Paul McGuigan Inteview, PUSH

MoviesOnline sat down with director Paul McGuigan to talk about his riveting new action thriller, "Push," set in the deadly world of psychic espionage. The film stars Chris Evans, Dakota Fanning, Camilla Belle and Academy Award nominee Djimon Hounsou.
 
The premise of Push -- a world in which ordinary people capable of astonishing acts are tested and controlled by a secretive government agency -- stirred director Paul McGuigan's curiosity and sent him to the Internet for more information. "I typed in 'Psychic Powers Experiments,'" says McGuigan. "Out comes this amazing stuff. It's 1949 and the Cold War is about to begin. People are starting to experiment on what the brain can do."
 
The filmmakers believe the reality behind the movie's story sets it apart from other films revolving around superheroes. "We wanted to tell a fantastical story in a way that makes it feel very real," says McGuigan. "I liked the idea of bringing this whole world of people with extraordinary powers to life."
 
Paul McGuigan has carved out a reputation for himself as a director with a keen visual sense that is incorporated seamlessly into each cinematic narrative he undertakes. A native of Bellshill, Scotland, McGuigan began his career as a photographer before moving toward filmmaking with a series of acclaimed documentaries for television. His first movie was an adaptation of Irvine Welsh's short story "The Granton Star Case," which eventually became part of McGuigan's feature-length trilogy of Welsh stories called "The Acid House" (1998).
 
"Gangster No. 1" (2000) was notable for launching both McGuigan and the film's star, Paul Bettany, onto the international stage. McGuigan capitalized on those successes with the U.S. films "The Reckoning" (2003), also starring Bettany; "Wicker Park" (2004), starring Josh Hartnett; and the acclaimed "Lucky Number Slevin" (2006), starring Hartnett, Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, Ben Kingsley and Lucy Liu.
 
Paul McGuigan is an amazing director known for his bold visual style and we really appreciated his time. Here's what he had to tell us about his new movie, "Push":
 
MoviesOnline: Can you talk about the visual style of this film and your personal vision?

PAUL MCGUIGAN: Well, when I first got the script, I was quite surprised that somebody would send me whole done movies that weren’t like this at all so it’s always nice when somebody thinks about you in another way. I got sent the script and I just thought, “Oh, interesting.” And then I thought about the whole genre aspect of it and, you know, we’re up against big movies because of The Dark Knights and I call it the Tin Man, but what’s it called? Iron Man? (laughs) You know, those were great movies and I thought to myself that the only reason I would do a film like this would be if I could do it the way I want to do it. An important part of my decision making was to have a strong point of view of how I was going to shoot it. Decision making, i.e., do I want to do this movie? And I said, this is the way I would want to do it which was all kind of handheld and use a place like Hong Kong to its full advantage. And, also, it’s the first time I’ve actually worked in a country or a city that I was actually in that country and that city. It’s like that film logic where you say, “Well, this looks like New York” and you’re in the middle of…it could be anywhere, in Scotland or something, just because it makes more sense financially, but it was actually great that they wanted to shoot it in Hong Kong.

MoviesOnline: Did you have to do everything in one take if you’re on the street with a hidden camera?

PAUL MCGUIGAN: Basically the idea was…again, go back to film logic… usually what happens is that when you make a movie, you see a street scene and you walk and you see the street and you take a picture because you’re on location. And then you go, “Okay, we’ll put in our own people. We’ll take everybody off the street and we’ll populate it with our own people.” You can’t really do that in Hong Kong. I mean, one, we can’t afford that amount of extras and two, it’s not as interesting. So, we basically had to let Hong Kong dictate how we worked which was nice and essentially how I like to work, but sometimes you don’t want people to muck with the camera, you don’t want people to look in the camera, so the idea was we had these hidden cameras and then what we would do is we would shoot a master shot and then we would punch in if we had to or felt we needed to, and then we would populate it with our people afterwards. So, it was a bit of both but for the big shots, and that’s why it looks quite an expensive movie because we were smart enough to use the location and we were fortunate enough to be able to use the location because we weren’t shooting Hong Kong for New York. (laughs)

MoviesOnline: How cooperative were the authorities?

PAUL MCGUIGAN: You know, it was funny because we had certain scenes with the guns. The guy has a gun and he shows a gun and he takes a girl off the street and you would think somebody might react to it, but normally they just kept on with their business. It was the same idea with the people that were setting up. The authorities were pretty much, “If you can do it, do it.” If you have to cause a commotion, then we have to know. That’s the kind of ying and yang of it. You just have to go with it. You know, we were actually there when they were shooting Dark Knight and Dark Knight closed off the whole of downtown Hong Kong and it cost me. My taxi I was using to my favorite bar was ten bucks. I had to go all the way around and it was a hundred bucks. I called Christopher Nolan and said, “You owe me ninety bucks. That’s what you cost me, you bastard.” They did that. They would lock down the streets because you need control and certainly with Batman and stuff. But we kind of just went with the flow and hopefully the movie kind of has that feel to it and we’ll just see what happens.

