by Kim August

There were many challenges in the film, the first being a lead character who had so little dialog and relies largely on body language facial expression. But Paul and Kurt were up to the task. “That’s what we always thought was going to be the big challenge of the movie. I really like the character because he’s bred to be the Terminator. He’s bred to be a machine, and you have to see that machine break down and show emotion for the very first time. Because Kurt had so few words to actually convey all of that, because for him to speak would be a violation of the character, he was having to rely on doing it all with facial expressions, and a lot of it was in his eyes,” the director says. “We talked an awful lot before hand about what we were going to do. If he was going to convey a stiff awkwardness because he feels unsure with the situation, I’d be sure to drop back into a wide shot. So we’d get a full shot of his body. If I knew he was going to give me something with his eyes, I’d do a track in for a certain moment so we had to be very in synch. More so than with a normal movie where you just do the standard coverage of me doing the wide shot, then close ups.”

For many fans SOLDIER is a treat, you’ll find a lot of references to other films; firstly BLADE RUNNER; Anderson explains that connection. “Well the links with BLADE RUNNER are deliberate. David Peoples did the adaption of BLADE RUNNER, he wrote the screenplay for SOLDIER. I’ve always seen the worlds of BLADE RUNNER and SOLDIER as co-existing. If Kurt Russell should go to earth, he’d find Harrison Ford there,” the director is eager to note that sharing the same writer isn’t the only aspect of BLADE RUNNER that shows up in the film. “Also thematically; the movies, although they are very different they have a similar central concern. In BLADE RUNNER, Rutger Hauer is the machine that becomes as human as he possibly can be. And in this movie, Kurt Russell played the man who the military made as machine-like they can. And because of those similarities we really wanted to point out the facet hat they were existing in the same universe. The battle in Tanhausser Gate is a battle Rutger Hauer talks about. And that’s one of the battles that Kurt’s been to. It’s tattooed on his arm. Also the Spinner that Harrison Ford drives (a flying car) is trashed on the edge of the village in SOLDIER.”

For the hawk-eyed amongst you there are more nods to both Paul and Kurt’s previous work. “ There are chunks of the some of the ships from EVENT HORIZON. There’s the stealth fighter from EXECUTIVE DECISION; you see it briefly in a wide shot and then if you ever look up at the ceiling you can see there’s an undercarriage dangling down into Sandra’s apartment and that’s from EXECUTIVE DECISION. One of the things that I really liked but I never asked them to do, one of the FX companies did when Kurt’s war record is printed out in the first five minutes of the movie, if you look at the left side of the screen, it’s all the awards he’s received and the medals. Like “The Plissken Patch”, and the “Captain Ron Trophy”. You won’t see it unless you get the dvd and pause it, but it’s nice to have all that stuff in there.”
SOLDIER’s villain was cast against type; Jason Scott Lee turns in his first performance as a bad guy, but Paul sees the whole film as cast against type. “I saw the movie cast against type,” Anderson asserts. “Kurt was always my first choice; Kurt, Kurt, Kurt. That’s the only person I wanted. Kurt’s a nice guy right? And that’s particularly why I wanted him to play the brutal killer at the start of the movie because I thought it would shock people who come to see a Kurt Russell movie and then they see this man whose completely irredeemable. He’s doing terrible things. So I thought he’d be good casting,” the director states. “And Jason Scott Lee’s always the good guy. He’s a terribly sweet, nice man and here he’s the monster in this movie. At the end of the movie he really does look monstrous, he doesn’t look human any more. That’s a fun thing for me to do as a director. I think it gives the audience something slightly different than what they expected. Also it’s a challenge for the actors. For Jason Scott Lee to be a bad man, he’s so unlike that, so he really went for it. Putting all that extra weight on, shaving his hair off, and what he did to his neck! It was as wide as his head was. And then Gary Busey as a sympathetic older captain. When you usually associate Gary as the wild man. For him to come and turn in this sympathetic performance. It was kind of nice, he hasn’t done something like that for a long, long time. When I’ve seen this movie with audiences, when Gary gets up you think he’s going to beat the hell out of Colonel Mekum and everything thinks “Yeah. Gary Busey going to do what Gary Busey always does and there’s a twist there as well.”

“PLANET OF THE APES is actually about something. It’s a great movie and it’s great entertainment, but there’s a real theme at the heart of it. And SOLDIER is the same kind of thing. It’s an action movie; it got all the guns and explosions but again there’s the whole nature vs. Nurture debate-there really is a theme at the heart of it.” - Anderson on SOLDIER’s story.