John Stockwell on the Casting Process: “Josh [Duhamel] we cast first. One of our producers, Scott Steindorff, who produces Las Vegas, brought me there to the set. I met him and he was such a… I was looking for a guy who was centered, and solid, American in a classic sense of the word. He was from North Dakota and going to dental school or something before he decided to be an actor. He felt to me like a guy who could go to Brazil and order a Coke.
I asked him if he had been anywhere and he said he had been to Cancun. Then we brought in other actors and we did huge big mix and matches. We kind of paired up girls and guys in a room to see who worked together and who felt right together. Who liked each other and who didn’t like each other. It was a big kind of free for all. I would do a lot of improvisation and sort of see how people handled that. You could kind of tell who liked each other and who didn’t like each other. I had all the girls come in and tell me, ‘Oh, there is this girl here, and she does the movie we’re not doing it.’ I was like, ‘All right.’ I almost wanted to cast her just to see. I’m a provocateur. I’ve done it before on Blue Crush and Crazy/Beautiful. I’ve done a lot of that.
I’ve thankfully had movies where I haven’t had to get Matt Damon or Brad Pitt to get it made. And this is one of those cases where they were like, ‘We don’t need to find a star to make it.’ Blue Crush, the same way. Into the Blue was a little weird because it wasn’t supposed to be a Paul Walker movie and all of a sudden it was a Paul Walker movie.”
Asked if it’s liberating to not have to have a major star on the set, Stockwell responded, “Well, it’s liberating to not have to necessarily get one in order to get the movie made, because most movies are stalled. You hear that story with Darren Aronofsky and The Fountain and just go, ‘If that happened to me I don’t know if I could survive.’ I mean, he barely survived. You’ve got Brad Pitt and you’re making the movie and you’re building the sets and all of a sudden Brad’s like all of a sudden, ‘I don’t want to do it.’
It’s not like I don’t want to do it. I’ve experienced it a little bit now. I’m going and doing the dance with an actor and you’re like, ‘Do I like you? Do you like me?’ It’s a little bit of a seduction process. I’m glad that I haven’t had to do it, but it would be interesting to go through it.”
The Decision to Shoot Turistas in Brazil: “I think making the decision to go to Brazil filled a lot of people with a bit of dread and fear, especially the financiers. I guess Brazil, in people’s consciousness, you’re going to go down there and get kidnapped. You’re going to get robbed; you’re going to get raped. And given that is kind of the set-up, everything went pretty darn well. When we first got to Brazil, our first scout, we were five minutes outside the airport. We look over in rush hour traffic and there is a guy robbing a woman in a car at gunpoint. So, okay, this place is pretty [scary]. What’s next if that happened in the first five minutes? But, for the most part, we were treated really well.
You know what I loved about working there? We had a largely Brazilian crew. They operated in such an efficient way. If you needed to get equipment a mile and a half up a jungle trail, they hired local kids to get it up. If you needed a kid to jump off the waterfall, you hired a local kid to do it. You don’t bring in an American stunt guy. It was a kind of more expedient, guerrilla, by any means necessary style of filmmaking, which I liked.”
What Can We Expect of the Turistas DVD?: “We did an unrated which has some kind of semi-crazy stuff on it. There is a pretty cool Making Of. We had a guy who was there the whole time, and mostly got the partying in Brazil and some of the insanity that went on off set, which I think in many ways is more interesting than what was happening on the set. There’s a whole kind of underwater Making Of, a special effects thing, how certain things were done. I haven’t seen it. It’s all kind of being done right now.”{p] What’s the reason for an unrated version? “It’s certainly a marketing thing,” responded Stockwell. “I actually asked the same question because I had never done it before. Our producer did the unrated version of American Psycho and he said the difference between the unrated and rated was two thrusts. He was f**king some girl and the MPAA made them cut out one thrust. They put in the extra thrust and released it as an unrated, and that’s the only difference. They sold so many more of the unrated.
In our case we actually did have to do some somewhat drastic cuts for the MPAA and then I had some extra kind of pervy stuff that I put back in. There is a more explicit scene with the guy and the prostitute. It’s a little crazier. There is more stuff with Beau [Garrett]. But yeah, it’s definitely a marketing thing. Everyone falls for it, though. I was like, ‘Doesn’t it have to be longer? And they go, ‘No, usually they’re like three seconds longer.’ Unless they’re a directors cut, which I didn’t do. I did just the unrated version.”
Into the Future: Although John Stockwell’s building up a reputation as the king of water films, his next project will not be set anywhere near the beach. “My next movie I think is going to be in the snow. Honestly, it’s either going to be in the snow or it’s going to be with pot smugglers in Vancouver. I love the water and I love working in it because, for me, it’s really peaceful. It removes a certain kind of crew or collection of people around monitors and in your ear. We were in some caves in the water, way deep, a mile in. No one could get in, so it was just me and the DP, and the actors, I felt very free.”
