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Interview: Pierre Morel

THE GUNMAN directed by Pierre Morel, written by Pete Travis and Don MacPherson from the novel by Jean-Patrick Manchette, with Sean Penn, Jasmine Trinca, Javier Bardem and Mark Rylance. An Elevation Pictures release. 115 minutes. Opens Friday (March 20). For venues and times, see Movies.


Pierre Morel is the guy who gave Liam Neeson a second career as an action hero with Taken. Now he’s looking to do the same for Sean Penn in The Gunman, a cat-and-mouse thriller about a former mercenary who finds himself on the run from unknown assassins years after quitting the game.

As the movie progresses, Penn’s Jim Terrier must not only fight back in increasingly brutal ways, but grapple with the possibility that he actually deserves to be tracked down for the things he’d tried to leave behind.

The premise is a hair more complicated than a father who’ll stop at nothing to save his daughter. And as Morel explains, that’s sort of the point.

“Always have a good reason for things to happen,” he says. “I make action movies, I love action movies, but the more I see action movies where it’s just a succession of action scenes with no interesting plot, it doesn’t satisfy me. Of course it can be fun, for the guilty pleasure of seeing two guys trying to shoot each other for two hours. But if there’s no reason for it, it doesn’t carry for me.”

Morel also relished the opportunity to cast a heavier lineup of talent than he usually lands. In addition to Penn, he managed to lure Javier Bardem, Ray Winstone and Mark Rylance for key roles.

“We wanted those guys with that level of experience,” he says. “That capacity to play a complex, lived-in character.”

But these are also characters who will, at some point, pick up a gun or beat the crap out of each other. Which raises a question I’ve been wanting to ask since Taken. How do you stage elaborate action scenes with actors of a certain age?

“Sean is definitely in fantastic shape,” says Morel. “He worked out so hard to look the way he looks and to be able to achieve the things he does. But it’s important to stage and choreograph action pieces so they’re realistic and not stupid. If you had, like, Liam or Sean or Mark Rylance doing wire work from the ceiling, it’d be ridiculous. You can still come up with impressive stuff – realistic, violent stuff – without any compromise, but [have it be] consistent with what those actors could actually do.

“Even a one-minute fight takes a week to shoot,” he says, “and that’s 12 hours a day of kicking and running and jumping. It’s exhausting. So you have to keep that in mind.”

Interview Clips

Morel on watching Taken turn into a phenomenon.

normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner

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