With The Avengers currently lighting up the global box-office and The Dark Knight Rises poised to invade theatres, you’ve got to wonder were all the action movies aimed at men are? Forgive me if I’m nonplussed by this decade-long fascination with superheroes. I prefer my summer entertainment to feature car chases, endless ammunition and testosterone-fueled explosions. As our Reagan-era icons reach retirement age, action movies have been hijacked by costumed ubermensch and low-rent Euro-thrillers. Parkour has replaced bulging biceps and body-shrapnel. A recent New York Times article by Adam Sternbergh chronicles the rise and fall of America’s greatest cultural export, lamenting a bygone era of guts, glory and distilled machismo.
But hope is on the horizon.
The Expendables 2, which drops
in August, may be the bullet-riddled reprieve we’ve all been looking for. Sylvester Stallone’s original film co-starred
Jason Statham and a stellar supporting cast, including Arnold Schwarzenegger
and Bruce Willis in a much-ballyhooed, but all-too-brief cameo. While the sequel re-assembles the same red-blooded roster
of forgotten action heroes, it also throws Jean-Claude Van Damme and Chuck “Fucking”
Norris into the fray.
A few weeks ago, a fan-made trailer for The Expendables 2 kicked up a stir across the web. It was created by Garrison Dean, and presents
a refreshingly gung-ho point of view. Schwarzenegger
himself says the insanely jingoistic trailer “is without a doubt the best fan
video I've seen.”. The Governator even goes so far as to suggest it should be the official trailer for the film. I couldn’t agree
more. I recently traded punches with
Garrison Dean, who currently works at an ad agency in Kansas City. We chatted about his creative sensibilities,
his career aspirations, Michael Bay and the sad state of American action
movies.
GEEK ZERO: What was
your motivation for re-cutting The Expendables 2 trailer in the first place?
GARRISON DEAN: Sheer, raw, arrogance. I feel that
I can do a better job selling the film than "they" can. The
Expendables isn’t a gritty Bourne
movie. It’s classic action, a bunch of
dudes fucking shit up, and I wanted to get that across. The first one (Call To Arms trailer) definitely made a splash, and I was wondering
if I could do a sequel. I wanted to capture that same vibe, same feeling
and same call to action that the first one had, while not being a blatant copy
of it.
When I made the Call
To Arms trailer, I was thinking about the last Rambo, Punisher: War Zone,
and a few other films that came and went without any fanfare. I wondered why guys weren’t seeing
these? And with The Expendables I really felt that if this collection of movie
stars can’t pull men in, then action films may have been lost to video games,
or sports, or God knows what.
So for this, when I saw that NYT article, it reignited that
feeling in me of, “dammit, this is America and Hollywood’s bread and
butter. This is what we do!” So I felt I had to do a response.
GZ: Music is so instrumental (no pun intended) to
the effectiveness of the trailer. Tell me about the song choice, “Totally
Stupid" by Andrew W.K..
GD: Music, for
everything I do really, is very important. And I fight like hell for it
when I'm doing collaborative work on things other than trailers.
I also try to pick something that isn't obvious and will hopefully give
people something familiar, that they'll like, but that they probably haven't
heard. But for this, I really wanted to
use Andrew W.K. again because he worked so well for the first one. I
think he's fucking brilliant. If you listen
to his album, "The Wolf", it's basically what would happen if
Meatloaf and the Top Gun soundtrack
had sex and made their kid grow up listening only to Oi! Music. So when
it comes to The Expendables and that
80’s style action, there is an optimism, a lack of irony and cynicism. And there’s an aggressive push towards almost
violent positivity in Andrew W.K.’s music that really calls back to the 80's
action films that The Expendables
echoes.
In the 80's, for whatever reason, they knew to
temper their insane violence and mindless action with synth pop or
power ballads. I guarantee if every film from the past 10 years that
thought about putting Drowning Pool's "Bodies" in their movie had
instead put something by Robert Tepper or Frank Stallone in there, they
would've seen their Box Office go up 10%. That's a Garrison Dean
guarantee.
But for this, I knew it had to be big and sweeping. I tried his song "Ready to Die" and
it kind of worked, but it wasn't anthemic enough. So I stuck with this and really tried hard to
make it work, and I gotta say, it did. And for people complaining about
it and saying it’s not manly enough? Well. You’re wrong.
 |
| Andrew W.K. |
GZ: You currently work in advertising, and
you’ve created a collection of fan trailers. Is legitimate trailer
cutting something you want to pursue, or do you have other movie-related career
aspirations ?
GD: The ultimate goal is, that at some point down
the road, I hope to direct a film that I can make my own trailer for. How long can I sit and piss and moan about action
movies, or chick flicks, or how people "don't get it" without trying
to really prove it myself? It would have
cool cars, fights, explosions and boobs. That much I promise. My second
film would probably have spaceships too.
