Welcome to The B-Side, from The Film Stage. Here we talk about movie directors! Not the movies that made them famous or kept them famous, but the ones that they made in between.
Today we speak with the great Andrew Davis, director of The Fugitive (now available on 4K UHD and Digital). We chat about his favorite days during the production of the iconic Harrison Ford thriller, some of his B-Sides and the trajectory of his career in general.
There’s his debut feature, the bluesy ensemble piece Stony Island. There’s the movie he got to make after his meteoric success: Steal Big Steal Little. And then there’s the Coast Guard action drama The Guardian from 2006, which Davis claims had better test screening scores than any movie in the history of Touchstone Pictures.
His 1998 thriller A Perfect Murder is discussed, and Davis explains why he was never as big of a fan of Hitchcock as other filmmakers of his time. And finally, there is his most recent film, Mentors – Tony & Santi, which explores the lovely friendship between legendary photographers Tony Vaccaro and Santi Visalli.
Also discussed is the quick demise of Savoy Pictures, how Coast Guard recruits went up as a result of The Guardian, why it’s hard now for blockbusters to make money now-a-days (spoiler alert: they all cost 200 million dollars!), and how impressive it is that Davis worked with nearly every big 90s action star (from Keanu to Harrison Ford to Arnold Schwarzenegger to Andy Garcia).
References include Mitchell Beaupre’s great interview with Davis for Letterboxd and this making-of documentary about Stony Island. Also, follow along with The Film Stage’s best of 2023 coverage!
For more from The B-Side, you can check out highlights of actors/directors and the films discussed in one place here.
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