MoviesOnline: What area of Hong Kong did you shoot in?

PAUL MCGUIGAN: All over. I mean, I tried to stay away from Central (Central District of Hong Kong) which is where all the big shopping malls are and it looks very western, so we tended to go over to Kowloon which was over on the other side. The reason I liked Hong Kong story-wise was also that here you have a guy who has to almost be untraceable and we thought better of it. I saw this block of flats and I took a picture of it and it ended up in the movie because it’s all these people who live on top of each other and I thought it makes sense to us story-wise. Kowloon made sense to us story-wise. He wouldn’t be in Central, he wouldn’t be living in a big, fancy apartment. It’s like somebody living in Manhattan. You always see them in these big, fancy apartments. It’s like, no, you actually live where most people live which is over on the other side in cramped-in spaces, you know.

MoviesOnline: Can you talk about casting Dakota in this? Was she the first person you thought of for this? This would be her first teen role.

PAUL MCGUIGAN: Oh, she was the first person I thought of. Absolutely. I think we were just fortunate. I never really thought about it until I see her now and she’s changed so much since I last saw her. I only saw her a few months ago. We were doing the DVD commentary yesterday and I’m looking at her going, “Geez.” It reminds me of when you were young and your grandmother would always say, “Wow, you’re getting big.” It was the same thing. I was like, “Whoa! You’re getting big.” And it’s the same deal.

I don’t think I would have done this movie without Dakota. Again, as you’d mentioned before, what was my whole vision for the film? She was very much a part of that vision and I mean that genuinely. Maybe it’s because I don’t know many 14-year-old actors or actresses. To me, it was just sure, okay. And then, looking at the part that she had to do, I did realize that this was probably another part that she hasn’t done before and I realized she might want to do it because it’s quite interesting and it’s quite brave of her to go out there and do something like that because she’s not a cutesy in the movie.

She’s a brilliant actress. Dakota Fanning is – I’m sure you’ve heard it [before] and I’m sure you’re bored of hearing how brilliant she is but she is quite absolutely brilliant, you know. And I’ve learned a lot from Dakota as much as I’ve hoped she’s learned from being in Hong Kong. You have to learn when you’re a director from the people in front of the camera. You’ve got to learn how they work. I’ve worked from some great people, but Dakota Fanning just has her own thing and she’s very prepared. She sits and she’ll listen to people talking about the script and then she’ll say, “Right. We’ve all read the script, haven’t we?” And I’ll go, “Okay, okay. Yes, we have.” And then we’ll go on with it and her mother and her family are just a dream. I mean, they really are.

I’m Scottish, I’ll tell you if there’s any bullshit going on. It was just fantastic and I’m really glad that I kept with my “This is who I wanted.” This is really who I wanted and that’s who we got. I’m very fortunate.

MoviesOnline: Her look was very reminiscent, I thought, of Jodi Foster in Taxi Driver.

PAUL MCGUIGAN: Oh really?

MoviesOnline: There were some shots of her where she’s lounging on the chair with the short little outfit on. Can you talk a little about her look?

PAUL MCGUIGAN: She’s more of a street urchin. She’s kind of like if you were a 14-year-old kid who doesn’t have a mother and you’re her, that’s the way you would dress. We talked about it a lot. I gave it up to her. I said, “Look, you go find something.” And she actually found it herself and then I agreed with her. I thought it looked good. I mean, I have an 11-year-old and a 14-year-old so I know how this deal goes. So I much prefer if she found her outfit and we talked about it and it fit the character. It was all about the character. And her nails were all painted pink. She had to wear something in Hong Kong for 3 months and she just felt this would be perfect. This is the way she would like to dress if she was a 14-year-old with the colored hair. It sort of punks her up a little bit, makes her look edgier.

MoviesOnline: Given the genre aspects of this film which has drawn comparisons to X-Men and Heroes, what would you say differentiates this film from those franchises?

