| By Fred Topel
In Theaters July 29
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Kurt Russell returns to his Walt Disney roots 30 years after he capped off his run of family comedies with The Strongest Man in the World. Now he is playing another world’s strongest man, the superhero Captain Stronghold. Stronghold is off saving the day fighting supervillains while his poor son has to deal with high school.
While Russell hopes people will consider his entire body of work, his role in the Disney tradition is not lost on him. “When I walk on that lot, I’m flooded with memories,” he said. “Flooded with memories because I’ll walk around the corner and see two people that I’ve known for 40 years. So we’re talking, ‘Hey, how’s so and so?’ ‘Oh, he died two years ago.’ I have lots of friends who have died there. That’s 40 years.”
During his youth, Russell had a chance to meet Walt Disney himself, who became his mentor in the film business. “Walt Disney was my friend. He spent a tremendous amount of time talking to me about movies [and] how to make them. He asked me, ‘Are you interested in this business?’ I said, ‘Well, no, I’m playing baseball and that’s what I’m going to do but I am interested in this business.’ He said, ‘Do you want to learn about it?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’”
With that, Disney invited Russell to his office every afternoon he had off from production. He showed Russell the animation department and ultimately gave him a say in the project Mary Poppins.
“I watched Mary Poppins with him before Mary Poppins was finished, before it had any of the animation in it. At the end of the movie, he said, ‘So, what do you think?’ I said, ‘That’s good, it’s really fun.’ ‘But you wouldn’t tell your friends to see it?’ Then I looked at my mom and she said, ‘Tell him the truth. He’s asking a question.’ I said no. He said, ‘Yeah, neither would I.’ And I watched him invent some things then and there.”
What stuck with Russell about Disney’s philosophy was his emphasis on the audience over the filmmakers. “He’d talk to me about story arc, character arc, the last down before the last up, specifics, movies, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Snow White, all these movies. And creating and inventing and always seeing it from the point of view of the audience. Don’t look at it from the point of view of can you make your character better if it doesn’t make the movie better. Make the movie better. That’ll make your character better. If you create something that’s better for your character in a movie and it helps the movie, you’ve done a good thing.”
When the Sky High script came to him, Russell had a hand in developing it. “I saw lots of laughs, visually lots of laugh lines, could be a fun character to play and I think the movie has something to say at the end of the day. In that vein, I believe it’s the classic approach to a Disney movie, the kind I used to do there. I got this rewrite that I hated. It was suddenly, I felt, because of the way it had been tweaked, it was nasty, it had a meanness to it that nobody else was seeing. I said I don’t want to do that. I talked to [the director] for a long time and I gave him the pages that I had written out, and I said, ‘I would like to do this.’ And they said, ‘Yes, this is what we want to do. This is the road we want to go down.’ I said, ‘Okay, count me in, let’s go.’”
With the tone of the film secure, Russell could then develop his own character. Captain Stronghold is a loving homage to all the superheroes who have graced comic books, television and movies. Though he did not base Stronghold on anybody specifically, Russell acknowledges the similarities.
“I thought there’s all kinds of people that have a nice, in a comical sense, an overblown personality. I think Adam West as Batman, Shatner does that with Captain Kirk. I can’t find specifics. I never thought about William Shatner as Captain Kirk, I never thought of Adam West as Batman, but I know that when I was doing him, I could feel like that sometimes and say that that’s not a bad rhythm. It fits my guy. What you do when you create characters is you have the great fun of acting. You have the ability and the freedom and the right, the job, the duty to come up with something. And you start thinking about what works. Mainly, what I like to do is get the feeling of the person on paper so that everybody knows who you are. And then you can also be treated that way. And that’s often what I’ll say to directors and actors is, ‘Look, tell me if I’m wrong, but I’m this person, right? Then I need to be treated that way. If I’m treated that way, it’s a lot of load off of me. I can now just be somebody. I don’t have to show you somebody.’ And that’s always true of acting a part.”
Sky High opens July 29. |
