GETAWAY directed by Courtney Solomon, written by Sean Finegan and Gregg Maxwell Parker, with Ethan Hawke, Selena Gomez, Rebecca Budig and Jon Voight. A Warner Bros. release. 90 minutes. Opens Friday (August 30). For venues and times, see Movies.
Courtney Solomon is getting ready to drive away for a while.
“I’ll probably take at least a month off,” laughs the Toronto-born director, who’s come home to promote his new action thriller, Getaway.
“I’ve been literally working non-stop on this. It looks like just an action movie or whatever, but it’s really been a Herculean task to make, with all those cameras and all that footage to sift through. It was like doing three movies.”
By his own estimation, Solomon has spent 21 months working on Getaway, which stars Ethan Hawke as a former racing driver forced to steal a tricked-out Shelby GT500 and zoom around Sofia, Bulgaria, to save his kidnapped wife from an all-seeing tormentor. Selena Gomez co-stars as a young woman who tries to carjack Hawke and ends up becoming his unwilling co-pilot.
“What I saw from the beginning was this interesting concept that’s essentially Phone Booth meets Saw,” Solomon says. “There’s this guy in control of these two people’s lives, and they’re in this claustrophobic environment, which is just this car. And the car drives through this whole city, so it’s a sort of contrast to the claustrophobia.”
Solomon also wanted to make a movie about surveillance, so he had the villain trick out Hawke’s Shelby with nine tiny cameras whose feeds become part of Getaway’s visual strategy, along with street cameras and more conventional set-ups.
“The average was 27 [cameras] on every take,” Solomon says. There are 630 hours of source footage it would take you 33 days, 24 hours a day, to watch every daily from this movie – with no bathroom breaks, no food breaks, nothing. My editors figured that out.”
But the number of cameras pales next to the tally of cars wrecked during the shoot.
“We actually destroyed 130 cars,” Solomon says. “We had a whole graveyard of cars. They were sold for parts and scrap at the end.”
Getaway is a movie about momentum, and it doesn’t have time for anything that isn’t absolutely essential. There are maybe five speaking parts, and most of the characters don’t even have time to say their names. Gomez is billed only as The Kid, Jon Voight as The Voice.
“That’s gonna work with some people, and that’s gonna bother some people, quite frankly,” Solomon acknowledges. “I think some people need that anchor, you know? We [adjusted] the bar in this movie. Certainly, we went back to the classics of this type of movie in the way we crafted it, but then we did this more advanced thing: ‘Okay, we’re just going. And we’re gonna throw out some conventions.’ People sometimes love their conventions.”
The success of The Fast And The Furious films has proven that people love to watch cars move at high speeds. And Getaway has plenty of that, thanks to a team of some 45 Bulgarian stunt drivers.
“We couldn’t do the stuff we did anywhere in North America,” Solomon says. “These guys just want to give you their best. You’re holding your breath because you’re pushing them for their best, but if anything goes wrong you’re gonna wear it forever.”
Interview Clips
Courtney Solomon on putting his actors into the action:
Solomon on always keeping everything you shoot:
Solomon on Jon Voight’s choices for his character:
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