Daily Archives: January 24, 2012

Part Jack London, part John Carpenter, “The Grey” combines hurtling excitement, heartfelt emotion and masterful filmmaking and acting. It’s not just the bloody kill-or-die adventure; a true and beating heart is what makes “The Grey” come alive on-screen. Speaking with director Joe Carnahan and Liam Neeson in Los Angeles — each with an adult beverage in front of them — the easy rapport between the two came across.

After this film, one of the things I wanted to watch was “Runaway Train,” because you had this similar story of rough guys in rough circumstances.

Neeson: Good call, buddy.

Carnahan: You know, what if I had to pick one film that’s elementally similar to “The Grey” it’s “Runaway Train.” By the way here’s an interesting fact about “Runaway Train”: Produced by two Israelis, Golan and Globus, written by Kurosawa, directed by a Russian, starting three Americans.

There’s all these rough guys in rough circumstances, and the roughness kind of scours their armor away until they’re completely vulnerable. How do you write that, and how do you play it?

Carnahan: I think you write it with a huge degree of humility. What’s great about that script is I can actually say it’s kind of my own psyche, which means my own insecurity and my own fear laid bare for all those characters to kind of inhabit. It’s not that difficult if you don’t give in to melodrama. That’s what I avoided I think was melodrama. In the writing of that it’s just these conversations, but it’s exactly what you said. I said that earlier, “Nature will eventually remove the veneer of whatever you think you’re projecting to the world. It will strip you of that and show you for who you truly are.” That was kind of the goal; especially a guy like Diaz, who’s probably the most extreme example of that. This machismo, until the guy who’s the de facto leader of this group says, “What the f**k is wrong with being afraid? I’m scared s**tless. What’s wrong with that?” You don’t see that in movies. You certainly don’t see a guy like Liam Neeson say it, so when that moment happens it becomes very honest, and it becomes soul-baaring, I guess in a way. You’re just honest with yourself; that’s how you write it.

How do you play it? Acting when you know you’re playing voiceover later as well, how do you play that stuff and how do you keep subtelty from becoming invisibility?

Neeson: We laid very little voiceover later. I don’t think ever really changed a semi-colon, a comma in this script. We knew the emotional reservoir that was there. We had four or five days of rehearsal beforehand just to talk about stuff, but we never ever intellectualized the emotional impact. Joe cast me for whatever reason. All I knew when he gave it to me, was “Okay, I can hit these reservoirs of emotion very easily.”

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