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Holding All the Aces
We caught up with Smokin' Aces writer and director Joe Carnahan to discuss his latest flick, why he thinks the critics snubbed it, and why he's going to keep doing things his way in spite of them.
Maxim Online, Apr 2007
By Adam Bryant
You had a lot of big names—Jeremy Piven, Andy Garcia, Ben Affleck, Ray Liotta—on set for this film. What was it like managing all that talent at once?
They were very infrequently there all at the same time, so you were never really aware that all of this was happening or that you've got all these people in the same movie. You just manage day to day. I think the most I ever had to deal with was maybe Ray Liotta, Ryan [Reynolds], and Andy in one scene. Beyond that it wasn't that terribly difficult. It was more segmented so that we were doing stuff day to day. So it doesn't feel like the weight of all these performers was constantly approaching. It was more of a mediated process.
We've been reading all these stories about Piven acting alot like his character from Entourage? Did you have any problems with him on the set?
No, and I can tell you that that story is complete bullshit. The maître d' was literally being a complete jerk. This idea that Jeremy would carry a DVD of Entourage around and just casually fling it at people is just stupid. He went over to the restaurant with the entire cast, and they made him stand there for half an hour, and the guy was being incredibly rude. Knowing Jeremy like I know him, I can see him in a situation where I would probably punch somebody in the face, and him be nothing but unfailingly polite. He gets one of the shittiest raps of anybody. I've never even seen him flare. Jeremy admitted that the one thing that kind of blew it was on the way out he said, "Thanks for nothing." Because the guy was a jerk. Jeremy is a good friend of mine, but he is the pinnacle of professional. I've never seen that guy act up ever.
How do you answer the critics that shrug this movie off as Quentin Tarantino wannabe?
The one thing that I realized is that this genre has been hijacked. And not even by Quentin, who I adore and who I think is such a fucking talented guy. But I think critics have unfairly used Pulp Fiction as the kind of measure, and not even Quentin can get out from underneath that. And I don't think he's trying, which I think is great. He's just doing his own thing and making his movies. But ripping that off was never my intention. My intention was to build this kind of wild, kind of freaky story. My fascination at the time with the Iraqi war played a part in that. The idea that we're going in with no fucking plan, on a really specious rumor. The movie is structured like that—it's chaos on purpose.
If I saw Smokin' Aces one time I wouldn't know what the hell to make of that movie. It almost has to be viewed a second time. I felt the same way about Narc. Narc was never something that was heralded until much later. I'm not saying that people are going to do cartwheels over Smokin' Aces, but there will be a level of appreciation of that film later on that there's not now. I knew it was a large experimental process because I was trying to put really dark humor against really heavy drama, and those two don't really go together. But you have to take chances. It requires you to make a lot of weird and interesting gear changes, and some people made them and some people didn't. I knew from the jump that it was going to rise in that way. And it's only if you're fearful of that process that you fail.
In the midst of that chaos you have great bit roles from Jason Bateman and Matthew Fox. How valuable are those little pieces of character to a movie like this?
I love that. There was a conscious subverting of what I knew these guys could do. Ryan Reynolds is a funny guy, so I'm not going to have him be funny. Matt Fox is kind of this serious action guy, so I'm going to have him be a goofy security guard. Nestor Carbonell, I only knew him from a TV show where he played a gay Cuban, and here he is playing this kind of sinister guy. So I really went against the grain. You can say that's a stunt or whatever, and that's fine. But it was a deliberate kind of thing. I like doing it. With somebody like Jason Bateman, that roll was never written to be this knock-down comedic moment. He brought that to it because of his casual way of how he threw that stuff away. When I saw other guys that came in and read it, they tried to play it all for the funny stuff, and Bateman's instinct was to go the other way. That's why that scene is so God damn good in the movie.
The opening scene of Narc has one of the most intense chase scenes we've seen. How much of that was planned and how much just happened?
Until I had Dave Emmerichs on Smokin' Aces as a steady cam operator, I hated steady cam. For Narc I had probably the worst steady cam operator of my life that would literally take one take and call it a day. He could not do the work we needed him to do. I love those moments where you have to kind of come up with stuff. I had always wanted to have a stunt guy run with Jason, and I decided that that was now the way we were going to do it. So we strapped a camera to this guy, and he had a monitor right in front of him. I told him to keep Jason in that monitor and run your ass off. I told Jason just to run full speed. That's what gave that propulsion and the velocity of that scene. And that feeling of, "Holy shit, you're running right with them!" Once you get into that, I stuck to it in the editing room. There are cuts in that scene, but you have the feeling that you're running nonstop, that it's a dead run. John Gilroy is a great editor, and that's where he came in with his particular brilliance.
You've said you prefer to make independent films because you have more control over the vision, but you're working with some of Hollywood's elite. How long do you think you can stray the line between independent and mainstream?
I think that often times even something like Smokin' Aces is probably the most mainstream that I would go, and I still don't consider that very mainstream in comparison to Narc. It's kind of funny and goofy and crowd-pleasing at moments. I don't ever want to do the four quadrant family hit. I have young kids, but I still want to do something that will last beyond some goofy Ben Stiller CG whatever that makes a boatload of money, but who gives a shit at the end of the day. They offered me this big, huge comic book franchise with this continuing character from a massively successful series, and the temptation is to be like, "Hell yeah, man. Take the money and run." I don't ever want to go down that road, though the temptation is massive.
Did that have anything to do with your walking away from Mission: Impossible III?
I feel like I did that a little with M:I:III. I had that moment. And do I regret not making that film? Yes and no. Everybody got what they wanted. I got to make the movie that I wanted, and they got to make the movie that they wanted. You always have to be very careful. What I want to do is be able to do that kind of stuff, but own it like Lucas has done with Star Wars. That's his own creation and of his own inception. That's where the real beauty is, because you control every aspect of it. That's the way to go.
See more of what Joe Carnahan has to say about Smokin' Aces in our exclusive video!
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