I was at the very first test sceening of Antoine Fuqua’s Training Day over a decade ago, and I knew right away – even though the ending was a little bit different – that it was going to be a very, very big deal. Training Day was not Antoine Fuqua’s first feature, but the Oscar-winning cop drama put him on the map as one of the most prominent, hard-hitting directors in the Hollywood landscape. His latest film, Olympus Has Fallen, has been described as “Die Hard in the White House,” and it is, but it’s clearly a Fuqua production, with the brutality, memorable casting and attention to detail that have become some of the director’s trademarks.
I sat down with Antoine Fuqua in the bar at the Four Seasons in Los Angeles to discuss his approach to action movie violence, Olympus Has Fallen‘s factual accuracy, his opinions about Roland Emmerich’s very similar-sounding White House Down (in theaters this summer), and whether he’d ever want to return for Training Day 2. (Short answer: yes.)
Olympus Has Fallen, directed by Antoine Fuqua and starring Gerard Butler, Aaron Eckhart, Rick Yune, Morgan Freeman, Dylan McDermott, Melissa Leo, Radha Mitchell, Robert Forster and Ashley Judd, opens in theaters nationwide on March 22, 2013.
CraveOnline: Olympus Has Fallen could have been lame. Instead, you did not @#$% around with this movie. This is a great cast, first off…
Antoine Fuqua: Great cast.
But what I’m more interested about is the tone of the action. It’s punishing. It’s really brutal. Was that in the script or did that come with you?
That kind of comes with me. I mean, that’s what I love, that ferocity. I read it and I thought, you can’t make this cheesy fantasy. You’ve got to go hardcore with it. You’ve got to kick some ass, and you’ve got make it brutal because terrorism is brutality. So I said, I need brutal. I need it to be hardcore.
A significant portion of the movie is just the terrorists being brutal, and winning, and that creates this atmosphere of… I can’t think of a concise word, but the hero is screwed. Ridiculously screwed. It’s refreshing. Do you not see this enough? Is this a reaction to something?
I don’t see it enough, for me. I grew up watching Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now, Battle of Algiers…
You grew up watching The Battle of Algiers? When you were a kid?
Oh man, yeah, really. Well, as a teenager. As a teenager I remember seeing it, going, “How did they do this? Is this real?” It was amazing. But they’re brave. Those filmmakers are brave. They’re making things that are punishing. It was entertaining but it had a realism to it, and for me, sometimes I see films and I go… Why is it that we shy away from some of the harshness of battles? Sometimes in movies we dumb it down. We police ourselves. So I was reacting to that. Training Day had that same sort of [ambition]. I don’t know any other way to be. I’ve tried it a little bit before. It doesn’t work for me.
When did you try it?
Well, King Arthur was a much tougher movie. King Arthur was written as an “R,” and then the studio and everybody wanted to change it, but there was things that I shot that were serious situations. There were warhorses. They made equipment for horses that were like claws on their hooves. It’s in museums. You can see them. And a lot of that stuff I just wasn’t able to use because it was just… You’d see someone just run over by a horse, ripping them up.
Was that difficult for you?
Very. Painful.
Did anyone want Olympus Has Fallen to be PG-13?
Well, in my contract, I wouldn’t do it. And those guys, to their credit, Mark Gill, I just said, “Look man, if you’re asking me to do it… I know who I am as a director, and I know what I’m going to want. When I read this, there are certain things that felt a little too sci-fi, or soft,” and I said, “I think you’re going to get punished for that.”
I don’t think anyone wants to think it’s that easy to take over the White House.
Yeah, it’s brutal. It’s going to be nasty. Unless it’s a cartoon, yeah, but we grounded it saying, these are real people taking it down. So… how would you do that? So I talked with Secret Service guys and worked it out
Did you get a lot of input? Was there any input from the White House itself?
Not the White House itself.
I had to ask. They might be big fans.
Yeah. [Laughs] In private they’ll watch it. But my buddy is an ex-Secret Service guy, Joe Banning. His name is actually Joe Banning. [Editor’s Note: Gerard Butler plays a character named “Mike Banning.”] When I first read the script I thought it was about him. I called him, I said, “Is somebody telling a story about you?” He said, “No, what is it?” I sent it to him, he’s like, “It’s crazy!”
That’s one hell of a coincidence.
Crazy. My other buddy, Ricky Jones, he worked for the government in a different capacity, and Darrell Connerton, he worked for George Bush Sr. in the White House, and my stunt coordinator Keith [Woulard] is a Navy Seal. So we laid it out. We had a map, man. I said, okay, I want to know how you attack the White House, for real. We laid it out. And there were some things like, okay, we’ve got to take this out. We can’t show that.
Yeah, right? We don’t want to give anyone ideas…
So this is what you can show.
One thing I like about Gerard’s character, but it also has a lot to do with the pacing of the movie… Once he’s in the White House he’s always busy. There’s a great bit when he’s on his earpiece and he’s talking about something else, but he’s also deleting classified documents. It showed how good he was at his job, and you don’t see that anymore.
That was me and Gerard, all night, just coming up with business. Because we’d talk to our guys. What would he be doing?
He’s got to have other priorities.
That’s right. You don’t [the terrorists] to have access to our files, or anything they may be able to use against us anymore. You’ve got to shut down their systems as much as you can, because he has to be a ghost and move around the White House. Especially, if you’re Secret Service, you know everything. You know the secrets. And you need a weapon. You’ve got to get a weapon, [so] you’ve got to kill without using a gun for a while. So it was all these things that me and Gerard kept saying. What is our hero doing when he gets in there? What’s his journey? What does he have to do? So that’s all us, up all night. It wasn’t in the script like that.
