WithThe Gray Manopening in select movie theaters July 15 and streaming on Netflix starting July 22, I recently spoke to directorsJoeandAnthony Russoabout helming their latest film. While the embargo prevents me from saying too much about the film, I can say theRyan GoslingandChris Evansled action thriller is loaded with cool fight scenes and nine action set pieces that look fantastic on the big screen. If you have the ability to seeThe Gray Manon a movie screen, you should jump at the chance.
During the interview, the Russo brothers talked about why it’s taken so long to get Mark Greaney’s novel to a movie screen, casting Gosling, the incredible challenge of making a movie with nine action sequences, the way they will reshoot a scene that doesn’t work, and why they castDhanush. In addition, they also revealed why they had cinematographerStephen F. Windonkeep Gosling out of focus in select frames and put him in part of the frame that’s slightly less conventional.
The Gray Manwas written by Joe Russo,Christopher MarkusandStephen McFeely. The film also starsAna de Armas,Regé-Jean Page,Billy Bob Thornton,Jessica Henwick,Wagner MouraandAlfre Woodard. Check out what the Russo brothers had to say below.
COLLIDER: This project has been in development for over 10 years. So many people have been attached to it. Charlize Theron was originally going to be the lead. What is it about this material that had so many people interested in it, and why did it take so long to get made?
ANTHONY RUSSO: Well, the novel that the movie is based upon is calledThe Gray Manby Mark Greaney, and it’s a very compelling book. Mark Greaney’s an interesting author. He does an exhaustive amount of research, and he really understands the details of the world that he’s writing about, and that comes across to you when you’re reading the books. He’s very inventive in terms of the set pieces. He created a really interesting character in this idea of the Gray Man. There’s something alluring about it. For me, I love the idea of a spy’s spy, meaning that if all spies are secretive, if all spies are undercover, if all spies need to know how to blend in and disappear and be anonymous, nobody more so than the Gray Man, because he is in a section of the CIA that’s not even acknowledged as existing. And he’s a furloughed prisoner who has no background and was chosen because of his disconnection to any other people.
So there’s something just alluring and appealing in that concept and also the inventiveness of the set pieces that are based on real world research. That’s what gave Joe and I the initial spark with the book. And of course we like to do things that are very…there’s always sort of a political dimension to us, like from Winter Soldier. So same thing here is we needed to go through a process of how do we make this story topical to what’s happening in the world today? What anxieties are swirling around? How do we imbue it with that kind of tension? And that’s where we took the story.
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I’m a huge fan of Ryan Gosling, and while he has done action before inDriveand other movies, he’s never done a movie of this scale before.
ANTHONY RUSSO: No.
So I’m curious, how much was it him looking for a role like this, and how much was were you even thinking about him as the lead, because he’s never done a role like this.
JOE RUSSO: We love Gosling.
ANTHONY RUSSO: And we did think of him fairly early on, and I’ll tell you it was for this reason. Number one, Joe said we love Gosling, so he’s in our consciousness inevitably, but also his qualities. He’s like this master of minimalism. And so if you’re looking for somebody who can disappear into this character and be this figure that can kind of float in and out of spaces, be anonymous, be quiet, be controlled, be disciplined, he lines up. But at the same time, have a very rich inner life and be very entertaining and create charismatic, it lines up perfectly with Ryan Gosling, the character. So it’s uncanny. I remember when he first popped in our heads you couldn’t think about it any other way, because he fits it so cleanly.
But getting back to what I said, he’s never done action of this scale.
JOE RUSSO: Right.
What was it like explaining to him or telling him, “Hey, this movie’s going to have a ridiculous amount of action, and you are going to be front and center. Are you really ready for this?” Do you know what I mean?
JOE RUSSO: He trained as a dancer when he was younger, so he has incredible body control. And I think we never met anyone who could do stunt work, stunt fighting as well as Chris Evans, until Gosling. And it really is a different muscle that you’re using. An action movie is using your physical presence in a different kind of way. You have to train for it. There’s a lot of safety issues. You have to be really accurate when you’re throwing punches to not hit people or hurt them or get hurt yourself. You have to remember a sequence of punches and kicks that if you don’t remember correctly you’re going to get hurt. And he did that in nine action sequences. So this was a Herculean effort.
