SNAKE EYE

Kurt Russell returns to action as that most charming of anti heroes, Snake Plissken, in Escape from LA, but if Avco-Embassy executives had had their way back in 1980, when they greenlighted Escape from New York, Snake might have had quite the death wish.

"Embassy didn't want me in the movie," Russell recalls with a sly smile. "John Carpenter wanted me. He had to fight for me, because Embassy wanted Charles Bronson. John said, 'No, I want a younger Snake.' John fought for me to do it. He got me into the movie. Then, Embassy made us shoot a beginning to the movie that would make you understand why Snake was the way he was. John wrote a scene where Snake got caught stealing credit cards from the Denver Mint. Snake boards a trans-continental bullet train, gives them to a lame friend and says, 'Congratulations, you're a millionaire!' That was the first lime in the movie. When they get off the train, the police are there waiting. Snake could make it out, but they shoot the lame guy for no reason. Snake chooses to go back and help his buddy out, and that's when he gets caught. So, that made the audience think, 'He's the good guy.' When we put the movie together and cut that scene out, Snake became a complete enigma. He had no socially redeeming values"

And, courtesy of Russell, Carpenter and Debra Hill, Snake still has no socially redeeming values in Escape from LA. Russell co-wrote and co-produced this new Escape wiht director Carpenter and producer Hill. Since making New York, the trio have remained friends, and Russell continued his professional relationship with Carpenter--which began in 1979 with the Elvis TV movie--by starring in both The Thing (1982) and Big Trouble in Little China (1986). A script for an Escape sequel was written in the mid-1980's, but dropped. Every so often, Russell, Carpenter and Hill toyed with the idea of trying again. Eventually, they wrote a spec script to be offered to a studio with the director, star and producer attached. "Either John came up with an idea and bounced it off me or I came up wiht an idea and bounced it off John. So, we wrote it together," recalls Russell, who was no stranger to screenwriting, having penned episodes of The Waltons and having created dialogue, uncredited, for his characters in other films.

"Initially, John and Debra took the ideas John and I started with and put together the first draft, and that came in at 160 pages. Then, John and I got together and we started cutting it down. When we got it down to 137 pages, we all agreed we would cash in, that we would say, 'OK, we're in. We're going to try to make this movie and not back otu.'" We had all give each other the opportunity to back out until then.

"At the 137-page point, we all felt good enough abou the script to say, 'Let's do it!' It was at that point Debra went to sell the movie [ultimately, to Paramount Pictures, which agreed to the $50 million budges]. Then, we went into pre-production as John and I continued to polish the script. The studio was great with their notes. They were never withough though or reason. It was really a good experience. Slipping back into character was pretty easy. I automatically had the right mindset, because I had spent eight months with the character as it got written. Actually, when the studio read the script, they said, 'God, there's not a lot of humanity here. This guy is basically socially unfit.' I said, 'Well, have you seen the first movie?' They said, 'Yeah, but you're in a different time now.'

"So, we talked about trying to give Snake a cause. Finally, after many months, John just looked at me and said, 'You know what Snake would say about this?' Finally, that's what inspired us to go with the ending that we went with. I wrote itand said to John and Debra, 'I think this is true to the character, but I don't know how the audience is going to react.' I just felt it was true to what Snake would do in this movie. John said, 'It's exactly what Snake would do.'"

Grim Actions

With the script in hand and budget set in stone, Escape from LA began production. Russell yanked to original Plissken leather jackt off a hanger in his closet and dove into the project. Anyone who has seen the film can tell it was a series of grueling night shoots for the 45-year-old actor. Some scenes called for him to race along a motorcycle, while others demanded that he leap from car to car. Then, there was the basketball sequence from hell. As usual, Russell elected to handle many of his own stunts.

"I never actually said, 'I'm too old for this shit,' but there were a few times I said to John, 'Boy, it's getting tough.' The scene on the basketball court was a good example. It was a night shoot and the first thing I did was slip on the wet court. I fell on my back and really hurt it. It was a wet floor, there was a lot of mist because we were outside so my feet couldn't grip the ground. So, I got hurt and had to do the whole sequence with a bad back," Russell lamets, "I ran 10 miles that night, because we did it a bunch of times. The toughest physical sequence was a flood sequence cut out of the movie. It was cold and wet and tough and tiring.

