SKYSCRAPER DIRECTOR AND THE ROCK TALK STATE OF HOLLYWOOD
Summer flick rolls dice in industry plagued by sequels and superheros
LOS ANGELES— Throughout his movie career, Dwayne Johnson has squared off against all manner of threats, from giant monsters to ancient armies to earthquakes, firmly establishing himself as the king of the action-movie hill with more than $9.4 billion (U.S.) in global box-office grosses to his name.
Now, with his latest film, Johnson is going up against sequelitis.
Out of eight movies that the major studios will release in July, only one is not either a sequel or an outgrowth of an existing property: Johnson’s Skyscraper.
Skyscraper, which hits theatres Friday, stars Johnson as a former FBI agent and amputee named Will Sawyer who is hired as head of security at the world’s tallest building, a Hong Kong tower called the Pearl. When the high-tech skyscraper comes under attack by a criminal syndicate, Sawyer must save his family before a raging fire consumes the building.
From the start, writer and director Rawson Marshall Thurber — who directed Johnson in the 2016 action-comedy hit
Central Intelligence and will soon reunite with him again on a heist movie called Red Notice — conceived of the film as an homage to meat-and-potatoes action movies.
“I hope that this movie is going to feel fresh in its familiarity, which I think is a real sweet spot,” Thurber said at a hotel in Bel-Air, as Johnson sat beside him picking at a plate of food.
Johnson and Thurber speak about the challenge of trying to bring back the old-school action movie in today’s era of Rotten Tomatoes scores, generally dwindling movie-star drawing power and comic-book franchise overkill.
What was the original germ of this idea?
Thurber: When I was in postproduction on Central Intelli
gence, I saw Creed, and I loved it. I started watching a bunch of Sylvester Stallone pictures and one of them was Renny Harlin’s (1993 action film) Cliffhanger, which I remember loving when I was a kid.
I just love action movies. I’ve wanted to make one since I was 8 years old. Die Hard is one of my all-time favourite films.
Dwayne, what hooked you about the idea?
Johnson: Rawson gave me a preamble of what it was and immediately I was in, because it was different, it was fresh, it was cool. It had this clear reverence for movies we loved, like
The Towering Inferno and Die Hard and The Fugitive, and it felt like it had the potential to be something that audiences really liked. How much of the decision to set the movie in Hong Kong
was for creative reasons and how much was driven by box office considerations and the importance of the Chinese market?
Thurber: It was kind of hand in glove. Obviously, you want to pay attention to the fact that it’s a huge market and that matters. But for me, Hong Kong is an incredibly vertical city so it seemed to fit there. Setting it in China was not by happenstance, but it certainly wasn’t a case of the tail wagging the dog by any stretch. I wanted it to feel as real and in the soil as possible, which is why we have the cops speaking to each other in Cantonese.
This movie is one of the only big-budget studio tent poles this summer that isn’t a sequel. Dwayne, in the current climate, is it getting rarer to come across original scripts like this?
Johnson: Well, the original scripts that are coming in are certainly not coming in at this size and scale. Of course, in today’s market there are superhero movies and sequels and big franchises, which work very well and they’re very enter- taining, and it’s what we do.
But with Skyscraper, the original IP (intellectual property) made it very appealing. I think there was also something interesting to the studios in that we were going to be cost-conscious and create a summer movie that didn’t have to be $250 million. You could cut that in half and it would still feel like a big, entertaining movie.
With a movie like this, you take a shot.
Dwayne, Skyscraper rests almost entirely on your shoulders in terms of your drawing power. You’re one of the only stars left who a studio would conceivably make that kind of bet on. Does that feel like a lot of pressure?
Johnson: I mean, it comes with the territory and the position. But there’s a lot of confidence that I have in the team and the material. The writer-director, a great producing team, a great studio in Universal and Legendary — there are a lot of components that I can rest on.
I like to take big swings. For me, the goal is always to impact as many lives as possible in the
most entertaining way. You roll the dice and sometimes it works, like a Jumanji or like a
Central Intelligence, and sometimes it doesn’t, like a Baywatch or like a Doom.
With Baywatch in particular, you argued there was a disconnect between what critics thought of the movie and what audiences thought. There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about the “Rotten Tomatoes effect” and how much of an impact that can have on a movie’s box office. With a movie like Skyscraper, how much do you think about critics versus the general audience?
Johnson: With Baywatch, it’s not that critics didn’t like it — they ... hated it. (laughs) But to clarify, it’s not audience first, critics never. Critics love movies, and we’re all in this business together. I know a lot of critics. They’re my buddies. It’s not an easy job. Everybody’s got a job to do. Even the executives who are in charge of the spreadsheets at the studios — we all love movies.
This interview has been edited and condensed.