"Holy crap!" someone reflexively yells out as the twin M61 Vulcan cannons mounted to an evil-looking Dodge Ram fire. "That's about the scariest damned thing I've ever heard in my entire life."
Vulcans are usually mounted to fighter jets like the F-15 and F-22, not pickup trucks. Each has six rotating, air-cooled barrels and can spit out more than 6,000 rounds of 20mm ammunition a minute, and each one of those rounds is accompanied by an absolutely brutal explosion. Brutal enough to make your spine shudder.
We're on the set of the new film Death Race, which is scheduled to open this August 22, so the ammo is only blanks, but the armor-clad Ford Mustang racing through a derelict industrial plant outside Montreal is also as real as it gets.
What? No Stallone?
The new movie takes its inspiration, title and a few character names from 1975's satirical cult classic Death Race 2000, and promises a return to old school, R-rated automotive mayhem. You know, high-speed wrecks, plenty of arbitrary violence, loads of gunplay and blood everywhere — the good stuff. Plus it has Hollywood's current go-to ass-kicker, Jason Statham (The Transporter and The Italian Job) aboard as the star.
"We did keep the anti-authoritarian 'screw you' tone of the original," director Paul W.S. Anderson, told us, citing Bullitt, The Getaway and the original Death Race 2000 as influences.
"All those films were done practically. I said 'Let's make a real movie. With real armor-plated cars. With real machine guns. A really intense car movie. No CGI cars. No CGI environments.' The laws of physics apply in Death Race." If there's any CGI at all, Anderson promises, it will be solely to clean up individual film frames to rid them of stunt rigging, other cameras in the shot and the like.
Statham is joined in the cast by Tyrese Gibson from 2 Fast 2 Furious, but it's the cars that will matter most in Death Race. But the cars are at least as important as the people. And the on-site workshop where the cars are being built, rebuilt and rebuilt again is crushingly busy.
The laws of physics, it seems, chew up cars at a furious rate.
Finding Stars
The Death Race crew has taken over this entire 3.5-million-square-foot assemblage of huge, stale-smelling, brick-and-steel buildings and wide roads once used to build and service locomotives. The complex is acting as one big set, portraying an island penitentiary in the grim near future where prison gangs have their own race teams and are forced to run against one another in a grisly no-holds-(or weapons or tactics)-barred competition their jailers sanction for the amusement of a global audience and the accompanying money-spinning commercial opportunities.
Already the site is littered with the bodies of cars that haven't survived the production. On one end is a pile of Chrysler 300s sacrificed for one sequence. In another corner is an old BMW 7 Series that's been sliced apart like a loaf of Wonder Bread. Look around and there's the burnt shell of a Porsche 911, the carcass of a '66 Buick Riviera that went through a radical chop job before being assassinated, and Mustang pieces that have been used, used up and discarded. Nothing is sacred in this carefully crafted and precisely decorated post-industrial wasteland — destruction is entertainment.
"I spent an intense year designing the cars," director Anderson tells us. "There are nine principal cars in the movie and each has its own identity and silhouette. We had to make things that ran and ran into each other."
Apparently, No Hybrids in the Near Future
"The hardest part was actually settling on what cars everyone could agree on to use," explains Production Designer Paul Austerberry. "We went for distinct shapes because when you're in a race — particularly at night when there's rain and gravel flying — the audience will lose track of where they are. We could have put them all in different colors, but that really isn't the feel of Death Race. They're in the very depth of the prison and it's very grim.
"We had a tremendous amount of support from Chrysler and Ford, and both supplied vehicles to us. The cars were the cheapest part of it. It's that manpower that's put into building them that adds up."
The Death Race hero car is a heavily modified Mustang GT that rides on Mustang GT500 wheels. Ford provided the cars and the wheels to the production and asked that the "FR500X" logo be included on the Mustang's lower body stripe.
Besides the Mustang (driven by Statham's heroic "Frankenstein"), Ram (which has Gibson's "Machine Gun Joe" behind the tiller), 300, 911, BMW 7 Series and '66 Riviera, the race is filled out with a '71 "boat tail" Riviera, a Jaguar XJ-S that draws some slight inspiration from the old Group 44 racecars of the '70s, and a late-'70s Firebird Trans-Am that pays some homage to Smokey and the Bandit .
The 10th major player in the 2008 remake is a semi known as the Dreadnaught that comes out to apply its considerable firepower to race vehicles that just refuse to die.
The Permanent Thrash
Movie crews grow and shrink according to the film's needs at any moment. And Death Race needed a lot of mechanics and fabricators. According to Picture Car Coordinator Dennis McCarthy (familiar to Inside Line readers from his work on The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift), the production built six Mustangs, five Rams, four 911s (all "964" models from the early '90s) and three each of the other cars. And, of course, there was the Dreadnaught.