"But the toughest thing of all was probably the scene on Sunset Boulevard. We did that over fourt nights. There were a couple of times when I had to jump from car to car. The cars were going about 20 or 25 miles an hour. Well, if I'm on one care and I'm jumping to this other truck and the lead guy pulls ahead just a bit, or if the care I'm on hits the brakes just as I'm jumping, I'm not gonna make it. A couple of times I landed on the edge and almost fell and if I fall, I'm gonna get run over. So, you have to put out every time. You've got to make it every time. Well, do that over four nights, probably 50 or 60 times, and you start getting tired. It looks great on film--and audiences can tell when the actor is really doing it--but it was tough."

Though there's no denying tha tEscape from LA comes during a time that marks bot the peak of the resurgent Russell's star power and a critical and financial lull in Carpenter's filmmaking career, it's obvious from Russell's words that he simply wanted to work with his friend again. "I find we have a lot in common. We both have a fatalistic point-of-view, dark senses of humor. If [as Carpenter did to Russell in The Thing] you're going to put a guy in the Antarctic to figh some organism from a distant planet, why not put a sombrero on him? If I was there, I would wear one. That's the fun of working with John," he explains. "We have a similar sense of where the parameters go. We're both fathers. We both ask ourselves questions of freedom. We talk quite a bit about women. We just see things and smile at the same time. It's one of those shorthand dialogue relationships. We don't say very much to each other. We don't have to. On the set, we sort of look at each other and go, 'Yup.'

"Without a doubt, John is the most important director in my career. If I didn't have John to direct Elvis, I think it would have been very, very difficult and it wouldn't have hand the same result. If I didn't have John to fight for me on Escape from New York it wouldn't have happened. And then he let me do it the way I wanted to do it [as a futuristic gunfigher a la Lee Van Cleef and Clint Eastwood]. If I hadn't done The Thing, I don't think I ever would have been able to establish myself as a person who could play characters, but could also do leads in movies as an action hero. Jack Burton was completely out of it. John got an actor in me who was willing to take the lead, but let the sidekick do the lead stuff while I did the sidekick stuff. And I wouldn't have done Escape from LA without John."

Dark Adventures

Russell earned $10 million for reprising Snake Plissken, and that payday came on the heels of a $7 million salary for StarGate and $10 million for Executive Decision. Another $10 million has been deposited in Russell's bank account for the upcoming Breakdown, and the actor has just signed on the dotted line for the SF actioner Soldier. The payday for that one? $15 million. Some actors might pressure themselves when haded so much money, but Russell isn't one of them. "It's like winning the lottery, that's all. You punch in your numbers, win and get this money. It would be pressure if, in my mind, I had to maintain that salary or if I had to produce what allows me to maintain that salary, which is hits, hits, hits. That ain't gonna happen," Russell notes. "That's not what my life's about. My life is about characters. I was doing just fine before StarGate. I was having a great life. Things haven't been slow since 1988.

"That's when I did Tequila Sunrise. That was a conscious effort on my part to affiliate myself with people [writer/director Robert Towne, co-stars Mel Gibson and Michelle Pfeiffer] I knew could help the movie be seen. Right after that, I did Tango and Cash and Backdraft. Since that time, every movie I've made--with the exception of Captain Ron--has done either well or very well. Tombstone was a surprise. StarGate was a big surprise. Those films, mixed with some research on my part, of my going overseas and finding out what I was worth abroad, allowed me to come back and start talking to my agents about what I was worth worldwide. Since then, I've starte to make more dollars."

Looking back on StarGate, which kicked off the modern Russell renaissance, Russell asserts that he was surprised, but not exactly shocked, that the SF film fro the team that would go on to create Independence Day, Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin, caught on with moviegoers. Almost single-handedly, StarGate, in which Russell played Colonel Jack O'Neil, proved to the studios that moviegoers would happily plunk down their seven or eight bucks in exchange for a fresh SF experience. "I had been looking at the computer and I said to the publicity people, 'This is the kind of movei that, if I were a computer person, I would be interested in. What's this whole Internet thing?' They said, 'It's the information highway, blah, blah, blah.' I said, 'Could you get on there right now and say, "I saw this movie last night called StarGate, and it was blah, blah, blah?" Everyone in the room just stopped," he recalls. "They said, 'That has never been done.' I said, 'How many people does that reach?' They said, '60 million.' I said, 'Wow, I suggest you get on it right now.'