It almost killed Anthony and I, the movie. Really, I’m not joking. We were so tired by the end of this movie because action requires a level of thought, care, and execution on set that is really difficult, but then also editing at night. And we are very iterative as we go, so we’re re-crafting constantly as we’re making it, so we don’t sleep much. And Ryan was just getting beat up and beat up in sequence after sequence, and weirdly he loved it. By the end of it he was absolutely in love with the process. I think he was nervous at first because it was a different scale, and by the end of it I think he was so happy with how it turned out, how his performance turned out. The process of making it is exhilarating, and it’s fun to go to set every day and pretend like you’re kicking the shit out of each other.
I was going to say this movie is borderline nonstop action.
You mentioned it was a tough shoot. What day of the shoot were you both like, “What the fuck did we do with this movie?”
JOE RUSSO: Like halfway in we were-
ANTHONY RUSSO: I don’t remember the exact day, but I remember…we probably had shot three or four action sequences, and we were about to break in a new set, which was a new action sequence. And I remember walking on it and going, oh my God. We have to start from scratch again with a new sequence. And it was like, “Ugh,” and I knew how many… Because it was challenging. It was difficult. But that was the concept of the movie. We wanted to commit to that kind of a gauntlet.
JOE RUSSO: And that was the book.
ANTHONY RUSSO: Exactly.
JOE RUSSO: Why we love the book was it was inventive and relentless. And we wanted to make a movie where you forget to eat your popcorn. Marvel, you’ll make like usually about four major action sequences per film. And you kind of have to mentally prepare yourself for those moments. This was just like when we got to four, we weren’t even halfway through this film.
One of the things I’ve noticed, and not always, but Netflix very much responds to the algorithm. The algorithm can dictate a lot of stuff that goes on there. Because this is the biggest movie Netflix has ever made as far as I know, or one of the biggest, how much were they involved or giving you notes during the development and editing process?
JOE RUSSO: Zip.
ANTHONY RUSSO: I think the algorithm-
JOE RUSSO: They’re the easiest studio to work with that we’ve ever worked with. They give you more room than any studio we’ve ever worked with. We got a lot of room, but they are very supportive of your vision, what it is you want to do with the movie, and they completely stay out of your hair. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen before, and it’s a very comfortable experience as an artist. They don’t bring the algorithm to the creative.
ANTHONY RUSSO: Well, that’s the thing the algorithm isn’t for the creative.
JOE RUSSO: It’s after the fact, right?
ANTHONY RUSSO: The algorithm doesn’t say, “Here’s the kind of movies you should make.” The algorithm says, “Here’s the kind of movie we should offer audiences based upon what they’re looking for.” You know what I’m saying? It’s more of a programming, after the fact programming tool that they use. It doesn’t really have anything to do with how… Maybe it has something to do with what movies they green light, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the content of the movie, at least in our experience.
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I think also certain filmmakers are going to get more hands-on notes than…
ANTHONY RUSSO: That could be true.
The movie’s about two hours. Did you have a longer cut? Was it always aiming to be two hours?
JOE RUSSO: No, this was one that was meant to be more propulsive. It’s a ticking clock movie. It takes place over a few days.
ANTHONY RUSSO: We knew it wasn’t a two-and-a-half-hour movie. We knew that.
JOE RUSSO: Its character exploration is meant to support the action in the film, because it’s meant to be this adrenaline ride. So it’s not meant to slow down, and it was never meant to be a movie that was longer than two hours.
Did you guys end up with a lot of deleted scenes?
JOE RUSSO: No. Very little.
ANTHONY RUSSO: I don’t know if we ended up with any. Usually we’re pretty good. Maybe we lost a portion of a scene. Like a few line handle or something like that or a minor interchange, but there was no substantial scene that was cut from the movie.
JOE RUSSO: We have a very disciplined approach to working on a script. We worked on this one with Markus and McFeely. We’re also very hard on material on set while we’re shooting it. So sometimes we’ll be thinking about a scene the next day and go, we don’t need that scene, because we don’t like to execute things that aren’t going to be in the film anymore, especially on something like this where your energy is really precious.
The film has nine action set pieces. What’s the minimum amount of time each of those sequences took to shoot? And what was the longest amount of time one of the sequences took?
