Ashton
Kutcher and director Andrew Davis chat about The Guardian
Feature interview by Sian Thatcher
This is a military
flick in which the old veteran teaches the arrogant fledgling
a thing or two; if you think you’ve seen it all before in Top Gun, well
think again. The
Guardian on paper has many of the same elements
as the ‘80s classic, but it’s a far cry from
the butt-slapping, whooping campness of Tom Cruise’s
film.
This is a different take on the military
entirely and focuses on the Coast Guard Rescue Swimmers – people who go
out in the biggest storms and waves to save lives. Created
with the Coast Guard’s help and using true-life rescue
heroes as part of the cast this film offers, at times, a
gritty reality.
In the relatively warm and dry surroundings of The Dorchester
in London, star of the film Ashton Kutcher and director Andrew
Davis came to talk to Close-Up Film about their rescue adventure.
Looking stylish and relaxed in a suit
and tie, Kutcher reveals he wanted the part of arrogant
young recruit Jake Fischer so badly he actually started
training for the role before he was signed up – and he must have wanted it extremely
badly as he’s not a fan of the sea: “I don’t
like the water, I didn’t really like taking a bath.”
Despite this, he was determined to
get the part and had a gruelling training regime, actually
going though the Coast Guard training manual and making
sure he could do it all perfectly, only to find out he
would be swimming with Olympic gold medallist swimmers. “Man, I thought I was there,
but they were faster than me, a lot faster, but when we got
the gear on, and started doing the tows and stuff, they slowed
down a bit as it’s a different kind of swimming when
you’re dragging somebody else through the water.”
His training paid off – in the film he looks like
a coast guard and is more muscular than we’ve seen
him yet. Indeed, Kutcher even got some training advice from
his wife Demi Moore, who buffed up for her role in GI Jane.
She told him to “go all out”, which he says motivated
him and got the real coast guards, who he was training with,
on side.
Kutcher also said he learnt a lot
from co-star Kevin Costner: “You
can count on one hand, maybe two hands, the number of people
who have been able to have a successful career for as long
as Kevin has, and you look up to those people when you’re
trying to do the same.” Costner, who almost committed
career suicide in the dire Waterworld, must have thought
twice before embarking on a new sea-based project, but luckily
for him, this one looks set to be much more successful, coming
in at No. 2 after it’s opening weekend in the US.
Indeed, Costner is ideal as the veteran
swim hero, guiding the fledgling Fischer through the training
regime. Kutcher says that during the filming, this fictional
relationship often mirrored their own, with him asking
his idol Costner for direction. “I’m very fortunate
to have met a lot of my acting heroes, and now Kevin is
my friend and I admire his work.”
This is really a coming of age film
for Kutcher as an actor, and he seems keen to be taken
seriously – unsurprising
when critics have, for the most part, ravaged his past body
of work, which includes Cheaper by the Dozen, That ‘70s
Show and Dude, Where's My Car?. “As an actor, when
you’re first starting off,” says Kutcher. “You
don’t necessarily get to choose that much, you kind
of do what you’re given. You have limited choices and,
as my choices have grown, I’ve been able to tell the
stories I like to tell, about people that I respect or a
story that has a message that I believe in.” With this
in mind, it seems clear why Kutcher overcame his dislike
of the water, gave up smoking and trained like a coast guard
for so long – he finally got a part he wanted.
It’s a good thing he did put everything into this
film and was at his physical peak, as the training montages
and rescue scenes look excruciating. Some of the film is
made up of actual documentary footage taken by director Andrew
Davis’ assistants at a bootcamp they ran for the actors
in Elizabeth City with the real coast guards. One scene where
a trainee is vomiting out of exhaustion is, in fact, a real
coast guard in training.
“There was a certain grittiness and reality of these
kids being pushed as hard as they were, that was going to
be hard to duplicate [on set] with 200 people standing around
saying ‘ok, go get sick’,” says Davis. “It
would have taken hours and hours, so there was documentary
footage and we felt why not use it?”
While on one hand Davis used gritty documentary footage,
there were also a plethora of special effects used to create
the rescue scenes. Davis suggests he is not keen on using
special effects as a rule, and enjoys the challenges they
had in the days of his earlier films, such as Under Siege
and The Fugitive.
“In The Fugitive we crashed a train – we found
a carcass of a train, we pushed it from behind and it was
a real train. Today you probably wouldn’t think of
that, well I would, but the studio wouldn’t. I’ve
stayed away from these kinds of films because you become
someone who’s not in touch with the movie – it’s
layer and layer and layer of special effects teams and visual
effects supervisors who are actually creating the movie.”
However, on The Guardian, he felt
it was a necessary process and actually enjoyed using the
new techniques. “In
this situation, I felt I could try to achieve a documentary
reality with the special effects. There’s no other
way to do it – we couldn’t go into the Bering
Sea at night and put our crew and our actors in this environment.
We looked at the footage of the most ferocious storms we
could find and our visual effects supervisor started working
on it and I think he did an amazing job duplicating what
those storms were like.
“I’m very inspired now to do period movies.
There’s a project involving a blend of Tom Jones and
Don Quixote that I’m involved in, and we have to create
Barcelona and the ships of Barcelona in 1604 and I’m
not afraid of that any more because I think we can go about
doing it in pieces of things. The trick is to have the foreground
reality not take away from what’s going on with the
effects.”
While they toiled to make the film
as real looking as possible and took advice from the coast
guards, Davis admits they tweaked a few coast guard practices
to heighten the drama. “We
broke some rules – they used to jump out of helicopters
and into the water. They changed that because it’s
so dangerous you don’t know what you’re going
to hit. We decided to let them do that for dramatic purposes.”
The film has been criticised for being
over long – at
136mins, it is a bum-numbing experience and there do seem
to be a few false endings tacked on to one another. The final
scene is openly sentimental and mythologizes the character
of Randall. Davis is perhaps aware of this when he says that
they went back and forth over the ending and chose the one
they decided upon, because it “gives it more of an
upbeat ending, which people in America tend to like.”
Despite maybe succumbing to Hollywood
pressure or pandering to the expectations of American audiences,
Davis has a political conscience and there are undertones
of this throughout the film. There are numerous references
to the fact that the coast guards are all about saving
lives and a fight scene between the navy guys and the coast
guards where one character describes why the swimmers are
better. Davis says that he was attracted to this new idea
of the military: “This
is a film about people whose sole purpose is saving lives,
they’re not trained to bomb villages, they’re
not trained to kill people… I wish the world’s
militaries were sent on that journey tomorrow to help people
starving in Africa or stop warfare and help the innocents
in the world.”
Kutcher was also hooked on the idea
of the swimmers saving lives, but admits he didn’t know much about them before
Hurricane Katrina. “When Katrina happened, they saved
a huge catastrophe and these guys really became the heroes,
the one thing our government was able to really lean on as ‘ok
they were successful’. I also appreciate the fact that
there’s a branch of the military supported by the US
government that’s trained to save lives and not to
take them. I think that that’s a noble thing.”
The coast guards themselves are enjoying
a much-raised profile after the film came out in the US.
They even had recruitment tables out at the opening night
in Chicago and apparently got quite a few people to sign
up. “I don’t necessarily
want to make a recruiting film,” says Kutcher. “But
if it helps them, then that’s a good thing.” So
if you want to see these heroes in action, check out The
Guardian – you may even be able to sign up afterwards.
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