Kurt Russell 'Escape From L.A.' Interview [Hollywood Foreign Press/Jul 19/1996/US] By Elisa Leonelli [Courtesy: Elisa Leonelli]


Kurt Russell, 45, after starring in the action thriller on a plane Executive Decision [WB] this year, is putting on once again the eye- patch and the black leather fineries of Snake Plissken, the cult hero of Escape From New York [1981], in the sequel Escape From L.A. [Paramount] directed by John Carpenter, produced by Debra Hill, for which he was paid $10 millions. He receives $15 million for his next two films, Breakdown, produced by Dino De Laurentiis, and Soldier [WB], a sci-fi thriller.

What did you find so attractive about the character of Snake Plissken in Escape From L.A. that you felt the need to reinterpret him again 15 years after the original film Escape From New York?

We didn't need to do anything, I didn't need to play him again, we didn't need to do another movie, none of us needed to do this, but we did have a desire to do it. Escape From New York was a successful movie, but it wasn't a gigantic hit; we were only in 550 theaters, but we did fill those theaters for three weeks, and the movie ended up making around $50 million, which in 1980s dollars was pretty good; but Escape From New York didn't really catch a big audience, until it became a cult hit on video; if you remember, it was at that time that video was just coming into its own. Escape From L.A. was a concept that we began to have in 1983 or 84; but it was only two years ago that we decided to finally do it; I guess it was 1994, when I went to do promotions on Stargate in Europe, and, as I asked questions, I found that there was a huge demand to see this movie; so, when I came back here, I called John and Debra and I said: "We've got to talk about this, because now's the time." In the meantime Los Angeles had suffered about a 16 month period of everything under the sun; the big earthquake hit, the fire, the floods, the riots and then finally O.J. Simpson hit the highway for Mexico. So I said: "This town is right for being hit." and John and Debra said: "Yeah, we have to make this decision to sit down and write it." It was a normal production and very comfortable, which was amazing to me, because literally, when John said "action" the first night we went to work, after I did what I had to do, which was walk across Mulholland, I came back and we looked at each other and it was eerie; it was like sixteen years had just disappeared, it was like we had finished shooting Escape From New York on Friday and we started shooting Escape From L.A. on Monday; it was like time had just ceased, didn't go by, which fell right in with the theme of the movie, which was deja vu and that Snake Plissken's life is caught in a loop. He is the only person perhaps who, unlike the rest of the world, does not change. He knew who he was the first time around and he knows who he is the second time around.

What do you think people liked so much about this character that made them want to see him again?

It's sort of not fair to impose what I feel on what somebody else thinks about a character. I can tell you what I like about him, but I don't know what you like or don't like about him. I do think that there were some universal chords that were struck in that character. I think that people appreciate that he's an incorruptible human being. Our point of view is that, in order to be incorruptible you have to have a total lack of caring about humanity, you have to get to a point where, as a person, as a human being, you realize that there's no reason to care for people. I think he's a fascinating character, and I thought he was the first time around; he's an interesting man, because you have to imagine how far down the road you'd have to go, before you would not care about anybody except yourself in any way; you have to have something happen to you so devastating that you're soulless, you're without any thought other than surviving. That's it. Now, if you happen to be a person who believes in freedom, who inherently wants to live an exciting life, then basically what you get into, politically, in this kind of a story, is that increasingly you are forced to become a criminal; because in five years I won't be able to do this, I mean, smoke a cigarette, and we'll have to have this interview outside, because I can't smoke inside. Like, if anybody's wearing fur today, you're a dinosaur; and for your own health you're being told: "Don't eat red meat!" Well, fine, everything starts out, theoretically, with some sort of concept about health and safety; but where is the Minister of Fun who says: "Maybe you'll only live for thirty years, but you'll have a god damn good time while you're here." Seriously, as a Libertarian, I have to say, this is edgy stuff and I realize it's just my own personal belief, but I thought, from reading the Constitution, that, if you wanted to be a heroin addict, if that was your choice, there was a country on earth where you'd be able to live out that pursuit of happiness. It might not be my choice, might not be your choice, but if you're not going to hurt anybody by being a heroin addict and it is your desire, I thought you were supposed to be able to have the freedom to do that here. But, in fact, that is increasingly disappearing from our lives, here in this country. So, from that premise, John and I wanted to create a political scenario, which may or may not be the case in 2013, but the possibilities exist; and say: "Let's put into that a character, who unfortunately has had his soul raped, but inherently craves freedom and understands that he only has one thing left to do on this planet, and that is to survive the next sixty seconds, and he's always placed into situations that ask for that." That's why I like playing the character, and that's why he's an interesting guy that's fun to watch; because he's incorruptible, he doesn’t care about you, he doesn't care about me, he only cares about himself; and you can't buy him, you can't get him through women, you can't get him through money, you can't bribe him. He doesn't want to add anything to your life, because it's useless, it's a waste of time; and the trick there is to play someone like that, not in a boring fashion. He's not bored by life, he's not bored by anything, he's constantly sarcastic about the loss of freedom. My favorite line in the movie is: "Yeah, the land of the free. No this, no that, no red meat... Land of the free?"