PAUL MCGUIGAN: I’ll be really, really honest. I haven’t seen either of those films. I haven’t seen X-Men, I really haven’t. On my kid’s life, I haven’t seen X-Men. I’ve seen maybe 20 minutes of Heroes. I thought it was really dull. I switched over (changed channels). I’m not a TV geek or a film geek. I love the fact that my son is a real geek and he tells me everything. I would love to be a geek but I’m not cool enough to be one. I think story-wise it does. I mean, you’re completely correct. I think storywise it obviously does ring familiar tones. It has familiar ideas in it from what I know and from what people have told me about it. I think when you do a film like this, you’ve just got to … As I said from the first time I came in here, I just had a certain way that I wanted to do it.

As a director, I’m not an auteur. I don’t have the writer-director thing going on, you know. I wish I could but I’m a better director than a writer. Believe me, you wouldn’t want to sit through one of my films if I’d rewritten it. I tend to just do what I feel is good for the film and I love the story, I love the idea of these people whose powers are not good. They’re probably rubbish powers. Yet, when you go on the internet and I don’t get the script and I looked on the internet and I looked up psychic powers and I looked up experiments, and then, pow!, the whole thing just came alive for me. I thought actually what if this did exist and what if the governments… And let’s face it, the governments haven’t necessarily been telling us everything, have they? So, what if really they had been doing these experiments? You’ve got to take this shit seriously.

When you commit to doing a book which is about powers, you’ve got to have rules. You can’t just have your person suddenly fly one minute because that helps your storyline, it just helps it. So, for me, comparisons to X-Men and Heroes I’ll take. I don’t really have an opinion on them because I’ve never really seen them. I think, most movies, somebody said there are only 10 movies ever made, you know, and that kind of crap. You try and do your own thing. And I think the film, for me, was just a great joy to do and I hope that comes over that we had fun doing it. This film is not going to make you walk out of the cinema crying or worrying about the children or the planet. It’s going to hopefully make them go, “Hey! We had a good time tonight. It was fun.” That’s as honest as that can be about a film like this. I love it. I just think it was fun.

MoviesOnline: What was the hardest thing for you to shoot? Was it the scene in the market with the explosions and water? How did you control that? Did you have to close the set down?

PAUL MCGUIGAN: No. What we did is we found the market and then we added our bit of the market onto it. So, you have the genuine market where Dakota and Chris have the conversation and then when they walk out of that market, they go into our market because it’s controlled. We storyboarded that and we’d have meetings like this with everybody around a table and suddenly you turn around and you think, “We’re all grown up her yet we’re talking like little kids.” [demonstrates how he choreographed the action sequences for the actors] “So we have a fish tank here and it’s going to blow up and then the fish is going to fly in the air or something and then I want you to come around here and then you go around that way and then, see this bit here? We’re going to make this here.” This is quite literally what you do.

MoviesOnline: Did you build little miniatures?

PAUL MCGUIGAN: Oh, of course. And you have little miniature Dakotas running around. (laughs) But that’s it, you hit it on the nail, it was a lot of fun, you know. It was hard. I mean, it was. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not like we’re all just laughing our asses off every day. But if you do the work beforehand and if you plan…I’ve never done an action movie before so, to me, I was always learning every day. I’m not very good at having meetings with people but you learn that’s what you have to do. You just have to plan it. You have a plan. You know, we had no money basically to shoot this film. I mean, it was pretty tight so when I’m talking about this, the producer is looking, going, “How many tanks is that?”

So you’ve got maybe one go at, maybe two, and you’ve got to have a plan. And then, I said to Dakota and Chris Evans, “Look guys, you’re going to have to run through this.” “We’re going to do that?” And I said, “Yeah.” But I told them at the very last minute before I went “Action,” and they just ran and you can see it in their eyes, and we covered it. We have 8 cameras with one camera flying on the wire. If you have good stunt coordinators and stuff, you can really do a lot. But otherwise, it was some tanks exploding but it’s still pretty impressive when it comes down to… You know, it feels very real, it feels very immediate, and that’s all I wanted.

MoviesOnline: Did you blow up any fish?

PAUL MCGUIGAN: Oh no, we couldn’t blow up [the fish]. I wanted to do it. Did you hear that story? I’m a vegetarian and I had fish in the tank and all the actors came over and went, “Why are the fish still here?” and I went, “I’m just going to blow them up.” And they went, “What?!” I went, “Well, we’re in Hong Kong. Have you seen the markets on the corners?” Because you know all the fish are fresh and so they just take them out and go “Boom, boom.” So it never dawned on me and then suddenly when it dawned on me, I thought actually these guys are right. So we took all the fish out and we had no fish. So the only people harmed during this movie were the actors, not the fish. There’s actually no fish there if you look at the sequence, there’s no fish flying about. I actually wanted fish to be flying about but I was told no.

MoviesOnline: Did you use Spider-cam technology or motion control for any of those scenes?

