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Compiled by: Jack Foley
Q. It’s an extraordinary script, and you’ve
captured the art of being a cab driver magnificently, so can you
tell us about the experience of making the movie?
A. What I’ve said all along is that when Michael
Mann called and said ‘can you play a cab driver’,
I was like, ‘come on, Mike, you know I do my thing’,
he said ‘can you not do your thing, can you just be regular,
can you be indecisive, can you be boring, can you be just the
guy that really just wants to go to work, and come home, and not
be able to go to the Jamie Foxx thing, or the Hollywood thing’,
and that was the struggle of getting that character to be the
way we wanted him to be. Now driving the cab on the Willow Springs
track was done because when you’re driving your car, you’re
not driving it saying ‘I’m driving my car, I’m
gonna turn my blinker on, or I’m driving it to work or something’,
we had to make the driving of the cab look as though it was natural.
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Q. And what about your next
project with Michael?
A. I came to Michael and was pitching him something like
every day. But there’s a thing going around right now, when
you look at what Kobe Bryant is going through in the States, and
when you look at what every big time athlete, there’s this
thing when they get into trouble and then we see, on TV, how they
fix it, and the statement they’re gonna make. So I came
up with this idea called Damage Control. It’s about a young
lawyer, who works for a sports agent, who has his tentacles in
every aspect of sports and entertainment, and it’s about
how his young lawyer finds out the pitfalls of trying to save
some of his favourite athletes, and he finds himself getting into….
Michael Mann: It’s not about Kobe Bryant but about someone
who has to manage, do the damage control, and manage those kinds
of situations. You can just imagine all the negotiations and moves,
and dynamics that are behind the Kobe Bryant headlines. It’s
not about an NBA player, but that’s the subject.
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