What is the message of Escape From L.A. in your intentions?

There's basically one thing, that is the through-line of the movie, as far as I was concerned, and that is: "The more things change, the more they stay the same"; and that's why we have that feeling of deja vu. It's a funny thing, but it's hard to deny that reality. Some friends of mine called me the other day from Israel, and I added my name to a list of people that hope that the peace process will continue. No, it's a joke. People have been fighting there for 6000 years, they're not going to stop tomorrow because Bill Clinton would like them to; it isn't going to happen. The more things change, the more they stay the same. So what's fun about this movie is that we have a character who says: "I'm not going to impose my will, my thoughts or my desires; I'm just going to call a spade a spade, that's all. I'm just going to see it like it is." And he happens to be a very dark person, he's a very bad boy, make no mistake about that; he does what he wants to do. Snake Plissken is like Greta Garbo, at the end he says: "I want to be alone, I'm going to disappear; that's what I'm going to do. Good night." So you could say that, on this incredibly selfish level, this guy shuts down the earth; but, as far as Snake Plissken's concerned, why not? It's fine by him.

It seems that this film is in line with your Libertarian political philosophy, would you call it a criticism of the liberal Democrats and the conservative Republicans?

John and I do see life similarly, so we didn't back off that here. The reason we didn't was because we know who that guy is, Snake, and we wanted to put him into a dilemma. Now, to have a dilemma you've got to create two worlds; so John and I started out one day and he said: "Where are we going to go? What happens if Chelsea Clinton takes off tomorrow, goes to the Department of Defense, gets some nuclear device, and the next thing you know she's giving it to Idi Amin. What would happen? The CIA and the Special Forces would be going crazy and they wouldn't want anybody to know that she had run away." So now, you take a president who, in my eyes, was a guy who sees political-correctness in a political way and understands the value of it; he understands the value of no real-fur coats, of no smoking, in a positive way. You have to look at the positive aspects of it. There are people who fervently believe it's really wrong to kill animals to wear coats. I understand that, okay; I don't have to agree or disagree with that, that's just a fact; so I put that over here in column A. Now there's people who say that second-hand smoke is really unfair. That's a fact, I get that, that's not a problem to me. Some people also go a little further and say: "Kurt, you don't know it, but smoking's killing you and for your own benefit I'm telling you, you can't smoke." I get that, I'm not saying they're wrong, I get it. Okay, we'll put that in column A. Red meat, if you eat a whole bunch of it, five days a week, it's going to eventually cause problems and you're going to die, so for your own good I'm telling you: "You can't eat red meat." Okay, put that in column A. If you take all these things in column A and you look at the source that they come from, they're generally, interestingly enough, from the more liberal part of our political spectrum. But I like making strange bedfellows, so let's say you take a Southern Democrat and he then is the guy who has this vision. He's not a politically right-wing president - this is where Debra and I argue - it's a left-wing president; because remember, the things that he passed were 'no red meat'. And ranchers are conservatives, they like red meat. 'No smoking'. Conservatives say: "Hey, you ought to be able to smoke anywhere you want to smoke." Fur coats. Well, the press loves to take pictures of republican wives in fur coats. So we take that president and we put him into the future and we say: "Yeah, but what if we meld him with the Christian coalition, the religious right? There's your fascist dictator." That to me is the fun part of science fiction, taking possible characters and putting them together in one. I think we've seen politicians in the last twenty years, that we never would have believed would have been working together or be thinking some of the same things. That character to me is an example of what's fun about Escape From L.A., taking its future history aspect and saying: "How wild can you go?" Is there anybody that believes O. J. Simpson's not guilty? Who would have believed fifteen years ago that O. J. Simpson was going to cut his wife's head off? Now that's not even sci-fi, that's just reality. But he's acquitted of that, so it's politically correct to walk the streets and say: "Well, he didn't get convicted of that, he shouldn't be accused of that crime any more." And you know what? They're right, but nobody believes it. All I'm saying is, if you take a president like I'm suggesting, you set him up and you put him in power; and now you take the Third World. Have you ever been to Peru? It's a serious bunch of boys, they cut your stomach out while you're still alive. So let's bring that guy from Peru up into Mexico; he starts gaining strength and power and where would he end up? He'd end up with the biggest, baddest gangs there are. Where are they? They're in Los Angeles, so we bring Cuervo Jones, head of the Shining Path, up there. Now there's your two guys, they both want the same thing, and nobody wants to play on a level field. So that's the dilemma. Chelsea runs away, gives the black box to Cuervo and the FBI wants it back, they don't want anybody to know about it. What are you going to do? You have to choose between the lesser of two evils. The thing is that, once you put that into Snake's hands, if there's any opportunity to alter the course of events, he's the kind of character who will do it for the most unbelievably selfish reason. And that reason was established in the first movie. The guy says: "Don't do it, Snake." If somebody calls him Snake, who he doesn't want to call him Snake, that drives him crazy. "You don't have the right to call me that name. The name's Plissken," and that's worth blowing the world up for, shutting down the world. Now people look at that and go: "No, you can't be serious. The guy's going to shut the planet down and you're telling me the reason why is because somebody called him the wrong name?" Yes, it's that simple.

