Shoot your money- maker
Commuter director creates art for the masses
NEW YORK — “Anything can be a thriller,” Jaume Collet- Serra said. “Any situation in your life — anything about betrayal, finding the truth or something that’s 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 Spanishborn 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 one other 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 a 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,” ColletSerra 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,” Collet- Serra 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.
“You can’t be afraid to make decisions with characters, even if you don’t know the answer. You have to analyze all possibilities, as crazy as they could be. It’s good to put your character in a corner and not know how you’re going to figure it out.”
Collet- Serra can be forgiven for wanting to spend time exploring the parameters of 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. Over the course of a month spent with a family near San Francisco, he did some recon on American universities. 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 moneymaking 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. Hitchcock, back in the day, did movies for everybody, and they’re masterpieces.”