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FRIENDS OF RAGING CHEETAH :
WIZARD
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HERO INITIATIVE
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CBLDF
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RAZOR SHARP |
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EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW !
INTERVIEW WITH MARCUS PERRY
Los Angeles, CA -
Marcus Perry, Writer/Director. Keep that name in mind,
because chances are you’re going to be hearing a lot more from him in the near
future. In less than a year, Perry and his stylish action movie RAZOR SHARP have already achieved
cult status on the convention circuit. In fact, if you’ve been to a recent
Wizard World, or to the always
crowded San Diego Comic-Con,
odds are you’ve already caught a glimpse of the future in moviemaking when you
passed by his booth. Mark these words. Marcus Perry’s on the fast track to
prominence. His film offers many of the reasons why. As a director, his passion
translates. His ingenuity resonates. And if you’re ready to invest 25 minutes to
see his flick, then he’s got a real treat for you. Skeptical? You don’t have to
take my word for it. Look up who swept the “Best in Festival” and “Best Short
Drama” awards at the 2006 Wizard World Film Festival. And the 2007 Comic-Con
“Best Action Short” honor? Yep, won that one, too. Like I said…. Raging Cheetah had a chance to sit down
with the rising director on a lazy, sun-drenched afternoon at The Grove. Hear
what he has to say, then go get your hands on his motion picture, RAZOR
SHARP. RC: Marcus, you were born in Texas, went
out to Washington D.C., Maryland, then came out west to USC for your
undergraduate education. Perry: That’s right, I came out here to
go to film school, and here I have remained. RC: What brought you out west? Was it
the weather? Perry: I’ll tell you, the weather
definitely doesn’t suck… I mean, it was movies. Since I was a kid, I’ve
really been obsessed with them, and I think it all came from seeing the original
DIE HARD at way too young of an age. When I was in the fourth grade, every
weekend my parents and I would go to movies in the little town that I’m from,
which is called Longview. (Actually, Matthew McConaughey is from my hometown.
That’s our big claim to fame.) Every weekend we’d go see movies, and for whatever reason
on this weekend the three of us were going to separate flicks. My mom wanted to
go see something, I was going to see some random kids movie that, for the life
of me I can’t remember, and my dad went to go see DIE HARD. He wanted to go see
DIE HARD. And, like most kids movies which clock in at about 80 minutes, my
movie ended early, and y’know, little old me comes out, and I’m sitting in the
lobby of the movie theater waiting for one of my parents to emerge. And my dad
comes out to go to the bathroom and sees me sitting in the lobby of this theater
by myself, and realizes this’s probably not a good idea. And he goes, “Well, I’m
sure your mom will be out soon, so just come into the theater with me for a
little bit.”
Happily, I came out of school with a pretty decent spec
script, and I got rep’d right away. And for a couple years I was just making the
rounds as a screenwriter trying to break in with mixed avail, which is
code for being unemployed a lot of time [laughs]. And the more I got into
writing, the more I missed production. I think I’ll always really like writing,
and it’s definitely a really rewarding part of the whole thing, but I like to
sort of be in the trenches in all the madness and kinda send a project through.
That’s really when I said, “Well, I need to put together a sample that’s going
to show people that I can work out here, that I can do the kinds of movies that
I wanted to do.” And that’s really where the idea for RAZOR SHARP came
from. Thematically, it’s a mix of all the things that I love.
I’ve been a lifelong comic book geek. Y’know, I’ve been going to conventions and
collecting comics since I was a little kid, and I was also pretty heavily
involved in BUFFY, THE VAMPIRE SLAYER. And so when BUFFY went off the air, not
only did I feel like I’d lost some really good friends, but I felt like there
was a real void for material like that. So if you watch RAZOR SHARP you can
really sort of see all of my influences there. You can see the BUFFY stuff, you
can see DIE HARD, (I mean the whole movie happens in a skyscraper, c’mon!) and
comics, and sort of the whole deal, and for me it was a way to combine
everything I loved in kind of a fresh way that I’d never really seen. I’d never
seen anyone do an action/adventure short that actually looked like 25 minutes of
big action with your big action TV show. And that was completely the goal.
Y’know, my team and I – who were fantastic – we knew that if we did it, we had
to really figure out a way to do it. ‘Cause that’s one of those things
that you just can’t cheat. I mean, we’ve all seen low-budget, terrible action
movies where none of the fight scenes look real and the effects are terrible,
and nothing really works. So we knew that we had to go for it. [Smiles]
So, there’s a long answer for ya right there.