How was the process of creating a sequel to Escape From New York develop into Escape From L.A.?

About three or four years after the first movie came out, people started talking about doing a sequel, but John was doing certain things at the time, I was doing certain things and Debra was too; but we were interested, so we talked about it a little bit, and Los Angeles was the town that we thought would be the one to do it in. I had an idea for what was basically a prequel to Escape From New York, which John and Debra liked and we decided to pursue that, although we didn't have time to write it. We wrote out the whole basic scenario, then we gave it to a writer, he wrote a script and about a year later came back; but we didn't really like it that much, so we realized, if it was going to be done, we were going to have to do it ourselves; but we didn't have the time, so, after about five or six years the idea began to fall away. Then there was another resurge, seven or eight years ago, about doing an 'Escape From something', and then it went away. John was entrenched in doing the work he was doing, I was doing movies that were taking me away for longer periods of time, and I wasn't thrilled about the idea of taking time off to work on making something happen with Escape.


Extended [Edited in 2025]


Where would a possible prequel have taken place?

It's a story we may still possibly do. I don't know where it would take place, but it was an interesting concept and it's scientifically becoming more and more plausible. We liked it to a certain degree, but it was just an idea, we chose this storyline.

Is it true that you asked people you were working with in Europe how they felt about a sequel to Escape From New York?

Yes, I never gave them a title, but I said to all the guys that I was working with there, and I asked the reporters: "Do you think the audience would be interested in seeing Snake Plissken in another Escape movie?” and they said: "Yes, why haven’t you done that?" And so I thought: "It's interesting after all these years." What had happened was that it took a long time to build up an appetite for Snake Plissken again. So I told John, "They tell me over there that they really want to see that movie. I've asked some questions back here, and it's the same thing in America." So John and I talked very specifically about different ideas, and we settled in on one that we liked, which is this idea. We then started to invent the characters and the situations, we talked them out in detail, we wrote stuff down and then I was off to make Executive Decision and I said: "John, write the first draft, and we'll go from there. None of us will make the determination that we're going to do this movie, until we all decide that we like it well enough to go after this movie and say, okay, we're going to make it." So John and Debra went off to write the script on spec, which at this stage in our careers is kind of not done, and when we put the stuff down on paper, it was about 160 pages; I liked it about 60 per cent and I said: "Let's take one more pass at it and get it down to something better page-count wise." So we talked about changes, then I wrote a little more and John cut it down to 137 pages. I read it and I said: "You know what? I'm in," and John said: "I'm in, too" and Debra said: "I'm in, I like it well enough to go after it." We really liked it and we were very protective of the feeling of the first movie, because we all three liked that first movie a lot. So at that point Debra went into production, John and I went strictly to work on a screenplay and started hammering out specifics of the movie itself, writing sequences, tightening them up, changing them, rewriting them; then we decided to go after producing the movie. We put it out there and literally four days later Paramount said: "We'll give you 50 million dollars to make the movie." We said: "We can do that, make the movie that is here on paper for 50 million dollars. We'll make some changes, but we can do this," and we did. So at that point we went into pre-production, I guess for about three and a half months and we finished the final draft a week before we started shooting, John and I together, and from that point on we just had a few things that we worked on as the picture continued to be made.