ANTHONY RUSSO: It’s really hard…
JOE RUSSO: I think the well, without giving anything away, was the shortest. Right? That was that…
ANTHONY RUSSO: Possibly.
JOE RUSSO: Well, not including him running up the… Yeah, that was still probably the shortest.
ANTHONY RUSSO: The hospital room is…
JOE RUSSO: Well, the hospital took weeks.
ANTHONY RUSSO: I know, but it didn’t need to.
JOE RUSSO: That was… We’re iterative, so we’ll watch a sequence and go, “Do it again.” And then we’ll go back in and do it again, or we’ll attempt to fix parts of it. If we’re unhappy with the storytelling as it presents to us in an edit room, before we let go of the actors and the cameras, we will do it again. The Prague sequence took months. It’s basically from the time the shootout in the square starts to the end of the tram sequence. That was months of work.
ANTHONY RUSSO: That hospital scene might have had the most amount of material cut from it in the whole movie simply because of how contained… we did a lot of experimenting in that scene because it was such a contained premise. There’s three people fighting in a hospital room, so we tried a lot of ideas in there because we wanted the most combustible version of that scene. So I would say that was probably one of the areas where we were most experimental on set and perhaps as a result threw out the most amount of stuff.
Do you guys actually know what you’re going to direct next or what projects you’re looking at in terms of…
JOE RUSSO: Yeah.
ANTHONY RUSSO: We do.
JOE RUSSO: We start shootingThe Electric Statein-
ANTHONY RUSSO: October.
JOE RUSSO: October in Atlanta.
Oh really?
I think when I spoke to you guys last time or two times ago you said you had multiple projects lined up and it was just a question of doing them.
JOE RUSSO: That’s right. So we’re at that point of doing them now.
Pardon me for not knowing, what studio or who are you-
JOE RUSSO: I think we haven’t released that yet, have we?
ANTHONY RUSSO: I don’t think… No, we haven’t. It’s coming out any day now, but I think the reason why it hasn’t come out is there’s some issue. I don’t know what it is.
JOE RUSSO: Right, so we’ve got to wait a beat before we can talk about cast.
I completely understand.
JOE RUSSO: It’s very close though.
ANTHONY RUSSO: We’re working with some old friends and…
Dhanush is great in the film. And I also love that he’s one of the strongest in the room. So how did you end up with him in the movie and was his character in the book?
JOE RUSSO: No, there’s a character like his in the book, but we do deviate quite a bit from the book. And Anthony and I, like with the comics, we get inspired by source material, but we don’t want to be slavish to the material, because we’re talking about different mediums. So different expression from a book to a movie, they’re very different expressions, so the movie may require different things. Dhanush, from traveling while promoting Marvel films, we’ve become much more interested in reaching global audiences than we are in American audiences, for many reasons. Some have to do with socioeconomics and some have to do with unifying people through narrative. But we’re just more motivated to invite other parts of the world into the stories that we’re telling.
India is a fantastic market with a cinematic tradition as long and illustrious as ours in their own right, and there are lots of amazing actors and movie stars in the Bollywood system. And it’s been fun for us betweenExtractionandThe Gray Manto discover some of that premier talent and bring them to the world in some of these bigger movies.
Yeah, he’s also fantastic in the movie. But I agree with you. Movies are global.
JOE RUSSO: They are.
They’re not just America. I liked the casting. Was it always designed that his character was going to be one of the strongest in the room?
JOE RUSSO: What was interesting about the character was, without giving anything away in the movie, is that he’s neutral and he’s doing a job, but he also has a code, and has a code not dissimilar to the Gray Man. If you step over a line with him, then he can no longer do the job that he was hired to do. Though obviously the whole world, appropriately inspired by the title, is gray, and everyone within this world in this movie, it’s a parable between good and evil, but where nobody wears a white hat. The most anyone wears in this movie is a gray hat, and so he’s a character in a gray hat.
ANTHONY RUSSO: And this gave us an opportunity too. It’s like, look it,The Gray Manultimately physically overcomes everybody in the movie that is in opposition to him, climaxing of course with the Chris Evans character, but not Dhanush. Dhanush he never physically overcomes, but he is able to get through that obstacle, he does survive that obstacle in another way.
Stephen F. Windon shot the film, and I don’t think you’ve worked with him before.
ANTHONY RUSSO: Yeah.
