Interview with Mark Neveldine & Brian Taylor
Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor debuted their first feature film, Crank (2006), a riotous and rambunctious action film that made some waves with its great and, if you read the feature, fairly accurate medical science. As I prepared the article, I actually got a chance to chat with Brian & Mark (thanks guys!) to talk about science in movies, inspirations for their work, and several other topics. Thanks to the good people at Lakeshore Entertainment for facilitating the interview.
On the science of Crank
Brian Taylor: “We kind of came at it in the most general terms. All of the medical people that we talked to, we said: this is kind of how we want it to feel, this is how we want it to work, is this possible? And we were kind of throwing things out there [to a pair of medical doctors one being Mark’s brother and the other a long-time friend of Brian’s], saying, what if we did this and what if we did this? And reverse engineering certain things. We wanted to be in this situation, so how would the drug have to work in order for that to happen. For a movie as crazy as Crank, and as sort of silly and absurd as it is in a lot of places, we just thought it would be so much stronger if it seemed like it would work medically.
Mark Neveldine: Sometimes you want to find the serious places in the fact, and then find the comedy within those facts. Like the steel hard-on, that shit’s funny. And the heart beat, and the things you have to do to keep it up. And just talking about medical facts in such a ridiculous scenario is what makes the movie in a way.On scientific research
M: We get on-line and research the hell out of it. We’re doing a movie right now called Pathology: it’s a group of medical students who want to be pathologists, and we just dove in. We talked to my brother and we talked to other doctors, and we just really got in there and dove in, because we want to base it…in movies, you got to have something that’s factual. And certainly (back to Crank) the characters and some of the ridiculous ideas aren’t.
Interests in the body
M: I think that we’re both sick.
B: Yeah we are, but don’t you think, Mark, that the common thread between doing an action-comedy where we’re manipulating a body and doing a medical thriller where we’re manipulating a body to doing a sci-fi thing that we’re working on right now, where we’re manipulating the body is sort of a fascination with human bodies and how much you can fuck with them, and still have them work. That, I think, if anything, is the sort of thread, the sort of obsession. You can trace a similar line through Cronenberg’s movies. It’s all an extension of the dreams that you had as a kid of your teeth falling out. And he’s made an entire body of work out of that idea of the body as being this thing that falls apart. And for us, it’s not necessarily a thing that falls apart, and maybe that’s just our personal take…
M: …it’s about how far you can push the limits.
B: Because it’s kind of the way we are, kind of moronic that way as well. It’s the appeal of Jackass too, the things you do to human beings and it still works.
M: And obviously, other people find it fascinating too.
B: There are funny sides to it, there are also serious sides to it, but it’s the same kind of thing.Does this interest in the body’s limits come out of your previous work experience filming extreme motorcycle stunts?
B: Well, it’s probably what drew us to doing that stuff too.
M: We like to put ourselves in danger, because it makes you feel more alive. But we’re also the kind of guys who grew up watching all the B films as a kid: Summer Camp movies, all the Friday the 13th, and Freddy Kreuger movies, and stuff like that.
B: And actually I was pre-med, but that was only part of it, because I bowed out. My brother’s a doctor, I was pre-med for the first two years, then I bowed out to psychology.But that’s kind of a sideways step for interests in the body and the mind.
M: Yeah, it was actually a way to get on the Dean’s list to be honest. I had parents that had to have that.
On the comparison to Batman Begins and the issues of big budget movies
B: (Laughs) That’s funny. Chelios Begins!
M: The science in a small movie like ours, it didn’t really get filtered through a studio system, so there weren’t all these people saying, “No, this science has to work for the character, it has to work for the character’s arc. Our science is actually embedded into the character’s arc, and I think that’s why it’s different. Batman Begins, I think a lot of people noticed that [the science being bad]. So many of the studios, they aren’t concerned about the factual science. They’re just trying to figure out ‘is this going to help Christian Bale’s character?
B: And they’re very different kinds of movies. Our character is his body. So it is that the things that are happening to him physically are his arc…
M: …That’s right.
B: It’s sort of a different emphasis. It’s a little bit apple and oranges, because as soon as you’re dealing with guys who dress up in tights and battle criminals, then you’re automatically a little bit unhinged. In our movie, we just know that we like to take the movie to some real extremely absurd places and if we had just given ourselves the license to do whatever, and just say whatever, then there’s no rules for us to be grounded to or to hold it [the movie] to. Maybe in a comic book they already have rules based on forty years of the character. But for us, if we had given ourselves the carte blanche to just say, ‘yeah, it just does whatever, and we can just do whatever’, then I feel like the movie wouldn’t have had anything to grab onto. It would have just been a collection of gags with no heart.On how much medical info to put in without messing up pacing
B: We took a little bit out. We weren’t concerned with the pace so much, we just didn’t want it to be so complicated for people that they just turned off to it. We wanted it to feel accurate, but we also to explain it in a way where people just sort of got it very quickly and were able to kind of roll with it.
Working the info with Jason Stratham, the film’s star
M: We didn’t get into the medical side of it so much. We wrote this character biography of Chev Chelios [Stratham’s character], who this guy is and of course, he read the script and loved it. We had the rehearsals and talked more and more about who this guy is physically and what kind of stuff does he do and how does he relate to his girlfriend. The medical side of it was kind of an aftermath, it just kind of happened while we were shooting. I don’t remember if we had any conversations early on about the medical stuff, but I don’t think we did.
B: No, not like that per se, but one thing that’s kind of interesting is at times when we were sort of overly focused on the physiological things that were happening to the character, Jason, who’s this flesh-and-blood human being, remained very cognizant of his motivation at all times as an actor. So there were times when he definitely kind of pulled us back to reality and said: ‘Look mates, I don’t know what you think his body’s doing right now, but this is what he should be doing right now’. And we were like, yeah you’re right. Our bodies do strange things to us on given days, we’ve all been in strange places physically, but it doesn’t mean that you’re completely a slave to them all the time, and Jason could help keep us focused on the guy.Dwight Yoakam and his comfort level with explaining the science in the film
M: We hired him the day before, and yet, he was so cavalier and comfortable with the whole role. Basically said, ‘how do you pronounce this?’, and he figured it out, and he wrapped his head around it. And we would say, ‘Maybe you can talk to him this way’. And he’d give it a shot. And we shot that all in one day, every Doc Miles scene we shot in 12 hours.
B: A lot of the stuff he was saying, he probably had no idea what the hell it was. If he had known, it probably would have made it worse. Because he didn’t know, he was able to be so conversational about it.On prior movies that were influential for their ‘stories of the body’ theme
M: Re-Animator!
B: Actually, Night of the Living Dead is a very influential movie for us. Even though it may not seem like it has anything in common with this, one of the things that we love about that movie that is sort of the same as Crank, is there’s this thing that’s happening that obviously has some scientific basis to it. But in terms of the characters who are involved in it, they don’t know anything about that. They just sort of have to react. There’s just something so great about that, and that’s sort of the way real life is. If suddenly your body was just breaking down like that [as in Crank] and you just had to kind of find that answer, find the things that work and the things that don’t work. That’s so much more interesting than if you know exactly what it is you have to do and how to do it. And it’s the same thing with the zombies, it’s like ‘wow’ the dead people are just getting up and eating people and walking around! We don’t really know why it’s happening, but we better figure out the rules pretty quick and what we have to do to deal with it. So, there’s a very pragmatic quality to both movies that’s just being faced with an absurd situation and just having to find the rules and deal with it.