PAUL MCGUIGAN: No. The great thing about technology, even since I started, is it’s really gone on so much now that basically I shot it all hand held which would be a no-no to do. We have no green screen in the whole movie apart from the cars. The only reason we had green screen with the cars is because the cars don’t move very fast in Hong Kong and it would have been a really dull sequence. So I wanted to make it all very kind of heightened with the car stuff so we shot that in green screen. That was the only green screen in the whole movie. Everything else – there’s lots of effects on top of what we shot. I like to shoot through the camera. It’s just the way I grew up. And things like the cup cam, for instance, it’s a $10 piece of machinery which is basically a cup, camera, that’s it. Everyone said, “Ah, that’s amazing.” I went, “No. It was ten bucks.” (laughs)

It’s nice to kind of work that stuff out in your head rather than relying too much on the post process where you just go, “Here is what I shot” and make do with it. I think that comes over in the movie. You can really tell that it’s not just… And when we threw people around on wires, we really threw them around. I mean, we hurt some people. We didn’t want to hurt people, but I was really insistent that it wasn’t going to be kind of like a John Woo operatic throwing around. It was going to be really fast and the camera almost doesn’t catch it too much. Sometimes I think that’s much more impressive than actually showing off your stunts and special effects. You actually try to throw them away a little bit.

MoviesOnline: I assume you didn’t shoot this in order so did you get lost a little bit on which case is which and who’s got the real one?

PAUL MCGUIGAN: I was watching it yesterday and I was going, “What?” But it does make sense. You’ve got to keep with it, you know. You’ve just got to keep with it. Actually, it was a very conscious decision in the editing suite, we could’ve sorted this stuff out. I mean, we have clever people, believe me. We’re not stupid. But, we also think that other people watching it are clever people so we were like, “You know, leave it.” There are some points where you go…it’s infinite, right? It’s really infinite if you start dabbling in this stuff, which you should do. Of course you should, it’s a script, it’s a movie, but if you start going too far with it, and start thinking that you’re smarter than the script, then yes, of course you’re smarter than the script, but ultimately you would never get that film made because that film is just continuously evolving. If you talk about people that can change the future, and you can change the future just by thinking about the future, that in itself is a big idea. But hopefully, you just go with it and you kind of go, “You know, this is fun.” Hopefully, that’s what you do because that’s the spirit in which we shot it.

I think you’ve got to have rules. That’s the most important thing I think in a genre film. You can’t fuck with people’s idea that okay, one minute I can move this over from here to there and the next minute I’m flying through the air. That’s not your power. Your power is to move things. It’s not to basically go up and fly through the air. And sometimes, the first script that I got, there was a lot of that where the guy would suddenly fly in the air and I’d go, “Whoa.”

As I said, we’re not stupid people that make these things. We think a lot about that, but at the same time I like to make complicated films. Slevin (Lucky Number Slevin) was a very complicated film. Wicker Park was even more complicated than I would care to even go through to be honest with you. And Gangster No. 1 is a very complicated film in the sense of what it was trying to do. I would rather do that. That’s just the way I like to work.

MoviesOnline: How did Mel Gibson’s company get involved?

PAUL MCGUIGAN: Bill Vince, who was a producer who passed away last year, went to Icon with the initial idea and he got involved but said, “You want a partner in this?” and then Summit came on board too and they’ve been brilliant and then that’s what happened. The producers on this film I have never met. There’s like 12 producers. I’m like, “Who are these people?” That’s just the way movies are at the moment. There’s just a lot of people.

MoviesOnline: But they all made it happen for you?

PAUL MCGUIGAN: Well this is it, absolutely. You’ve been able to talk here now with the finished product. And that’s the thing that you forget about. You should talk to producers occasionally as well I think.

MoviesOnline: Was the voice over narration always in the film?

PAUL MCGUIGAN: In the beginning, yes. We had voice over through the whole film at one point -- not in my version of it, but in the first script that I had -- and I took that out straight away because – I don’t know what you think of voice over but to me it seems quite lazy, you know. I think we’re complicated, but we’re not lazy in the movie. You do scratch your head at times. I did yesterday, but I was scratching it for the right reason. I was kind of going, “Oh, okay.” It just made me think about this. I mean, Chris Evans has a script scene where he says, “Are we laughing or shouldn’t we?” He’s going, “So if I think about it, I can change it, but if I don’t think about it, I can really change it.” And I’m like, “Can you just say that again to me?” Because that’s a big idea and David Bourla hopefully you’ll meet. I mean, he thought it out so blame him if it’s something you don’t know about. (laughs) It was lovely to meet you. Thank you very much.

MoviesOnline: Thank you.

“Push” opens in theaters on February 6th.