"I knew there was a whole section of people that wasn't being tracked. So, I knew we would do better than the $9 million opening weekend the studio was hoping for. But people wanted to see StarGate. It looked different. Finally, I was in a movie that was a surprise, and the surprise was that it was science fiction. Nobody had done SF for so long. When we came out, it was like, 'This is fresh!' and it was. Everyone wants to know if we'll ever do a sequel. I don't know if it will happen, but sure, I would do one if it came together. One of the things that should be changed is that I should make a little more money and talk a little less."

Future Fantasies

The actor's next film, Breakdown, actually does find him earning morea nd talking les.. In the drama, he plays a rather timid man travelling across the country with his wife, portrayed by Apollo 13's Kathleen Quinlan. When Quinlan is kidnapped, Russell must find the strength to do what it takes to save her. Next up for Russell after a long vaction is Soldier. Directed by Paul (Mortal Kombat) Anderson and penned by David (Blade Runner) Peoples, Soldier feels in tone very much like the screenwriter's acclaimed Unforgiven. "It starts in the late 1980s or in the early 1990s, with orphans who are taken by the military. The ones that show the most aggression, the highest survivability, continue on in a military program until they're grown men, at which time they go off to war," Russell reveals. "Now, the mvoie changes from time frames to 2025 or 2030. Territorial wars are being fought in space and there's a new group of soldiers coming up; thy're bigger, badder, better and smarter. So, the older guys are being discarded. These old guys are only 34 or 35, but they look like they're 45. They're just a little beat up and bent, but they're very, very good and quite war-wise.

"These new guys aren't as experienced, but they're better at everything. My character is on oe fht discarded guys. They think I'd dead and dump me on a planed where they don't think anyone is. I meet these refugees who take me in. But it's a bit like having a pet lion in the house. They're afraid of me, so they finally push me out and I go live in a big, round piep by myself. It's at that time I realize I'm a human bieng. I don't know any experience other than war. I don't know anything really beyond, 'Yes, sir. No sir.' I can speak, but I've never been asked my opinion on anything. Essentiall, it's about a man who learns that he is a human being and tries to become one. It's a great script."

With so many SF and action credits udner his belt, Russell rivals perhaps only Arnold Schwarzenegger for the title of Hollywood's greatest action hero. Is Russell comfortable with the term action hero? "Yeah. I'm uncomfortable with any label. I was comfortable with the label of child actor when I was doing films at Disney. But I think the truth of the matter is that when my career is done, they'll realize that, basically, I was an actor who played many roles, and some of the roles they enjoyed the most were the ones when I was a cowboy," he observes. "Maybe they'll think of me as one of the first cowboys in space. 'He was a science fiction cowboy. He brought the Old West into SF and said "all the rules apply here as well.'" I've felt that way since John and I did Escape from New York. We both said, 'This is a Western,' and it is. People didn't know that at the time, but it was. Escape from LA is clearly a Western. In StarGate, the guy I play is a cowboy. I think to a certain degree, that if I were to be typed after, say, 60 years as an actor, they would probably say, 'He was an American cowboy. That's really what he was.' I've been told that already, and it's OK with me."

If Escape from LA satisfies enough moviegoers, audiences may demand that Russell play that cowboy named Snake one more time. Carpenter has already floated the idea of a third film called Escape from Earth, which he promises wouldn't take 15 yearst to get made. "We've talked about it jokingly. The only reason we would do it would be if John and I came up with a story that we were both inspired by and both really liked," says Kurt Russell. "If we said, 'Well, we wold love to see this movie,' we would have to consider it. Would we like what happens to Snake? Maybe we could do somethingcompletely different. We wouldn't say not just because it looks like a lot of work, but we also wouldn't say yes just because the opportunity might be there. I will say this: The way John and I look at is, if we have an idea and it came out really well, why shouldn't we do it?"

--by Ian Spelling