Throw in the special effects crew and armorers and painters and the like, and there were up to 140 people working on the cars 24 hours a day during the Death Race shoot. Still, considering the abuse, the vehicles held up rather well. The '66 Riviera's design had to be modified to keep it from overheating, some of the older cars got crate engines to ensure their continued usefulness, at least one Mustang was ripped apart in an unplanned collision, and virtually all of the cars were reinforced both for safety and to carry the additional weight of the props laid atop them. (On average, said one on-set source, the vehicles weighed about 1,200 pounds more than stock.)
Because those Vulcan guns weighed so much — about 600 pounds each with their ammo belts — and were mounted so high on the truck, the Rams were particular handfuls to drive. They also were, by far, the heaviest of the race vehicles. So heavy, in fact, that while the trucks started their lives as half-tonners, they were later toughened to 1-ton specification.
The Promise of Spectacle
Death Race 2000 is still beloved for its goofball attitude toward low budget itself, some sharp social humor and the sheer audacity of a plot that imagined a cross-country road race where the racers score bonus points for knocking off pedestrians. "The original Death Race 2000 was a film I've always loved," director Anderson told us. "Filled with truth, violence and reckless nudity."
The new Death Race, which reportedly cost at least $85 million to film, keeps the character names Frankenstein and Machine Gun Joe, but it promises to be a very different sort of film — darker, more hard-core in its action and more daring in its stunts.
The cars back in '75 weren't much more than re-bodied VWs and the stunts consisted of barely more than driving through the desert at 50 mph. The sets, the action being filmed and the cars up in Montreal were all impressive and encouraging. This movie doesn't seem to be sanitized down to PG-13 like the Fast and the Furious series or demand that your brain be turned off like Speed Racer or dozens of recent summer comic book movies.
But all that together isn't as encouraging as NBC Universal's decision to move Death Race's release forward a month from September to August — when its prime target audience of young males raised on Grand Theft Auto is still out of school and ready for multiple doses of action. NBC Universal has to think it has something good on its hands — and must be plain giddy about Internet reports of enthusiastic reactions from test screenings. Movie companies don't shift their release schedules lightly, and when a studio doubles down on its bet with a film like this, it's because it thinks it's sure money.
It's time for some good old traditional automotive bedlam. Here's hoping that Death Race delivers.
Vulcans are usually mounted to fighter jets like the F-15 and F-22, not pickup trucks. Each has six rotating, air-cooled barrels and can spit out more than 6,000 rounds of 20mm ammunition a minute, and each one of those rounds is accompanied by an absolutely brutal explosion. Brutal enough to make your spine shudder.
We're on the set of the new film Death Race, which is scheduled to open this August 22, so the ammo is only blanks, but the armor-clad Ford Mustang racing through a derelict industrial plant outside Montreal is also as real as it gets.
What? No Stallone?
The new movie takes its inspiration, title and a few character names from 1975's satirical cult classic Death Race 2000, and promises a return to old school, R-rated automotive mayhem. You know, high-speed wrecks, plenty of arbitrary violence, loads of gunplay and blood everywhere — the good stuff. Plus it has Hollywood's current go-to ass-kicker, Jason Statham (The Transporter and The Italian Job) aboard as the star.
"We did keep the anti-authoritarian 'screw you' tone of the original," director Paul W.S. Anderson, told us, citing Bullitt, The Getaway and the original Death Race 2000 as influences.
"All those films were done practically. I said 'Let's make a real movie. With real armor-plated cars. With real machine guns. A really intense car movie. No CGI cars. No CGI environments.' The laws of physics apply in Death Race." If there's any CGI at all, Anderson promises, it will be solely to clean up individual film frames to rid them of stunt rigging, other cameras in the shot and the like.
Statham is joined in the cast by Tyrese Gibson from 2 Fast 2 Furious, but it's the cars that will matter most in Death Race. But the cars are at least as important as the people. And the on-site workshop where the cars are being built, rebuilt and rebuilt again is crushingly busy.
The laws of physics, it seems, chew up cars at a furious rate.
Finding Stars
The Death Race crew has taken over this entire 3.5-million-square-foot assemblage of huge, stale-smelling, brick-and-steel buildings and wide roads once used to build and service locomotives. The complex is acting as one big set, portraying an island penitentiary in the grim near future where prison gangs have their own race teams and are forced to run against one another in a grisly no-holds-(or weapons or tactics)-barred competition their jailers sanction for the amusement of a global audience and the accompanying money-spinning commercial opportunities.