What were your intentions in crafting the plot of Escape From L.A.?

John and I wanted to put more at stake in this movie than the first movie, there's a dilemma setup here. You have a man over here who believes what he's doing is right, he would like to see all the murder, the mayhem and the crap stop. Well, we all would. And he's had a vision of the apocalypse happening through an earthquake. Well, if you had a dream the night before the L.A. earthquake happened and you stood up the next day on Good Morning America and said: "I'm telling you, at 6:22 tonight in L.A., you've got about eight million people who are going to be dead," and everybody said: "Well, that's fine." And you are a presidential candidate and it happened, wouldn't you believe you were right? You'd have to think: "I guess I know what to do. I know the way." So this poor guy thinks he knows the way. He happened to have been right about that one thing, and there's not much else he's probably right about, but that was his one moment and he becomes the president, then he changes all the rules. That's in the vein of good sci-fi, as far as I'm concerned, that's the concept of that. So to take Snake, put him into that thing, he runs into one person who says: "You're caught in a loop." Now is he going to give the box to this guy and live or he's going to leave it with Cuervo? As he says to his transsexual friend, Hershe [Pam Grier]: "Do you want to stay here while Cuervo Jones rules the world? What's that? So what are you going to do?" The point was to give it more weight, put him in a dilemma and hopefully getting the audience to pay attention to that swop, so that the real swop they wouldn't pay attention to, which is the dilemma he's under: "What are you going to do?"

How does Snake arrive at that final decision at the end of Escape From L.A. of not letting things continue?

Valeria Golino laughs and says to him: "You're caught in a loop" and he looks at her, he listens to her. That's the one character in the movie that he pays attention to, because she has no agenda. She asks him if he's going to leave Los Angeles and he says: "Not if I can help it." But when she says: "You're caught in a loop," I think that at that point he probably makes the decision: "I don't want to be caught in a loop anymore. I'm going to change this."

Did you mind that some people did not understand Snake?

People talked to me about the first time they saw the character and they said: "Snake's this one-dimensional guy that just goes and does what he has to do," and I thought: "You poor dumb fuck, you didn't get any of it, but that's all right anyway, it's okay." It took them fifteen years, but they got it, and now he's a character that people want to know, they get it now.

Do you ask you fans what they thought about your movies?

Sure. If a girl comes up and says: "I didn't understand what you guys were trying to do in Big Trouble in Little China," and if there's nobody around and I've got time, I'll say: "What didn't you understand about it, why didn't you like it?" And vice versa. A lot of the movies I've done had a second life on video, they became cult movies, they just did. Used Cars, Big Trouble in Little China, Escape From New York, Best of Times, Overboard. These are movies that on video people really buy. And I'm a curious human being, I want to know why, so I ask them: "Why did you see that on video, but you didn't see it in the movie theater?" I ask them questions, because I like to try and be as knowledgeable as I can, I'm just trying to get information; so I listen to people when I talk to them, I've got the inclination to know, to learn. I'm like that. After seeing a movie I can tell you why I liked it, and it's generally for the same reasons that the other people liked it, because it has some basic things in it that hit me. So, having asked some of those questions about Escape From New York in Europe and in America, John and I talked about it; I told him what I knew and he told me what he knew, and we all agreed that the main thing to do with Escape From L.A. was to start with Snake, because that's what they get. The thing is that, even though that character and John's style in making the movie has been copied many times, it's interesting that, like painters, when their originals are involved, they understood what they were doing. It may not be accepted for a long time, it may never be accepted, it may never be liked, or it may be liked right away, there may be new things discovered about it later on; but the thing is that the people who made it, they understood all that. It wasn't a surprise, it wasn't a mistake, and if they find, over a period of years, as was the case with this one, that they want to see another one, the fun part is to say: "Yeah, we know what we did. Now let's take that and do it, as if you were doing a television show and you had to go to work on Monday after finishing one episode on Friday, go to work again. And what new episode can you come up with to put this character into?" But you start with the character, you start with knowing who that person is. This is a very interesting guy, this character, he's easy to do and he's easy to write, because if you understand him you get it. But it's interesting to watch other people try to write him, because inevitably they come up with some need to justify his behavior and his feelings. The studio the first time around was freaked out by the fact that the guy was the way he was. We said: "Well, this guy has no social redeeming value." "How can you expect the audience to pull for that guy or like that guy?" I said: "Yeah, other than the fact that I'm playing him, I don't know how to explain that. I can just tell you that they will." Because what you get from Snake is that he's like a snake, he's just trying to get through the grass, he's not finding his way to your room to bite you; but if you're in a tent and that happens to be in his path, you got a problem, because you're now in his territory. He's a fun guy to explore.