RC: No, no, very nice…. So you were
actually involved in BUFFY, THE VAMPIRE SLAYER?
Perry: Oh, no, no, just from a fan
standpoint. I just watched it obsessively. I love Joss Whedon. As a
writer his stuff really speaks to me, moreso than just about anybody else I’ve
ever read or seen.
RC: Okay. Now, you’re most famous, of
course, for RAZOR SHARP, which we’re going to get to in just a few minutes. I
saw in your credits – or more appropriately your filmography – THE
INTERRUPTION. Tell me about that.
Perry: THE INTERRUPTION was a project
that my college roommate directed. When he got out of school, Brian was in the
same boat as I was. He was a critical studies major rather than a film
production major, which means that in school he didn’t really have a chance to
do any production work. And that’s his big passion. He wanted to do a short film
and sort of show his stuff as a director. He had a pretty cool idea for this
corporate thriller about a guy who is kinda middle management in a software firm
that’s going to undergo a big merger. And he’s sort of in a unique position to
either make or totally sabotage the deal. He gets approached by another group of
guys that say, “Look, we know you’re having some financial trouble and you’re
frustrated, so we’ll give you a million bucks if you tank this deal, so that our
company can swoop in and pick it up.” And they’ve got some inside track that
after this merger goes through, the main character’s actually going to be laid
off from his company when they reshuffle everything. So the main character decides that he’s going to go through
with it and sabotage the deal. And a couple of unfortunate twists of fate
happen, and the guy basically has to end up killing a guy to make this deal go
away. At the end of the movie, sort of the big twist comes out that the guy who
he thinks is going to take care of him is actually the hitman who is hired to
sabotage the whole deal, and he basically just used the main character to do his
job for him. It’s kind of got a cool, sorta USUAL SUSPECTS-ish twist in the way
it all comes together. The thing I liked about it was it was really ambitious for
a short film. Most short films are like two guys in a bar talking about how
tough it is to get a date, or something like that, because logistically stories
like that are really simple. That’s usually what people go for with short films,
because most of the time the money’s coming out of their own pockets, and
they’re going to have to pull favors, and so they sort of take the path of least
resistance to get their films done. And that’s never really interested me,
because I feel like that doesn’t yield, y’know, spectacular results. You see a
lot of films like that, that don’t really push it to take a chance.
Brian’s film, THE INTERRUPTION, had a number of complicated locations, including
shooting on the runway of LAX with planes landing, which I’m proud to say we’re
one of the few productions since 9/11 that’s ever been able to do that. We had
to shoot scenes in terminals at LAX. We had to basically be in the Argyle Hotel
in downtown Los Angeles for a couple of nights, closing off the lobby and the
rooms, and restaurants. We were all over the place in houses, and in street
scenes and office buildings. I mean, we shot THE INTERRUPTION, if memory serves
me, in about somewhere in the neighborhood of ten days, I think. A lot of days
we had to do total location moves in the middle of the day, which is just
really tough for any crew. So it was a great trial by fire for me. I’d originally been
asked to come in and help with the script, because that’s what I was known for
among my peers at SC at the time, that I wanted to be a writer. After working
with Brian on the script a little bit, he eventually said, “Well hey, would you
think about producing this, too?” I thought it would be a really good
experience, and it was. It was a great trial by fire. I just kinda got thrown in
with it, and I did what I usually do when I’m asked to produce anything: I make
my problems somebody else’s problems. I also brought in my good friend, Brian
Pianko, who’s an editor, to co-produce that with me. Brian was one of the
producers on RAZOR SHARP, and was also the editor there. He’s a professional
trailer editor. Brian just did the trailer for AMERICAN GANSTER, a new Denzel
Washington and Russell Crowe movie that’s coming out, and a bunch of other
stuff. He’s fantastic, and he’s got a really great sense of production, and he’s
a really hard worker. So Brian and I ended up producing that movie for Brian
Leavell. It was great because it taught me a lot of really valuable lessons
about managing a production before I went and did RAZOR SHARP. So I got a trial run in that level of filmmaking, which we
basically set out, with THE INTERRUPTION, to do a movie that looked like 20
minutes of anything you’d pay to go see in the theater, or on TV with a real
high level of production. I’m happy to say I think we’ve pretty much achieved
it. So I knew at least where I needed to start with RAZOR SHARP to really
go and do it. And I knew that it was possible, which gave me a lot of
confidence, y’know, going in and doing something that’s sort of nutty and
over-the-top as an action movie on pennies. So, it was a good
experience. RC: Hmm, you’re gonna have to hook me up
with a copy of that movie. Perry: [Nods] Oh yeah, dude. Totally,
I’ll hook you up. RC: [Quick nod back] Sounds good.
