Montreal Gazette

Fear fuels Commuter director

- T’CHA DUNLEVY

“Anything can be a thriller,” Jaume Collet-Serra said. “Any situation in your life — anything about betrayal, finding the truth or something more action-driven. It’s just (a question of ) being very specific about what your character wants and making it very hard for them to get.”

He would know. The Spanish-born director makes things hard for Liam Neeson for the fourth time in seven years with The Commuter. Based on simple yet effective premises, their films (including 2011’s Unknown, 2014’s Non-Stop and 2015’s Run All Night) share another trait: high entertainm­ent value.

The pair’s latest edge-of-your seat offering posits Neeson as a 60-something guy who gets let go from his job, then gets more than he bargained for on the train ride home to his wife and teenage son.

After accepting aw substantia­l sum of money to track down a stranger on the train, Neeson’s Michael MacCauley realizes the offer comes with karmic debt.

“It’s very hard to find movies that have action and also mystery,” Collet-Serra said. “Either you have a survival thriller like (the director’s 2016 stranded surfer pic) The Shallows, where there’s no secret — you know everything — or you have something that is full of secrets, where it’s hard to infuse action.”

With The Commuter, he wanted to combine the two, while tackling perhaps the film’s greatest obstacle: almost the entire story takes place aboard the train.

“We enjoyed the challenge of making a movie in one location,” he said. “That’s new to my body of work. It was very limiting, and exciting. I usually choose movies because I’m scared of them. I’m always wondering how not to repeat myself.”

That’s no easy feat when you’re making your fourth feature with the same lead actor. For the director, it was just another challenge. And if he gets the chance to work with Neeson again, he admits it would be hard to say no.

“He’s just an amazing actor,” ColletSerr­a said. “He can do anything. He’s brilliant at making a character relatable, instantly. He’s very collaborat­ive and respectful, all the things you want in a partner.”

Neeson is an eager co-conspirato­r for Collet-Serra. In The Commuter, in addition to working within the confines of the train, they had to navigate the film’s twisting plot.

“You need to be able to forget the destinatio­n,” Collet-Serra said, “to put yourself in the moment, think like the character and be surprised by what could happen if they choose one thing over another.”

Collet-Serra can be forgiven for wanting to spend time exploring the thriller genre.

The filmmaker has been on a mission since first travelling to the U.S. on a summer exchange program at age 15. Three years later, he entered film school at L.A.’s Columbia College. Upon graduation in the mid-’90s, he began making music videos, then TV ads before, in his words, “Hollywood came knocking.”

Producer Joel Silver (The Matrix) backed his first and third features, the horror films House of Wax (2005) and Orphan (2009), broken up by the sports drama Goal II: Living the Dream. From the beginning, Collet-Serra made money-making movies.

“Honestly, those are the movies I aspire to make, movies a lot of people see,” he said, “I think there’s an art form in doing that.”

 ??  ?? Jaume Collet-Serra
Jaume Collet-Serra

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