It'd be fun to cut real trailers, but from what I know about
advertising, I think that as soon as I enter into that world, all that crazy
shit I can do in my house that everyone loves would become a victim
of committee and Nervous Nellies. I also think that there is a lot
more than just good editing going on in my trailers. I think people are
too smart to be fooled anymore. I try to
think creatively about how to sell a film, and I don’t know if studios or
agencies would respond well to my strategies.
GZ: How do you honestly feel about the current
state of American action movies?
GD: How do I feel
about the current state of American action flicks? The NYT article wasn’t
exactly wrong (despite my loud line in the trailer). I do think there are some other countries who
are doing great action films. France and England for sure. I think
a lot of it has to do with them having a smaller budget which allows them to be
truer to their vision and not have to please as wide an audience. I think
we’ve definitely veered towards the softer more family friendly superhero
films. I think a lot of Hollywood films try to pander to as many people
as possible and end up alienating a bunch of people in the process.
But America still kills it when they get the chance. Big, loud, and bold (and sometimes stupid) is
what the other countries can’t do. Every Fast and Furious movie gets bigger and meatier and they just get
better and better and keep making more and more money. There is something truly unique about American
films that allows us to just go for it, and I find that endearing. The
foreign films come in and work with the underdog status, they never achieve
that certain something American films have. When we go big, we go big.
Sylvester Stallone, The Rock and a few other people are
really keeping the flame going. Rambo,
for my money, is one of the best action films of the past 20 years. And
with the The Expendables, Stallone is
able to bring together such a collage of people beloved around the world that
anyone outside of Hollywood wouldn’t be able to do. But I do think that
when these films are made they are often marketed with their head hung low as
if they are ashamed that they are carrying the torch of the 80’s. As if
its passé.
GZ: Any thoughts on the cinema of Michael
Bay? I have a morbid fascination with him. I own all his films, but
love them and hate them simultaneously.
GD: I fucking love Michael Bay. Yes, many
of his films have issues with plot and character development, so I won't sit
and endlessly argue with the haters on that point, but he is in a class all by
himself. He's the type of auteur filmmaker normally found in indie or art
films, he just makes those films about shit blowing up not
about internal strife and struggle. Nothing exceeds like excess
and he exceeds them all. While I say it tongue in cheek, I do stand by
the stuff I say in the Transformers trailer
I did.
I think it needs to be pointed out that to successfully
manage films that big, and drive action the way he does takes a lot of talent.
We can see with Battleship that just
copying what he does, doesn't get results. And one can look at just about
anything he shoots from film to commercials and know immediately that he did
it. That kind of visual signature is rare and has to be respected.
I think in a decade or two people will look at his films and have a bit
more respect for them.
I really didn't like Pearl
Harbor though. And you could've cut out almost all of Sam's storyline
in Transformers 3 and had one hell of
a mean action film. Also, I find it interesting that no one has pointed out
that TF3 and The Avengers have pretty much exactly the same plot? Right
down to space portals on the top of skyscrapers bringing in alien armies and
gigantic robotic space snakes/slugs? Just sayin.
GZ: Other than The Expendables 2, what summer movies are you looking forward
to?
GD: Well, I was looking forward to G.I. Joe… but The Dark Knight Rises for sure. Prometheus, but I'm worried about that one despite how beautiful it
looks. The trailer for Total Recall
surprised me in that I didn't hate it, but not expecting miracles there. Abe Lincoln Vampire Hunter I want to be
excited for, but I know it's probably going to be essentially a fantasy movie
with no real suspense or immediacy so I will just end up sitting there watching
the cool slo-mo. Boy, you just forced me to go look through the list of
films coming out this summer and it's pretty slim fuckin’ pickings. I'd love for Savages to be great old school Oliver Stone, but we'll see.
Oh and Looper.
GZ: Anything else you'd like to add, about movies
in general?
GD: I’d like to add to the record, that I love
comic book movies. The Dark Knight
and Iron Man are classics in my mind.
But they are a definite departure from classic "Action" films.
When it comes to action films we need heroes who can die, and we've lost that.
We have so many Franchises, and Franchises can't die. Think about
how all our heroes look at the end of all those classic American Action movies,
Die Hard, Lethal Weapon(s), Commando,
Rambo etc… The hero looks like
death. They have been beaten, stabbed, shot, and stagger to the finish line and
we feel that with them and root for them because of it. When John McClane takes out a building full
of terrorists and jumps off the roof looking scared as shit as it explodes,
it's unrealistic, but it's not fake.
If I could leave people with anything… have fun. Don’t take
things so seriously and go to the actual theater as often as possible, seriously.
There is nothing like a big screen, big stars, and popcorn and soda and a room
full of people all enjoying something at the same time. That experience,
whether it’s The Expendables, or Twilight or Moonrise Kingdom, is one of America’s greatest gifts to the world.
Garrison Dean has done every self-respecting man (and babe) a favour by compiling a mix-tape of all the music he's used in his trailers thus far. Let this be your Summer soundtrack.
www.garrisondean.com
No comments:
Post a Comment