Alright, so RAZOR SHARP was an idea you had in college… Perry: [Smiling] It was, it was. And it
all started when BUFFY went off the air! I mean, that’s really… [laughs] that’s
literally when it started. Y’know, I’ve always really loved action stuff.
I mean, one of my favorite movies is ALIENS. I love TERMINATOR as well, and I
think what [director James] Cameron’s been able to do with women action cinema’s
been pretty unparalleled with the exception of what Joss Whedon’s been able to
do, which is sort of a totally different approach, but it ultimately results in
the same ends, which are really authentic and believable female action heroes,
which for some reason, it seems to have been harder for people to digest, movies
like CATWOMAN, ULTRAVIOLET, AEON FLUX, and there’s a whole sort of litany of
them that have never really found their audience and never really worked. But I
think in the case of BUFFY and the stuff that Cameron does, it really can. And
it’s really interesting because you just don’t see those stories very much, and
you don’t see that point of view in action cinema very much. It’s one of the few
aspects of the film genre where there just aren’t that many opportunities for
women other than to be somebody’s love interest or some victim who runs around
screaming the whole time and needs to get rescued. I really wanted to see if I
could contribute something positive to that genre. And I’m not so presumptuous
as to assume we’ve succeeded [laughs], but that was the goal originally to see
if we could do that and try to learn some lessons from the projects that didn’t
do well, and say, “Well, let’s do them differently and see if there’s a way to
do it.” For me, the answer became having a sense of humor about
itself, y’know, and making sure that our main character, that Veronica Sharpe,
is sort of this self-deprecating thing where she’s not totally slick and on the
ball the whole time. She’s a little klutzy, and she messes up. She’s not
necessarily a knight in shining armor, but she pulls it out in the end. And I
felt like that would help make her a lot more human and a lot more relatable to
people, and hopefully make our movie work. Really, that whole thought process
started from me just from watching so much BUFFY. I did several drafts for the
script before we got started, and at first the sense of humor really wasn’t
there. It was going to be a straight-ahead action film with a woman, basically,
and I think my whole approach at the time was: if you’ve ever seen that old
Hitchcock movie TO CATCH A THIEF, with Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, I was like,
“Well, let’s do TO CATCH A THIEF, but what if Grace Kelly was the thief,
y’know, as opposed to the love interest.” That’s sort of where it all started, and it was all about
her being supercool and slick. And I read it and I was like, “Yeah, it’s fine,
and we could make this, but… it’s not interesting. We’ve gotta take this
character a little further and find a little bit more dimensionality to her.”
That’s really when I started injecting that kind of sense of humor and said,
“Well, maybe it’s more interesting if she’s not the world’s greatest
thief. Y’know, maybe it’s more interesting if she’s not even a great
thief. But somehow in sort of that Inspector Clouseau kind of way she’s able to
pull it out in the end, and of course she ends up being the right thief for that
job." And that really kind of opened the doors to her whole moral dilemma, which
was, y’know, I figured if she was a great thief, and on top of her game,
and everything worked, I mean she’d be pretty cold-blooded and really wouldn’t
have a problem kidnapping a little kid and turning the kid over to her boss. But
if she’s not so great at it, it definitely leaves room for that possibility that
maybe she wouldn’t make the cold-blooded decision at the end, and maybe there’s
still room in there for her to become hero. RC: So part of the creation process
involved a conscious decision not to make her a caricature of an action
hero.
Perry: Exactly.
RC: There are several times during the
course of the movie that the camera catches these subtle gestures and facial
expressions that really give a lot of inflection to those particular scenes. How
much of that was ad libbing, and how much of it was you pulling, for instance
Cassidy Freeman (who plays Veronica
Sharpe), aside and saying, “I need this type of expression
here?”
Perry: [Smiles] It’s really equal parts
collaboration where some of that stuff was scripted very specifically. Cassidy
and I, we had a long series of talks in the beginning about who the character
was going to be. One thing that I kept pushing her to really watch was RAIDERS
OF THE LOST ARK. If you watch that movie, Indiana Jones basically, he loses his
whole way through that movie. I mean, in the opening scene he loses the idol,
and then he’s afraid of snakes, and he goes after the ark of the covenant, but
the Nazis take the ark away, then he can’t look at the ark when it’s opened, and
at the end the government takes it away. And despite the fact that this guy
never wins once in the whole movie, you love him. You’re totally with
him, and he comes off totally heroic, because he is. But I think the reason you
love him is because he’s so relatable, like he gets beaten up and you can see
that Harrison Ford’s scared. You can see that he gets hurt, and he doesn’t… he
doesn’t want to go do the stuff that he has to do, but y’know, he still does it.