Already the site is littered with the bodies of cars that haven't survived the production. On one end is a pile of Chrysler 300s sacrificed for one sequence. In another corner is an old BMW 7 Series that's been sliced apart like a loaf of Wonder Bread. Look around and there's the burnt shell of a Porsche 911, the carcass of a '66 Buick Riviera that went through a radical chop job before being assassinated, and Mustang pieces that have been used, used up and discarded. Nothing is sacred in this carefully crafted and precisely decorated post-industrial wasteland — destruction is entertainment.
"I spent an intense year designing the cars," director Anderson tells us. "There are nine principal cars in the movie and each has its own identity and silhouette. We had to make things that ran and ran into each other."
Apparently, No Hybrids in the Near Future
"The hardest part was actually settling on what cars everyone could agree on to use," explains Production Designer Paul Austerberry. "We went for distinct shapes because when you're in a race — particularly at night when there's rain and gravel flying — the audience will lose track of where they are. We could have put them all in different colors, but that really isn't the feel of Death Race. They're in the very depth of the prison and it's very grim.
"We had a tremendous amount of support from Chrysler and Ford, and both supplied vehicles to us. The cars were the cheapest part of it. It's that manpower that's put into building them that adds up."
The Death Race hero car is a heavily modified Mustang GT that rides on Mustang GT500 wheels. Ford provided the cars and the wheels to the production and asked that the "FR500X" logo be included on the Mustang's lower body stripe.
Besides the Mustang (driven by Statham's heroic "Frankenstein"), Ram (which has Gibson's "Machine Gun Joe" behind the tiller), 300, 911, BMW 7 Series and '66 Riviera, the race is filled out with a '71 "boat tail" Riviera, a Jaguar XJ-S that draws some slight inspiration from the old Group 44 racecars of the '70s, and a late-'70s Firebird Trans-Am that pays some homage to Smokey and the Bandit .
The 10th major player in the 2008 remake is a semi known as the Dreadnaught that comes out to apply its considerable firepower to race vehicles that just refuse to die.
The Permanent Thrash
Movie crews grow and shrink according to the film's needs at any moment. And Death Race needed a lot of mechanics and fabricators. According to Picture Car Coordinator Dennis McCarthy (familiar to Inside Line readers from his work on The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift), the production built six Mustangs, five Rams, four 911s (all "964" models from the early '90s) and three each of the other cars. And, of course, there was the Dreadnaught.
Throw in the special effects crew and armorers and painters and the like, and there were up to 140 people working on the cars 24 hours a day during the Death Race shoot. Still, considering the abuse, the vehicles held up rather well. The '66 Riviera's design had to be modified to keep it from overheating, some of the older cars got crate engines to ensure their continued usefulness, at least one Mustang was ripped apart in an unplanned collision, and virtually all of the cars were reinforced both for safety and to carry the additional weight of the props laid atop them. (On average, said one on-set source, the vehicles weighed about 1,200 pounds more than stock.)
Because those Vulcan guns weighed so much — about 600 pounds each with their ammo belts — and were mounted so high on the truck, the Rams were particular handfuls to drive. They also were, by far, the heaviest of the race vehicles. So heavy, in fact, that while the trucks started their lives as half-tonners, they were later toughened to 1-ton specification.
The Promise of Spectacle
Death Race 2000 is still beloved for its goofball attitude toward low budget itself, some sharp social humor and the sheer audacity of a plot that imagined a cross-country road race where the racers score bonus points for knocking off pedestrians. "The original Death Race 2000 was a film I've always loved," director Anderson told us. "Filled with truth, violence and reckless nudity."
The new Death Race, which reportedly cost at least $85 million to film, keeps the character names Frankenstein and Machine Gun Joe, but it promises to be a very different sort of film — darker, more hard-core in its action and more daring in its stunts.
The cars back in '75 weren't much more than re-bodied VWs and the stunts consisted of barely more than driving through the desert at 50 mph. The sets, the action being filmed and the cars up in Montreal were all impressive and encouraging. This movie doesn't seem to be sanitized down to PG-13 like the Fast and the Furious series or demand that your brain be turned off like Speed Racer or dozens of recent summer comic book movies.
But all that together isn't as encouraging as NBC Universal's decision to move Death Race's release forward a month from September to August — when its prime target audience of young males raised on Grand Theft Auto is still out of school and ready for multiple doses of action. NBC Universal has to think it has something good on its hands — and must be plain giddy about Internet reports of enthusiastic reactions from test screenings. Movie companies don't shift their release schedules lightly, and when a studio doubles down on its bet with a film like this, it's because it thinks it's sure money.
It's time for some good old traditional automotive bedlam. Here's hoping that Death Race delivers.
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