What was your motivation for bringing Stephen in to shoot this?
ANTHONY RUSSO: We’ve collaborated with Jeff Haley, our A camera operator, for many movies now.
JOE RUSSO: Probably a decade.
ANTHONY RUSSO: Yeah, and we have a very strong creative collaboration with him. And really it was a recommendation of Jeff, so much so that Jeff is an executive producer on the movie. That’s how closely-
JOE RUSSO: Jeff has won camera operator of the year five or six times. He’s sort of the preeminent camera operator in the world, and Anthony and I have a special collaboration with him. And he recommended Steve to us, and he was fantastic.
Well, can you talk a little bit about working with him on the color and how you wanted the visual aesthetic for the film?
JOE RUSSO: So it was a combination of Steve Windon and Dennis Gassner, who might be the greatest production designer in the history of the business, who worked with the Coens for most of their careers and has done all kinds of incredible movies. And so we’ve been fortunate enough now to work with Gassner on several films. He’s going to work with us on our next movie, as is Windon. And our approach to this movie was, it is calledThe Gray Man, but we were like, it’ll be compelling is that these characters move around in very colorful locales, exotic locales around the world. And the way that we approached the look and feel of the movie was in contrast to the expectation.
We’d done that withWinter Soldierwhere we had de-saturated the look and feel of the film, and withCivil War. Those were movies that were about trying to demystify heroes and ground them and bring a psychological realism to them. This film is very different in that regard. The characters, their morality is gray, but their personalities are gray. Their job is to behave gray, but we wanted the world to be colorful and exotic that they existed in, chaotic, noisy.
ANTHONY RUSSO: We didn’t want to shoot the movie in grayscale. You know what I mean? One thing that we really did with Windon was we tried to create this idea that this character is slightly less present at times, and so we do a lot of techniques in the movie that you probably feel more the notice. But a lot of times we’ll put him in a part of the frame that’s slightly less conventional or where you would expect him be to be put. When we lit on set, sometimes instead of lighting him like you would light a normal lead character, we were sort of not lighting him specifically in that manner while we were lighting the other people in that way. We also with focus, a lot of times we will sort of keep the focus off of him in certain frames. And it just sort of creates this idea of this sort of ghostlike quality that the character has.
COLLIDER: You guys know how much I lovedExtraction. I know you’re working on editingExtraction 2. What can you tell people about how it’s going and what it looks like?
JOE RUSSO: It’s great. It’s very different fromExtraction1, which we like. It’s its own movie in that regard. It has a different color schematic. It’s set in a different part of the world. It has a different pace, a different tone than the first one. And that, to us, is an interesting way to approach serializing a story, is that it’s more surprising and unexpected, and you’re not going to get the exact same movie that you got the last time out. So we’re really excited about it, and we think it was beautifully shot. Hemsworth’s fantastic in it. And we’re excited to share it with audiences.
I’m also excited to see the action in that film as well.
JOE RUSSO: Great.
ANTHONY RUSSO: Awesome.
For more onThe Gray Man, here’s the recent trailer followed by the official synopsis:
The Gray Man is CIA operative Court Gentry (Ryan Gosling), aka, Sierra Six. Plucked from a federal penitentiary and recruited by his handler, Donald Fitzroy (Billy Bob Thornton), Gentry was once a highly-skilled, Agency-sanctioned merchant of death. But now the tables have turned and Six is the target, hunted across the globe by Lloyd Hansen (Chris Evans), a former cohort at the CIA, who will stop at nothing to take him out. Agent Dani Miranda (Ana de Armas) has his back. He’ll need it.
Ryan Gosling is The Gray Man and Chris Evans is his psychopathic adversary in the Netflix/AGBO-produced thriller directed by Anthony and Joe Russo, starring Ana de Armas, with Regé-Jean Page, Billy Bob Thornton, Jessica Henwick, Dhanush, Wagner Moura and Alfre Woodard. Based on the novel The Gray Man by Mark Greaney, the screenplay is by Joe Russo, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely. The producers are Joe Roth, Jeffery Kirschenbaum, Joe Russo, Anthony Russo, Mike Larocca and Chris Castaldi. Executive producers are Patrick Newall, Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely, Jake Aust, Angela Russo-Otstot, Geoff Haley, Zack Roth, and Palak Patel.
