Killer Convict
By Steve Swires
If you were John Carpenter and it was 1980 and you were casting the starring role of a two-fisted hero named Snake Plissken for your science-fiction adventure film ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, whom would you choose? Clint Eastwood? Charles Bronson? Kurt Russell? Kurt Russell? Wait a minute! Isn't he that child actor from all those saccharine-sweet Disney pictures?
That's right, but having directed him in the title role of his ELVIS TV movie, Carpenter knew that Russell had come a long way since those adolescent days. "Kurt Russell is a great actor," Carpenter said in 1980, a few months before beginning production on ESCAPE and long before such Russell action films as TOMBSTONE, STARGATE and EXECUTIVE DECISION. "If you gave him a copy of STARLOG, he could play the whole issue, including the editorial and the letters to the editor. He's young, and I don't believe Eastwood or Bronson could do what's called for in the film. The things Kurt has in mind are more fabulous than I ever imagined. He really went all out for ELVIS and did some things another actor might not have done, and in the same sense he's going to do all that for Sanke, too. I have a lot of faith in him as an actor."
For his part, Russell has a great deal of faith in Carpenter as a director. "It sounds like typical Hollywood bullshit," Russell acknowledges, "but I honestly mean it when I say that I would be not only content but honored to work with John on as many more films as possible. Apart from being a really nice guy and, I feel, a very good friend, and a guy to whom I like being a good friend, he's also very talented. To me, that's the best of both worlds. I've seen lots of movies, and I think he's on top of the hill. He's fearless, he has great visual sense and a wonderful imagination."
DESPERATE MISSION
Carpenter's imagination gets a full workout in ESCAPE, in which he projects America circa 1997 as a police state, and Manhattan island as a maximum-security prison containing almost every convict in the country. In this living hell, the president of the United States is being kept hostage, and to rescue him the government coerces Snake Plissken - the world's greatest criminal.
According to Russell, Plissken is a great deal more than that. "Snake is an individual who is everone's fantasy of a figure who no longer exists by that time - a person who says and does absolutely what he wants. He's an interesting character, and over the course of the film, you'll come to find he's more than a one-dimensional, one-man destruction machine. My feeling is that he's just a guy who's getting through each day - he's a survivor.
"I don't know if there has been a character much like Snake before. I think the audience will pull for him because he's trying to accomplish something. I don't think he'll work his way into anybody's heart though, like John Wayne did in THE SEARCHERS. He's a fairly cold person, but to me, he's very sensitive. He's living in a colder society as well. The fantasy of what the situation could be like in New York City in 1997 changes his whole outlook."
That situation is "steely and very chilling," Russell says. "It's not made of breath-taking vistas, but is rather intimate - on a large scale. It's confining and claustrophobic. Given that atmosphere, Snake is the kind of hero we haven't seen yet - he's an ex-World War III war hero. If you take a guy who's a hero of a war that hasn't been faught yet and put him in a situation we've never seen before, he certainly has to be different."
As to Plissken's function in the storyline, Russell reports "he's basically a loner who doesn't have a real relationship with any other character in the picture. He uses the other people because they have information he needs in order to find the President. Other than that, he's not interested in anybody else."
RUGGED ACTION
Russell had to go into training for his role, but even with a background as a natural athlete, the rugged action sequences occasionally got the better of him. "I knew it would be a very physical picture," he says, "so I spent four months in advance lifting weights and running to get in shape for it. I also did most of my own stunts because I thought it would make a big difference in the final product, even though I cut myself up a lot. One scene in particular was a bizarre gladiator-type fight that was really grueling. I fought a guy who weighed 320 pounds, and we used trash can lids as shields and baseball bats with real nails in them. Because of the way it was shot, it would have ruined the sequence's timing to have cut it up and inserted stuntmen. I worked it out the day before with my stuntman, but it was still like stepping into the ring for an entire day and slugging it out. It was brutal, and I just got beaten to death."
Not every actor would be willing to undergo such abuse to preserve the authenticity of his performance, but for Russell it's just one instance among many of his loyalty to Carpenter. "I agree with all the nice things that have been said about John by the critics," Russell says, "but on top of that as far as I'm concerned, he's just a great guy. During the next 10 to 15 years, I think he'll grow as a director should."
From an actor's point-of-view, Russell found it easier to work with Carpenter on ESCAPE than to work with producer Dino De Laurentiis, who made Russell his first choice to play the title hero of FLASH GORDON, a role that eventually went to Sam J. Jones. "Dino was all over me on that one," Russell reveals. "I turned it down because I thought a lot of science-fiction pictures like that had already been done, and they were better. Basically, the character of Flash in the script was lacking character. I didn't feel he was in any way fulfilled. I talked with Dino and the director about it, but I couldn't make any headway. Dino was trying to make a deal and I was trying to make a character. We weren't on the same track. I was trying to come up with a character the audience could be interested in for reasons other than his just being named Flash Gordon. I wanted to see what made him tick, but Dino just wanted to make the deal.
"The thing I was interested in about the project was that it was a $40-million picture, and I thought maybe I should do something like that because it would be a big breakthrough for me. However, I just couldn't bring myself to the character. It seemed to me that the most interesting stuff in the script didn't involve Flash. He didn't have anything really good to do. He was Flash Gordon, but that wasn't good enough for me. I tried to get Dino to talk about that, but we just kept going around in circles. Finally, I said, 'Absolutely not,' because it wasn't what I wanted to do, and I ended up making USED CARS instead. Dino's an interesting man, though. Boy, when he wants you, he keeps coming!"
It's ironic that Kurt Russell should now be starring in a SF film at all, because, although he enjoys reading SF, he doesn't care much for watching it. "I'm a great fan of science-fiction books, but I've never been a fan of science-fiction movies," he says. "I've never liked the special FX in most SF pictures because they look so poorly done. I'm also not much of a horror film buff. I like them if they're scary, but I don't really like the genre per se. My favorite SF author is Robert Heinlein. Future history is my cup of tea. There's something about his work that is very real and very humanistic to me. It doesn't strike me as a world of machinery but as a world of people, which I think it will always be."