That’s what makes him such a great hero. It’s the same thing with Bruce Willis
in the first DIE HARD. He’s there sorta by happenstance, and he’s totally
vulnerable and scared, and spends the first half of that movie really trying to
get out of the situation before he steps up and says, “Okay, I’ve gotta be the
guy to solve this problem.”
So we talked a lot about that, and then, sort of the other
great x-factor to the Veronica Sharpe character is a lot of Cassidy’s
personality. We… [shakes his head] we looked long and hard for an actress to
play that part. I think my casting director, Brad Gilmore, and I saw somewhere
in the neighborhood of, like, 250 actresses to play Veronica Sharpe. Everybody
who did it, y’know, came in and they wanted to be tough and sexy. That’s about
as far as they took it. And you kinda go, “Yeah… that’s fine, but, y’know, we
can make anybody look tough and sexy. That’s the easy part. Y’know as
filmmakers, that’s our job.”
What we needed was someone who could come in and play that
sense of humor, and add some real vulnerability to it. And it’s weird, when
Cassidy walked in, even before she spoke Brad and I just kinda knew that
this was gonna be her. Just sorta the way she carried herself, I mean she just
had it all about her, and she was fantastic. I mean, Cassidy was a real find,
she’d only been in L.A. for two months before she did RAZOR SHARP. She’d never
been in a movie before; she had only done theater work. But she just totally got
it and was able to dial into that personality and add so much stuff.
The things that I would keep telling her in all those
action sequences are that the fighting, gunfire, effects; that stuff doesn’t
matter. What matters is what you’re going through and that we can see it in your
facial expressions. Like, I want to see you scared. I need you to react to this
scene the way an audience member would react to the scene if he were put in this
situation. Y’know, the way any of us would if guys with machine guns were
suddenly shooting at us, and we were having to fight off this big armored squad
and then jump down an air shaft. It’s like, I want to see her scared, and then
when things work out, I want to see her excited that they work out. I want her
to be almost as surprised that she can pull of these big, fantastical things as
hopefully the audience will. Cassidy not only embraced that, but she took it so
much further than I’d thought we’d be able to. And it really adds this
incredible amount of likeability for that character.
RC: That’s true. There were also some
scenes where the main character, Veronica Sharpe, took some good thumps. Was
that something that you specifically wanted and went over with the stunt
coordinators?
Perry: Absolutely. That was really
important to us. I wanted to see her get punched and kinda tossed around a
little bit, because you rarely see that with women in action films. You know
what I mean? Because there’s so much importance placed on keeping them looking
perfect and sexy. And come on, it takes away a lot of the believability away
from the scenes when they sort of escape with just, y’know, a nick on their hand
or something like that. I wanted it to look like she was really getting put
through the ringer.
We tried to build a lot of that stuff in even in her
wardrobe. If you look closely at her costume, her costume is all beat up even
from the time she first shows up in the movie, to sort of give you the
impression that she’s been through many, many an ordeal that… that didn’t go the
way that she planned. Kind of everything about her aesthetic, and her partner,
Bryce and her hideout, it’s all this beaten up, weathered down equipment. You
get the sense that these guys very rarely pull it off the way it’s supposed to
be pulled off.
RC: Okay. So it’s safe to say that we’ve
got a pretty good level of success here. You have a 25 minute short on the RAZOR
SHARP character. What about plans for a sequel? A prequel? Possibly even a
trilogy?
Perry: Well for me, I wanted the short
to be a self-contained story so that you could watch it and enjoy it, but for me
it was always to prove a concept for a bigger thing. One of the biggest lessons
that I’ve learned out here, in sort of my limited travels in the film business,
is that really no one has any imagination. It’s kind of a sad reality. You just
have to show people exactly what it’ll be, so that you leave no wiggle room for
interpretation. I wanted to do something that was hopefully the same quality of
a big feature film or a TV show. I’ve actually got a RAZOR SHARP feature script
that I’ve written that we’re taking around right now. We’re also taking it out
as a possible TV show. We’re doing it both at once to see if we can get any
traction one way or the other, because I feel like there is a lot of ground to
be covered with this character, and so much stuff that I want to get into. And
so many places that you can go with it, particularly with what’s going to end up
being a unique partnership between her and this little girl who’s basically a
genius. Because the way it’s sort of intended to work is the little girl is
actually the one who’s got the faculty for this kind of job. You know what I
mean? She’s the one who can figure out a way to pull this stuff off without a
hitch, but then it’s going to take Veronica Sharpe to go in and actually do it.
