Pierre Morel Q&A

26 February 2010

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Pierre Morel is in the director's chair the week for just the third time with his new movie From Paris With Love.

This follows up his 2008 movie Taken and stars John Travolta and Jonathan Rhys Meyers. Set in Paris, a young employee in the office of the US Ambassador hooks up with an American spy looking to stop a terrorist attack in the city.

- After Taken, did you want to do something different?

Taken was a single character movie, one guy that had one goal, so it was a pretty straight-forward structure. This one is more complex because when you read the script, it starts out like a funny buddy movie and it was nice to make it evolve, slowly but surely, into a darker plot.

From that super fun thing, slowly twist into something darker. The final twist makes it very dark in the end.

- Was it more complicated handling two actors?

It was a challenge, because in Taken we were on one character, staying with Liam all the way through. This one is more about the relationship between the two guys. It's a two-headed thing, which actually was fun.

The two guys are not supposed to work well with each other but they have to, and that’s what makes it fun having to deal with those two guys, those two characters, and those two actors, actually, who are so different in the way they behave, the way they work.

- Where did the idea to match John Travolta and Jonathan Rhys Meyers come from?

John Travolta was Luc’s idea and we offered it to John because when you see all the movies he has done in his career, you always see him change. He likes to play with his image, he likes to dress and have his hair cut differently from one movie to another.

He always changes, he likes playing different characters all the time. We never saw him play a character like this, so we thought it would be a good idea and he seemed to agree with that.

Wax is a larger than life, over the top, itchy trigger-finger agent and we had a lot of fun creating the character with him. Jonathan is a way more classical actor. You can feel the difference on set.

John is very American, very Actor's Studio he likes to play with the character on set but it takes time and rehearsals to make it evolve. Jonathan, on the other hand, is very British in his approach.

He works a lot beforehand, knows all his lines, so once he gets on set he knows precisely where to go. Actually, they're very similar to their characters.

John’s character, Wax, is the crazy guy that improvises all the time, while Jonathan’s character, Reese, is a very meticulous, do-everything-by-the-book type of guy. So the two guys in the real life were very similar to the two guys in the movie.

- What was their first encounter like?

The first time they meet on screen is actually the first time they met on set. We planned it that way, so that their first scene together would be in sync with where their characters are at.

I wanted to try that because they'd never acted together before, they didn't know what to expect from each other, so when their characters first meet in that French customs office, they were getting to know each other as actors too, and that was very helpful to the scene.

- How did you strike a balance between action and comedy?

The challenge was to make the super-fast-paced action thing that I like, but give it a funny twist. We had to choreograph scenes so that they wouldn’t be as dark as I have done before. They still had to have the same pace, but there was a comic touch now too.

Seeing as most of the action involves Wax, John Travolta’s character, we thought it would be fun to use John’s ability as a dancer.

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