Jamie Foxx leads a group of FBI investigators (played by Jennifer Garner, Chris Cooper and Jason Bateman) on a dangerous mission to discover who is behind the deadly attack on Westerners housed at a compound in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in the action drama, The Kingdom. Arizona substituted for the Middle East for most of the film, however Oscar-winner Foxx (Ray) and others from the cast did get to travel to Abu Dhabi to shoot a few scenes.
"It was beautiful over there," Foxx said about his time spent in Abu Dhabi. "They treated us well over there and it was the most incredible visual you’ll ever see. It’s like the palace was 850,000 square kilometers. I was a mile away from my sister’s room and it was just incredible. Any food you want, any kind of cuisine. I mean it was…it makes the food court here look crazy. It was different worlds. They pick you up in a Phantom - you know, the Phantom Rolls Royce. It was like shooting a music video the whole time."
Jamie Foxx Press Conference
How dangerous were the action scenes?
“I’ll tell you the danger of it. The danger was sort of the climate. We were in Phoenix. It was 115, maybe 130 degrees on that black top so you had to pay attention to yourself. That’s why I think Jennifer Garner is the strongest person in the world. After having a child and getting back into shape and being out in those conditions and handling it... The other danger was that we had to pay attention to was there were a lot of guns going off simultaneously, so you had to make sure you weren’t in anybody’s path. Even though they were blanks, it could still cause damage. And then the physicality of, you know, going through those hallways, blowing up stuff and just…but that’s the fun part of it. That’s what you dreamt about when you were a kid and you say like man, ‘I want to blow stuff up and be the hero and run through and save the day.’ Although it was taxing, it was still fun.”
What about your stunt man? Did you really do it all?
“I did it all…I’m lying. I didn’t do all the stunts, but I was probably the worst. ‘Can you get in there?’ But it’s fun because you get a chance to hang out with those stunt guys. The one thing about stunt people is that they have a voice, too. They have a thing they want to show us, so hats off to those guys that were trying to show you new moves, trying to show you different things because you’ve seen every probably every stunt in the world. You guys have seen every movie but to see them put their thing on there is fabulous.”
How much research did you do?
“The research started out with, first of all, we got a chance to over where the federal agents train for this and they show you bombs. That’s what was crazy, like seeing them blow stuff up in front of you, and to see how their approach was as opposed to mine. I was like, ‘Oh my God, what are they going to do?’ It was just another day in the office for them, so we had to sort of match that. Like, it’s not how we view it. We view it on this huge scale and they view it like, ‘I’ve got to get up and go to work. This may happen, this may not happen,’ and so that was the reason for putting some of the jokes in there, making it light because this is the way these guys are. Then it was just painting a picture.”
Can you talk about the balance this movie tries to make between politics and entertainment?
“I don’t know if it was necessarily political as it was when you watched Ashraf’s character. You lock onto him and say, ‘Wow, look at this dude who’s a cop in Saudi Arabia. How does he work within this,’ and you sort of…I did…sort of follow him. Watching his plight, and it wasn’t political, it was just about this guy trying to go to work and do his job.”
How do you go about working? Do you like to rehearse a lot before you actually do the take, or do you just like to just go for it?
“It’s different. Like with Michael Mann, you’re going to rehearse. You’re going to rehearse so much until you’re almost numb but what happens is now when you start you’re not acting at all. You’re just that person. With Peter Berg it was different because he wanted to catch things on the fly and flash because this movie is, like I said, intense. He wanted to catch things that were happening organic and quick, so it depends on who you’re working with. Oliver Stone you have to work. You have to really, really work.”
Peter Berg really likes close ups. Are you cognoscente of that when he’s shooting you?
“Yeah, and that’s a little bit of the Michael Mann school, too, if you notice that by him being Michael Mann’s protégé he likes to catch those angles. And what was great about Peter is that he was grabbing everything, even when he was just sitting around. ‘Grab that, shoot that.’ Then him being an actor it feeds into his process of showing you the movie because he knows what he wants to see. And you as an actor watching a movie, you know what you want to see in that movie and he’s able to give that to you.”
Do you think this has a chance to be a box office hit because it tackles a serious subject matter and does that factor into you saying yes to a movie?
“I don’t know if when you’re working with Michael Mann and you’re working with Peter Berg that’s not the first thing you think about is the commercial success. The first thing you think about is the work of it, the art of it. When you look at Al Pacino and we did something where we honored him, and you look at his body of work—all the body of work that he did that most of [them] weren’t the commercial success, but they were the ones you remembered. So, not to say that I don’t want to be commercially successful so I don’t want to have to hear you say that again, but you know that you’re doing a piece that when you look back on it you know you can be happy about it, I think.”
Page 2: Action Scenes, Drama, and The Soloist