Would you like to make another movie as Snake, tackling different issues?

Yes, we have talked about that, because it's fun. I'm forty-five, so I was really anxious to do this guy now too, that was a big force in me, coming to Debra and John and saying: "Now's the time, I can still do it, I can still look like the character should look, and I can still behave and perform the function the way it should be done. I can get in shape and do the part." That becomes increasingly difficult for me, although the wonders of special effects and makeup continue to grow. It was never a concept to do a sequel to Escape From New York, or to do a sequel to Escape From L.A. John laughingly one day said, and he's right: "The way I want to end this movie is with: See Snake Plissken in Escape From Earth." And we kind of kidded around and said, that would be the next logical step for that character. We don't relish the thought, because it's not easy for us to do. John's pretty quick, I'm not that quick, it's not easy, though, to sit down and write it. It's funny, because John and I sat down at his house and we said: "Okay, now we're going to do this." And we're sitting down looking at this, it's a blank white slate and we said: "Where are we going to go, where are we going to start?" It's tough, you sit there and you start to think, you start to question, you start to wonder. Now, it's a fun, creative process, but we really don't like to put ourselves in a position of having to do that, and I know that we're not going to do that now. It’s impossible to see where the future goes as far as what John's going to do, Debra or myself. We really, the three of us, we like being together on this. If any one of the three of us would have said: "I don't like this script, I don't want to do the movie," then we wouldn't have done it. It was going to take all three of us saying: "Yup, we're going down this road together." That was important to us. I really don't know and I don't plan on it, but I realize that there's a potential there. It's also a bit of a bad luck thing, a jinx, to talk about sequels to movies that have not yet been released. So I don't think about that at all.

Could you imagine that something similar to what happens in Escape From L.A. could happen in real life?

Whether I can or not, I already said yes to that, by saying that I'll do the movie, but what matters now is that the audience who has seen the movie says, yeah. I mean, did the Arab terrorists hit today somewhere? Jerusalem or something? Yeah, so I said, do you have any concerns about the way that the Arabs are portrayed as terrorists in this and how can you have the concern is simply that it exists, not that it doesn't exist, not that it lacks credibility.

Could you give a couple of examples of the most difficult scenes to shoot in Escape From L.A.?

Let me think. Logistically the stuff in the cabin of the airplane was pretty difficult because we had that thing on a big gimbel and big, big fans going, and you had to set the whole entire scene up, play it out to know where to go back and put the characters, so that they would be in the right place at the right time for the scene. Then you go back and you start shooting and piece by piece by piece by piece you start putting it together and it's very difficult to remember exactly where somebody is going to be when you're shooting their part on Thursday and you're now shooting this stuff on Monday, but the stuff you're shooting on Monday take place in the script after the stuff you're shooting on Thursday and you've got to keep track of that. Also in a movie like this you never know quite where the audience is going to be in terms of their emotion and the pitch of the suspense, so you take a stab at it every day and hope that when you put the jigsaw puzzle together, it comes together. Now you do your best in controlling that, but that's what's the most difficult to do.

Is it true that it would have been impossible to make Escape From L.A. without the cooperation of the Department of Defense?

Well, they were a little bit of a pain in the butt to begin with, but it was a blessing in disguise I think because it made us toe the line in terms of honest military behavior in a movie like this. We needed them because we needed the hardware that you couldn't get any other way. You know, you can't get F-14's, F-16's, carriers, tankers, whatever you need that is in this movie. You can't get it from anybody but the government and in the numbers that we needed them in, so, because of that you've got to kowtow to their tech adviser. He was a good guy, he was good at it, and I think that eventually in the end it was a good thing to have him there, because it made the military aspect of this movie to be done in a fashion that's actually very realistic. It's very much the way they wanted it, they were evidently very pleased with the film, which I found interesting, you know, have a singular outlook on life that is interesting and I think that's shown in the movie, but in the proper context.