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Dave, how much CGI was used in the car sequence?
Director Dave Meyers: “About 99.9% is real. There is no CG at all in it. The only thing that was done was that we broke cameras. I gambled correctly and put the camera right in harm’s way. So we shot each sequence with ten cameras. Four or five of the cameras would beat the other cameras and we had to erase them. It’s kind of just the art of invisibility. There is really only one major CG thing, which was the rabbit, which is pretty much out of the box now. But everything else was the art of trying not to have anything.”
Dave, how did you come to be involved in the project and was it something you always wanted to remake?
Meyers: “Brad, Drew and Michael [Bay] are big fans of The Hitcher and were sort of circling it and found rights to it. I was circling their operation of sort of being a home for video commercial guys, making that jump to movies. …All of these stars sort of aligned. I studied the film and realized like Sophia said, there’s character arcs in there. There is something more special than the typical horror film. It just all sort of worked.”
Sophia, why do you think audiences are fascinated with women who can kick ass?
Sophia Bush: “I think what’s great about is that we’ve seen so many great heroes in men and [they’re] iconic with Indiana Jones and Dirty Harry. You’ve got that, and we’re at a point where in our sociology we’ve evolved to realize that women can kick as much ass - and we want to see it. There’s something that’s a little less expected about seeing the girlfriend end up with the shotgun. It’s exciting, and it really gives the guys something to root for. But it gives the girls in the audience something to root for, too. You no longer have women being dragged to an action movie by their boyfriend. Couples are going together because they’re both really excited about the film and it’s something I enjoy.”
Can you talk about casting the film?
Producer Brad Fuller: “With Sophia it was very simple. She was an actress we had heard about and for Drew and myself, we get a lot more from sitting down with an actor and actresses then actually auditioning them. That’s how we found Jessica Biel from Chainsaw. That’s how we found Jordana Brewster for the other Chainsaw. We had heard wonderful things about Sophia, and she came in and we just kind of fell in love with her. We just kind of said, ‘We’re working on this thing The Hitcher,’ and it was early on. When this script was being developed she was the person we had in mind, and we kept her up to speed with what is happening with it. It was always Sophia’s movie. By design she fits the bill for us. We thought she was likeable and, at the same time, can carry the gun and blow his head off. That worked out.
As far as Zach, Zach had a much more torturous process to getting this role. Zach was a guy who we really wanted to be in the Chainsaw that we had just finished. For whatever reason it came down to Zach and this other guy, and the other guy got the role. We loved him and you gotta choose an actor, Sophia is really hot, and you’ve got to choose a guy who you believe is such a cool guy because she can get any guy she wants. You’ve got to get a guy that’s a real guy’s guy. When you’re casting actors, that was always a real hard thing for us to find - a guy who you believe is going to drive a Ford ‘42 and land Sophia and be in those situations.
Zach kept coming back. We didn’t want to cut him and we kept on seeing other actors for lack of a better term, bigger names and people who are more well-known. Zach, to his credit, doesn’t have many credits. He did one show and that was pretty much it. But he just kept coming back, and every time he came back, he was better and better. At the end of it you can’t think of the role any other way. He was the only guy who nailed it six times. I think you actually did come back six times. How do you not give the guy the role? He kept coming back. No one else had that longevity.”
Fuller: “For Sean, too, it was very simple. For The Hitcher we were looking for a Sean Bean-type…we didn’t think we’d actually get Sean. [We needed] this great elegant actor who could play this role. We’d checked on Sean and his dates weren’t working, and it wasn’t good. Sean had just worked with our partner Michael Bay on The Island and Drew and I went to Michael and said, ‘Come on, let’s get Sean. Let’s try to figure it out.’ We moved some dates around and then his dates opened up and we just got lucky.”
