And he’s going to go out and do what he’s trained to do and that is kill them all. I know that it’s fun and heroic and all that, but in fact, it’s very simple: he will do what he is trained to do: eliminate everything, and anything that gets in the way of that. That’s why he doesn’t want anyone out there. When she says ‘We’ll help you.’ He doesn’t want anyone out there because he’ll kill her to get to he knows that. He knows that he’ll do that," says Kurt. "You don’t take a Snake and change it’s pattern of behavior, you might train it to do something but you can’t alter it’s lifelong training. And he knows he’ll kill the kid, he’ll kill her, he’ll kill anything that moves, as long as he kills the enemy too. Doesn’t need to explain that to us, the audience, but he doesn’t want to do that. But I do think in that scene he in his sort of monotonic, mechanical way explains why he knows what he knows. These men are not the enemy, they just doing what they’re told to do. It’s not personal, it’s just business. This is what the order of the day is, you go out and you have twenty of these things that you have to terminate.”

SOLDIER demanded a lot from Russell, and as usual he did most of his own stunts, which tested him beyond anything before. “Well as always I do as much as I can. That was unfortunate in this movie because I broke my left ankle. It was on Friday, so I had Saturday and Sunday off. I went back to work on Monday and was able to continue. And then about three weeks later because of my inability of my left ankle to carry me as normal, I tore the tendons, I got hit. When we were in that fight scene and that big sign comes down, if you look real close you can see me get hit. It hit the back of my heel and crushed my right foot. So now I had a broken left ankle and I tore the right one and I had the rest of the movie to do. I took four days and we had to keep going here. We’ve got to keep going or wrap it: one of the two," Kurt the trooper that he really is stayed on. "I said ‘Well, let’s just go and when we reach those things that I can’t do we’ll figure something out then. And we finished the movie, we just kept on going. I think it was probably good for me because it was a blessing in disguise in terms of me learning to internalize my own physical pain. It’s incredible what your mind can do. You can ignore anything, I think you can walk through fire. I think you can just ignore it. But my left ankle still hasn’t healed, I don’t know what it means for me in the future, I don’t plan on getting in that kind of shape either anymore so. That’s the fun part of being an actor, you don’t have to do the same role over and over and over. “

“I think it was probably good for me, because it was a blessing in disguise in terms of me learning to internalize my own physical pain. It’s incredible what your mind can do. You can ignore anything, I think you can walk through fire.” Kurt on the pain he suppressed while filming SOLDIER with broken feet.

So was that growl rage or technique. “That’s a technique. If you watch the movie closely you’ll see. And it’s funny. The guy afterwards says ‘A growl?’ I asked him what he said and he said it sounded like a throat noise, a growl to me. To the person hearing that, he might be thinking ‘What the hell is out there,we may have an alien army.’ And he says this is obviously a military presence of a substantial size! It’s something we don’t know about. The growl is just a military technique to throw off the enemy and make them wait a minute, a growl, whoa what are you talking about?! What do we got here?! Understandably the audience is going to take it that way sometimes, but after you watch the movie four or five times. I like to do that. Movies that I make, I say, ‘Let’s assume that we are going to watch this movie five times ten, fifteen years from now, John Carpenter and I have talked about that a lot and that growl will no longer play like that,” Russell states. “That growl will play like ‘Oh yeah, you know that growl was pretty cool, that was pretty smart, actually. It confuses the enemy by throwing another possibility out there. What the hell makes a growl noise other than an animal?! It further freaks them out. That part of the movie is to say that the hunted has become the hunter. And we have the fun, in movie terms, in knowing it’s just one guy whose inferior to them.”

Part of Todd’s awakening includes his first normal observance of the opposite sex. For Todd thee was no sexual gratification prior to arriving on Acadia 234. “None. I think that the first time he sees her is the first time he’s ever looked at a woman outside of a war zone, a war experience. I don’t think he’s ever seen a woman outside of a war experience,” Kurt says, delving into Todd's psyche. “In other words, you could have the Rockettes naked in front of him and if he is on maneuvers, he won’t see them; he won’t see them as a man sees a woman. He’ll see them as an obstacle or something that has to be mowed down. There’s nothing like that here and for the first time I think he sees a woman. And the interesting thing about that is she realizes that in a flash, and he doesn’t avert his gaze, there’s nothing self-conscious, he’s not being caught at something. He’s doing something that to him is new but he suddenly feels something, and I think that is one of the scenes where he does indeed mask some emotion he might be feeling," he pauses. "I think one of the things that is interesting for her, is she realizes that even though she might be in a classic western sort of sense, drawn to him, if she takes this wrong or if he decides to do something about this he could do anything he wants to that village. If he decides he likes that what are you going to do to stop him. He’ll just take every woman and say ‘Now it’s your turn, come here.’ And he won’t speak about it, we look at sexuality in terms of cave man terms, this guy has the physical capability of a cave man with the brain of a six month old. He would be devastatingly dangerous. He might kill you in the process just because he doesn’t know any different. What the husband says is absolutely true: He’d break me in half without any real feeling. I think all of those things in People’s screenplay are the underlying things that make the more entertaining aspect of the simple movement of the movie in terms of action and whatnot, have some weight and be fun. And were certainly interesting to play, I enjoyed that aspect of it more than anything else.”

“Sexuality is a very interesting thing in this movie: because sex and violence are very close together in the brain. And for someone like that, if he flashes while he’s having sex with someone, he’d probably kill her. There wouldn’t be any other response. There wouldn’t be pillow talk afterwards (laughs)” - Russell’s take on Todd and sex.

Where do you see him and the other soldiers two to three years down the line. “You know I’ve always liked this movie for that reason. It’s really nice to hear that question because it tells me that the stuff plays out. Not in a sequel manner but like you’re saying, where would you see these people. I have a dog that ‘s been with us for nine years, we picked him up from the pound. He must have been abused, because he always lays his ears back and cowers when you walk up to him and then he warms up to you, but he’s getting old, he’s just about to die. And the other day, I said ‘Hey Rusty,’ and I reached out to him and that was his first reaction and then he let me have him. I think that they’d get that far in their life. His immediate reaction would always be to cower," Kurt says. "But he would allow someone to touch him and feel him and he would know that they wouldn’t hurt him, but I don’t think that he would ever get past that. I think that’s the bitter truth reality of about something that been abused at such an early age: I don’t think you can recoup it.”

We would like to think that he would go off and form this family. “That’s what we would like to think, we’d like to think that. You don’ t want to see the truth,” Russell says bluntly. “The truth is, her fifteen years later saying ‘I fell in love with a man that could never respond to me because if he ever did respond (laughs) you could imagine them having sex. Sexuality is a very interesting thing in this movie: because sex and violence are very close together in the brain. And for someone like that, if he flashes while he’s having sex with someone, he’d probably kill her. There wouldn’t be any other response. There wouldn’t be pillow talk afterwards (laughs). That’s not where he’s been going.”

March over the Official SOLDIER site

For more on SOLDIER please see our interview with director Paul Anderson.

For a look at two of Kurt's collabs with director John Carpenter go here.

For fun we've pit Todd against some other Russell soldiers. See how they did here

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