And so they’ll be kind of an interesting big sister, little sister relationship
with them, in the sense that the little girl will almost be acting as the big
sister to Veronica Sharpe. And then you’ll get into the little girl’s back story
and Veronica Sharpe’s back story, and all these different characters. One thing
that I’m doing to transition into a bigger series is we’ve got a comic book
coming out. The first issue’s going to be out anytime now this
month.
RC: With Jeff
Henderson?
Perry: Yup, with Jeff Henderson! He drew
the comic, and I wrote it. It gives you a little bit of a bigger introduction
into her world and what it’s about. The idea is basically that it’s all near
future, and the United States government has totally collapsed. Corporations
control everything, and there’s this thing called the board of directors,
which is the heads of the six major companies that run the United States and
basically control everything. The kind of thief that Veronica Sharpe is is
called a data grifter, and they’re sort of like the rebel alliance to the
evil empire. They’re like modern day Robin Hoods, where they basically rip off
these big companies to redistribute the wealth. And when we pick up with
Veronica in that world, she really doesn’t care anything about that political
cause. She’s just kind of in it for herself because her father, who is deceased,
was a big thief. And she’s kind of piggy-backing on his great reputation because
he was every bit the thief that she’s not. He was Cary Grant in TO CATCH A
THIEF. He was totally suave and pulled everything off without a hitch, and
nobody can understand why Veronica is so bad at it – why she didn’t get
some of those genes.
When she’s paired up with the little girl, she’s sort of
forced for the first time in her life to really try to be that level of a thief
to protect the kid, basically, to really hone her skillsets and to become a
hero. She kind of has a reason for the first time to want to become everything
that the Sharpe namesake suggests. That’s the groundwork for what we’re gonna
try to expand it into.
RC: Any parts that you’re looking to be
directly involved in with potential movies and TV
shows?
Perry: Oh yeah. The idea is that I’ll
write and direct. If it goes to a TV show I’ll write and direct the pilot and be
one of the lead writers on the show and direct episodes for a while. If it goes
feature then I’ll be the writer and director of the movie. That’s kind of how
it’s all built up. I mean that’s another big reason that I made the short to the
level that I did, hopefully to show people that I can be trusted to do it. We’ll
see if that pans out, but that’s what I’m trying to do right
now.
RC: What publishing company are you
using for the comic book?
Perry: It’s called Aftershock,
and we’re actually doing a split issue with another comic book called THE SIRE,
that a buddy of mine, named Mike Dolce, produces. Mike let us piggy back onto
his comic for this one zero introductory issue, which we’re now taking around to
some other companies like IDW and Image, and some places like that
and see if we can get it picked up on a regular run kind of deal. It’s been a
good excuse for us to get her translated into a comic book and show people what
we’re after. Plus I’ve got Jeff Henderson drawing it, who’s ridiculous…
ridiculous. I mean, he makes it look so good, it’s
obnoxious.
RC: Yeah, the storyboards that you show
on the movie DVD look great.
Perry: Hey, Jeff’s the real deal. Jeff
just got through doing all the storyboards for the 30 DAYS OF NIGHT movie that’s
coming out, and he worked on SPIDER-MAN 3 and a bunch of other films. So he’s no
joke. Jeff was a great fit because when we were doing all that production
artwork, I’d never directed anything before, really. Just worked on a couple of
student films, and it was important for me to show everybody that I was going to
be asking favors from that we really had a good idea of what we wanted to do.
And so, not only did Jeff’s storyboards convey all the information you need to
shoot a movie, but they convey it in a style that’s very reflective of what we
ended up with. So people can look at it on paper and go, “I get it. I know
exactly what you guys are going to do. I think you’re crazy. I don’t know if
you’re gonna pull it off, but, y’know, I’ll help. We’ll see.” I dunno, I feel
like half of it was probably people’s morbid curiosity, like, “I wonder if
this’ll just totally crash and burn. I kinda want to be there when that train
runs off the tracks.” But then as we ran the production, I think people started
to go, “Wow, I think… I think they’re actually gonna do it, and so let’s get on
board, ‘cause this could be a really cool project. This might have some legs
beyond the short.”
RC: You mentioned you were a comic book
fan when you were younger. What sort of titles did you
follow?
Perry: Well, I grew up on
Spider-Man. That for me was like, the big one. But then I kinda
got out of it for a couple years while I was in college, and the thing that sort
of sucked me back in was J. Scott Campbell’s Danger Girl. I loved
Danger Girl. That got me back into it, and then Paul Jenkins did a run on
Spectacular Spider-Man with the Green Goblin. It was dynamite, and after
I started reading that again I was pretty much hooked, so… these days, of course
all Joss Whedon titles. That’s been great having him in comics. I love Jeph Loeb
and Jenkins, and Mark Millar, and all those guys. So, I’ve got to say I’m kinda
back in a big way.
RC: Any older, more valuable issues that
we may be seeing on eBay anytime soon?
Perry: I have Amazing Spider-Man
numbers three to about 300 solid that I’ve kind of collected over the years in
sort of various states of repair. I’ve tried really hard to hold off on selling
those. There was a time when we were trying to finish off RAZOR SHARP when I was
like, “Well, maybe now it’s time to sell my comic book collection.” But to me it
was like, that’d be like cutting off my foot, y’know? Like there’s gotta be
another way to do this without having to sell my comics. So, thus far, I’ve
actually got my collection, but you never know. You never
know.
RC: Interesting. So what’s the next
project for Marcus Perry? I promise, it’ll just be between
us.
Perry: Well, that’s a good question. I’m
trying to figure out what that’s going to be right now. I’m writing some
features, and I’m going in and pitching for a lot of projects that are out
there. For about a couple weeks I was attached to do this movie called SMOKING
GUN, that was going to be a big comic book movie, but unfortunately that
production kind of went by the wayside. And so I’m really just
looking.
I think I’ve got a pretty good sample in RAZOR SHARP. I’m
happy with what we did, and I think we accomplished a lot of the things that we
wanted to do. Certainly it’s a totally imperfect piece, and I think everything
always will be. Like, I watch it, and I just sort of see a litany of the places
that I’ve failed. But I feel like it’s… I’m not embarrassed to show it to
people, to go in and ask for work. So now it’s just a matter of finding the
right project with the right group of people and the right budget that people
will trust me with as a first-time feature director. Because even though I’ve
done the short, I mean, a feature is a totally different game. That’s more about
a marathon run. Hopefully, sooner than later I’ll find the right thing. I’m
pretty excited about a couple of projects that I’m bringing up. Maybe one of
those will kind of take off. That’s about it for now. I wish I had some more
exciting news.
RC: Alright, last question. What was
your favorite memory during the making of RAZOR SHARP? Give me something that
maybe didn’t seem that significant at the time, but looking back was a special
moment that will remain so years from now.
Perry: I’ve got a couple, actually. The
first one is probably on our first day of production, when for the first time
Cassidy walked out in the finished Veronica Sharpe costume, all totally done up
before we were gonna shoot. That was just such a surreal moment, because for
about a year before then, the character had really only existed on paper. And
all of a sudden Cassidy walks out and looks exactly like the thing that
Jeff and I designed, and had been working off of and talking about. That was
kind of the first moment when I sort of looked around and said, “We’re really
gonna do this.” Y’know, like this is… “We’re really gonna do
it.”
That was pretty cool. My other favorite moment was when we
were in post-production, when we were editing the movie, the big fight scene
that happens in the vault. We actually ended up editing that scene on my
birthday. And for me that was the coolest birthday present I’d probably ever
gotten, because, y’know, since I was twelve years old I’d wanted to make a movie
that had stunts like that in it. And all of a sudden we’re putting it together
on my birthday. That’s something that I’ll never forget. And also the editor,
Brian Pianko, who’s one of my best friends in the world… it was just sort of
cool to be spending that day with him, in kind of that scene, I think that’s
going to be something I’ll take with me forever.
RC: Thanks very much, Marcus. Perry: Thank you for taking the
time! |
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Ever since then I’ve wanted to work in movies,
and more specifically action/adventure stuff, which as I came out of film school
I realized it’s sort of the one thing you can’t do in film school, for a variety
of reasons. I mean, liability insurance probably being chief among them
[laughs]. And so in film school I kind of voluntarily shifted my focus over to
screenwriting from production because I thought, “Well, I can’t make an action
movie here, but I can at least write one. And if I come out of school with a
couple of good scripts, maybe there’s a chance that I’ll get some representation
and be able to kinda start to work in the movie industry that way.”